I had the opportunity to do summer research at the Center for Advanced Studies in Blanes, Spain through the Gilman scholarship. To get this position, I emailed the top researchers at the institute and crossed my fingers. Surprisingly, one of them, Dr. Daniel Oro got back to me and after a few interviews, I was set (he told me later in the summer he couldn’t believe some random student from Ohio found the lab in Blanes, seeing as it is a small town of about 30,000 people).

My job for the summer was to take about 30 years of data from Audouin's Gulls (Ichthyaetus audouinii) in the Punta de la Banya and answer the question, “how do females allocate their finite resources in a clutch to increase their fitness?”. I immediately grabbed my computer and got to work in R. The data collected gives insight into different colonies, age of the seagulls, how many eggs they lay and also the volume of those eggs. It’s quite cool but these birds lay 1-4 (normal is 3) eggs of varying sizes so what we wanted to see is if those volumes and clutches had anything to do with the variance in the environment. It’s even weirder because the 3rd egg in a 3 egg clutch is normally a lot smaller (Reid 1987), so why not lay two big eggs? Coping with environmental difficulties is called bet-hedging, it’s basically when individuals allocate their resources depending the environment. It’s pretty cool if you ask me - so that’s what I tried to figure out using all of this long term data. Although the bulk of my work was just analysis in R, I did get to go to the field for a few days with Alberto where we tracked turtles and banded baby seagulls (I attached a video so you can see how fun it is!).

After having to recomplie the datasets due to a organizational issue and after having to bring my MacBook Air to the Apple store in Barcelona after water damage (via the humidtiy in Spain), I finally finished the analysis. I created a multitude of graphs, tables, and models that I presented to my boss and another co-worker, Meritxell Genovart, at the end of the summer. Although my time got cut short, Dr. Oro was able to write about a manuscript about our findings and it was just submitted Jan 2023.