“While I was an undergraduate student at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Canada, I did the marine semester programme. This involved living in the small town of Saint Andrews, also in New Brunswick, for three months and taking part in field-based courses. For one course, each student conducted their own research project.
Mine focused on sampling tidal pools, but in this photo, I’m helping another student, Brian Pallett, on his project exploring how coastal fish populations change owing to factors such as water temperature and time of day. Every week, we took out a five-metre-long fishing net, dragged it through the water, then pulled it up to shore to see what fish we caught. In the photo, Brian is kneeling in the back and another student, John Carlo Basergo (left), and I (right) are helping him to identify and count fish.
This photo was taken at around 11 p.m. in October 2024. The water in the North Atlantic was so cold. The programme ran from September to late November and by the end, we’d become sufficiently used to the temperature to do brief swims in the freezing water.
