​During this semester I was part of C.U.R.E, a class where students got the opportunity to dive deeper into the world of research. More specifically, in the world of soundscapes and animal behavior research. Not only did C.U.R.E give me a more professional glimpse of research, it taught me a couple of important lessons and skills I would need in the future to further advance my career. I learned that for me, one of the hardest steps in research is coming up with a topic. Initially, I wanted to research selection through soundscapes. Unfortunately, it was not possible with the data provided. I then wanted to research echolocation of Amazon river dolphins but again, the equipment used for the data collection did not register echolocation. About a week later, my professor Laura May-Collado suggested the idea of analyzing humpback whale and bottlenose dolphin behavior through the use of drones. In all honesty, it was better than all of the other topics I’ve thought of and I was absolutely delighted.
In order to collect data, I used a program called BORIS(7.8) which allowed me to time the duration of each event and record the time each behavior or interaction occurred.  I learned the hard way that collecting data can be tedious and rigorous work, especially with analyzing that required concrete decision making. I encountered multiple problems during the data collection process. The biggest obstacle I encountered was my indecisiveness when coding for my ethogram because I needed to stay consistent with how I defined a certain behavior. Any changes to my definitions can completely skew the data. It happened to me multiple times, and every time it happened I had to go back and correct each of my observations which was exhausting because all the videos totaled up to 2 hours and 13 minutes. Diving was one of these behaviors because I couldn’t decide how low the whales had to swim for it to be considered “diving.” Eventually I realized that viewing all of the videos first and then committing to definitions in my ethogram would be the best idea.
Prior to this class, if anyone asked me what I wanted to do in the future, I would have vaguely stated research. After taking this class, I’ve gained some love for marine animals, especially cetaceans. Not only that but my interest in animal behavior increased drastically. I hope that I can work on research concerning animal behavior again. Thanks to my professor Laura May-Collado and this class, I have gained a new interest that I want to pursue in the future. 

​I am glad to complete CUTE lab in my last semester at UVM. For me, it is a brand-new study experience. Different than traditional normal courses, CURE provide me a true, deep and complete undergraduate research experience. From looking for a research direction to write a formal research paper, my scientific skills have been fully improved.
CURE helped me find what I am good at and what I am interested. Practice makes perfect, I met many barriers during this semester. However, I think those barriers helped me to learn deeper and think more. My final research topic for this lad is how underwater noise affect marine communities. However, my first potential topic was evaluating future deep-oil noise in Panama area. The first barrier I met was missing raw data. Then I try to read more scientific paper under professor’s instruction. I finally decided to do research on off-shore shipping noise related to deep-oil noise. Meeting and solving barriers is an important learning methods in CURE lab. During analysis process, I also learned how to use analysis software and most important thing is, I learned how to write a standard scientific paper.
I recommend all undergraduate students who is or will learn science catch a chance to join the CURE lab. It is not only a scientific research experience; it is a preparation for using what you learned in real situation and for be a future scientist. 

​Throughout the four years that I’ve attended UVM, I never even knew that experiences such as CURE were offered until a fellow classmate introduced it to me. I’m so glad that I got to have this experience before I graduated. CURE has helped me learn what actually goes into research post undergrad. I never expected the process to be so different from all the labs I have done in other classes. Although this class is a lot of work, it is definitely worth it. This course has to be one of the most inspiring and engaging experiences I have had at UVM. This course is different from others because you are not just working for a grade but working on creating a project that could actually get published and that you’re passionate about. It’s taught me that anyone can get published if they work hard enough and put in the time and effort it takes. With all the work that needs to be done, the process can seem daunting at times but the professor, Laura May-Collado, provides awesome support and help as needed while still giving us the freedom of creating our own project. She explains everything clearly and gives you everything you need to start working on your project. She also meets with everyone throughout the semester and offers guidance as well as, any help she can offer. Laura makes the goal of publishing research achievable for everyone if they do their part.
For my project, I worked with another student to study the factors that influence the activity in marine soundscapes, focusing mostly on lunar cycles and substrates of the 4 different locations chosen. Using the program Arbimon allowed me to create playlists and Acoustic Complex Index graphs. It definitely was a learning curve as I had never used a program like this. At first, it took many hours to make the playlists but soon enough, I was making them on my own confidently. This process seemed endless in the moment, with so many graphs and excel files it was hard to keep track of it all. There were also challenges that came along with so many playlists. With so many different excel files and graphs, it was easy to become overwhelmed and make mistakes. But by staying organized and on top of everything, it was easier to navigate through the files and create the playlists. While making excel files, I discovered many playlists and graphs had to be remade. Even with all of the challenges and long hours, I was still very excited about the final results. The results were interesting because they were so different from site to site but it was so cool to see the correlations that could be made.
I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything, through all the challenges and the work load I feel like I got a good idea of what goes into research and it has made me excited to continue research in the future. 

Throughout my life I have had an immense infatuation for the ocean and the creatures that inhabit its waters. Growing up on the coast near Cape Cod has provided remarkable opportunities for me to learn about the ocean through simply spending time with it. During high school I had no idea what I wanted to do, but began to accelerate myself toward science based classes. I knew that I had a strong affiliation with the water, but I was unsure what I would be able to do with it in the future. I chose to pursue a Biology degree and thought that I might be a physician’s assistant someday. Three years of hard work and two organic chemistry classes later my mind had been slightly swayed. I did not know if I was going to be happy working in the same hospital doing the same thing for years at a time. After having that revelation I soon became infatuated with undergraduate research opportunities. At the time I was in Icthyology and thought that it might be worth while to ask Professor Marsden if she was offering any opportunities. Sadly she was not, so I was moved to look elsewhere. Drafting classes for senior year I was introduced to Soundscapes by my good friend Kate Ziegler. Kate had taken the class the CURE course last semester and thought that I would absolutely love it. After hearing this news, I quickly made my way to Dr. May-Collado office to have a conversation about the class and what it had to offer. Immediately I was awestruck. The 5-minute conversation we had completely sold me on the fact that I would like nothing more than to conduct research on things that are immensely important to the world at the moment. Throughout the semester I have been challenged by Soundscapes due to my unfamiliarity of writing real research papers for submission. I got to spend weeks analysing real data that could contributed to the protection and conservation of countless different places and habitats. I learned that analysing the data is hard, daunting work that could take hours a day to file through and figure out. Being exposed to this data helped me recognize the importance of having people that enjoy doing this stuff, because some of the ideas and patterns that people find could potentially be main contributors to the aid of certain ecosystems or species. Laura has been an absolutely incredible mentor and role model. She took the time to analyse and critique each section of our proposal as well as the research paper and gave us any insight that she may have thought was helpful and could make the paper better. Getting the correct format as well as wording the sections correctly was the most difficult part. I was quite unfamiliar with research paper formatting because of all the labs that I had taken before hand. Soundscapes has encapsulate me into the world of Marine Biology and I am totally aboard for the ride. This class has peaked my interests in graduate school and has given me the opportunity to enjoy what I will be doing for the next several years. Obviously, it is not all fun and games, but how could you not love your life when you are studying the oceans and the creatures that inhabit it. Soundscapes/CURE is the pinnacle of my education at the moment and has excited me vastly more than each one of my previous classes. I look forward to coming up with new and improved ideas and hope to be published one day so that my ideas can contribute to the help that our environment so desperately needs. I want to also thank Laura May Collado for this absolutely incredible experience and am looking forward to spending next semester improving my paper and ideas. 

​I decided to take the CURE course after taking intro to marine biology with Dr. May-Collado last spring. As a statistics major in CEMS, I am very used to analyzing data and trying to find patterns. However, one thing that is lacking in the statistics department is research opportunities. The CURE course provided a realistic experience of what doing research is like from start to finish. In many of my stats classes we analyze datasets, but I have learned that the majority of the work can just be collecting raw data and then getting it into a format that can be analyzed statistically.
On top of that, I have learned that sound data can be difficult to understand right away. You can’t just easily get a list of numbers; you need to learn software that can help extract the data from a spectrogram that can take hours to listen to and look at. As a statistician, it was extremely valuable to learn new software and to learn how to analyze a type of data that I have never worked with before.
I did my project on the effect of boat traffic on bottlenose dolphin whistles. We already know that dolphins alter the frequency of their whistles in the presence of boats. Whistle changes can depend on behavior and stress levels as well. However, dolphins have two major types of whistles- signature and variant. Signature whistles are unique to individual dolphins and are used for identification, especially to assist mothers and calves in reuniting after being separated by boats. The other whistles are variant whistles, which are not unique and can be used for general communication. Due to the different uses of the whistle types, we wanted to see if boats would affect signature and variant whistles differently. I compared signature and variant whistles in an area with high dolphin watching boat traffic (and high rate of mother/calf separations) and an area with transport boat traffic. We found no major differences in signature or variant whistle in each location overall, but more analysis should be done to look at when boats are present vs. when they are not present. Our more interesting findings were that whistles were longer, more complex, and higher in frequency in the location with more dolphin watching boat traffic.
Overall, this was an amazing course that provided experience in every step of the research process, from coming up with a research question all the way through writing a paper and formatting it for publication. The data I extracted for my project is also being incorporated into another students’ paper that is being submitted to JASA this winter, so I am very excited about that!

​This semester I took CURE after hearing about it through the instructor, Dr. May-Collado. I had previously attended her summer field course in Panama, which was also a great opportunity! Therefore, I knew a little of what to expect, in terms of the paper writing process and forming a testable question and procedure. However, I was not necessarily prepared with the ups and downs and difficulties of writing, developing and pursuing my own research project. Despite the difficulties, and with Dr. Collado’s help, I was able to come out of the course with a completed manuscript. In addition, I had a better understanding of the work it takes to do your own project and go through all that data!
 
For my project, I was given the opportunity to use drone footage, obtained by one of Dr. May-Collado’s PhD students, Eric Ramos, another great scientist. This footage was of Antillean manatees in Saint Georges Cayes, Belize. I then proceeded to develop a data collection protocol, so that I could create a relative behavioral budget for this understudied and endangered population. This was an extremely challenging process, as I had little to no experience in behavioral data collection, and no experience with manatee behavior. However, the experience was very regarding, I gained so many new skills. In addition, I have decided to continue on with this project, and analyze more footage to hopefully obtain more conclusive results. This project will eventually become my honors college thesis project. If you have the chance to take this course, I highly recommend it, as it is invaluable. It provided me with experiences in data collection, processing, project development, and manuscript writing. These are all very important skills for future biologists. I cannot thank Laura May-Collado and Eric Ramos enough for this opportunity.

​I learned of cure through an email and knew that it was going to be a unique and exciting experience. I came to UVM to learn in and outside of the classroom and am so thankful the university and Dr. Laura May-Collado provides student with this. My project was centered around boat traffic and its effect on dolphin foraging. After talking with Dr. May-Collado, we decided that I was going to study the foraging sounds of bottlenose dolphins in the presence and absence of noise pollution from boats. This really meant a lot to me because I come from a major port city where the local toothed whale population is in decline. Finding literature on this specific topic proved difficult, but this made my work all the more fascinating.
Through CURE, I was able to develop my skillset in Raven Pro, the program we used to examine audio files. By working with it, I became more familiar with the tools biologists use to analyze their data. At first, it was hard recognizing echolocation clicks among the sea of snapping shrimp and boats, but it slowly became second nature. There were days where the excitement of hearing a new noise was amazing but also those where staring at a scrolling blue screen gave me headaches like nothing else. This was really new for me, but I loved the course because, despite the ups and downs, you know that you are working to do good.
This course was also one of those times in life where you learn how valuable failure can be. I went in with big plans, but as the semester rolled along, I had to narrow my goals. In the end my results were interesting but left me wanting more. Something that Dr. May Collado instilled in us early on was to be okay with disappointment. Much of the scientific process is repetition and reworking, and I got my first taste of that here. I also learned that I need to work on myself and my own process. As a little bit of a perfectionist, I want to reword everything up to the last moment, but
CURE has shown me what it means to be a part of something bigger. A common saying in the scientific world is “standing on the shoulders of giants,” and CURE really instills that in its student participants. Nothing I was doing would have been possible without the hard work of those before me. All over the world, marine ecosystems are being put at risk by noise pollution, and the scientific community is working hard to catch up. Even if my work doesn’t change anything, I have gained a huge appreciation for sub marine acoustics and the work that goes into studying them. Going forward, I want to do my part in protecting these incredible species.

​The CURE course was recommended to me by one of my close friends who had taken it previously and loved it, and I’m so glad I took her advice! I was super excited to be participating in undergraduate research that was designed and controlled by me - this is not usually the case for undergraduates pursuing research. Out of all the possible projects, from manatees to dolphins to whales, I decided to focus on the curious toadfish.
 
Previous studies had already been completed on their acoustic communication, but there were still more questions to be answered. My objective was to classify acoustic toadfish “species” based on the appearance of their call, and extract various call information at three different times of day with varying boat traffic. After my hypothesis was developed and my goals were defined, it was time to dive into data collection. While at first it seemed redundant and time-consuming extracting data from 330 audio files, I soon developed an appreciation for the individual toadfish and what they had to say to each other. The end results were very gratifying; I had come to a conclusion that toadfish were producing lower and louder calls in response to boat noise masking. Not only this, but these results made me ask more questions and want to do further research. In the future, I hope to find out if the selection of toadfish calls is causing phenotypic changes as well, as the driver for (hopefully) my master’s thesis!
 
CURE pushed me to take responsibility and power over what makes me curious, and to dive into that. Despite minor setbacks and issues, I really wanted to make the experiment work and figure out more. At the end of the course, every student got to report and present their research to the class; it was truly incredible to see how passionate and excited people were about what they had researched and how their hard work had come to fruition. I am really grateful I was a part of this experience!

​I am very satisfied with the research experience I have gained in the CURE lab with Professor Laura May-Collado. The course has given me a taste of what it truly takes to work with real data in a lab. I gained a strong appreciation for the amount of time and hard work that goes in to creating a finalized product. This course will make you work very hard, but at the end it is the most rewarding feeling knowing that you are capable of making a significant impact in the scientific community. This course has definitely sparked my interest in research and in marine sciences in general.
 
 
This semester, I worked with another student in the class to analyze the song structure of the humpback whales off of the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. We worked with an acoustic analysis program crafted by Cornell University, called Raven. This program is commonly used in research labs, and so I think it was a valuable experience working closely with Raven and messing around with all of the different settings to see what the program is capable of. Dr. May-Collado gave us a lot of freedom with Raven, giving us a brief introduction to the program in the beginning, showing us the just basics. This allowed us to explore Raven much further on our own, giving us a more in-depth and personal experience with the program. For our project, we used Raven to visualize the structure of the humpback whale song. We worked with a data set of about 650 30-minute sound files. In each sound file, we made note when we detected the presence of humpback whales or boats. We then went back into the sound files where we heard whale song and analyzed the structure of the whale song. We were hoping to make conclusions about the variation of the humpback whale song based on the structural changes in the song over the breeding season. This process is easier said than done. Based on the data analysis my partner and I had done in previous science labs, we didn’t expect the whale presence/absence analysis to take as long as it did. We definitely spent more time in the lab doing our analysis than we initially expected. We mentioned at the end of our study how we may have achieved more statistically significant data had we been given more data to work with. Our data only represented a mere two weeks. Realistically speaking, if we had more data representing a larger portion of the humpback whale breeding season, we probably wouldn’t have finished our study in time! This really put the time commitment of research into perspective for me. It is very tedious, time consuming work. However, the end result is extremely rewarding, especially when you find your results are significant. We found that about 36% of the variation in the Guerrero humpback whale song was due to boat traffic. For me, this made me 100x more interested in continuing to research this population of whales.