Social Media Content and Posts for Fish and Oil Spills Project
While working on scientific research regarding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, I was also creating a short film. I wanted to get more involved in social media and build some interest and traction for my projects. What resulted is the @FishAndOilSpills Instagram page.
The page provided an opportunity to reach out to other scientists, organizations, artists, and nature-enthusiasts, learn to use social media and hashtags in a new way, and test out content for my film project. I am no longer posting to the page, as I completed my time working on the oil spill along with my short film, but it was a very rewarding experience!
Following are some samples of the types of content I created for the Fish and Oil Spills Page, along with links to the exact posts.
Through most of my time working on the oil spill, I worked with three different species of fish. I was very intrigued by their similarities and differences, one of them being differences in fin anatomy. This post not only served to educate viewers, but was also one that I returned to regularly to double check the names of various fins. The three different fish species are: Mahi-mahi (Coryphaenus hipporus), Red Drum (Sciaenops ocellatus), and Sheepshead minnow (Cyprinodon variegatus variegatus).
Throughout the two years of working on Fish and Oil Spills, I created content as my research progressed and changed. Eventually, I began working on larval edema, a concept that really helps to have explained through photos. This post illustrates different severities of edema, from normal to extreme, as a result of oil exposure.
The only species of fish that we had in our lab for an extended time was the Sheepshead Minnow. We kept breeding adults and used eggs and larvae for analyses. This allowed a very close examination of the whole life cycle of the species and ended up being something I was interested in talking about in relation to my research for Fish and Oil Spills.
The starting point for much of my research was in vision and how fish vision is impacted by oil exposure. This required extensive research into how vision works and the anatomy and physiology of it. The resulting post is a summary of that research and is essentially the same as how human vision works. This post later evolved into use in my short film on the research of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
At one point during this project, there was some controversy within the science outreach community. Someone specifically focused on women scientists who posted on social media, saying that they weren't focused enough on their work. There was quite an outcry and I wanted to contribute. I also had been experiencing other minor frustrations about not being seen as representative of a scientist so decided to address it in the following post.
Every May there is a group of artists on social media who all draw and post mermaids for the entire month (known as Mermay). It was a perfect hashtag/concept to join in on as I was working in some aspect with fish everyday. So I created this Red Drum-inspire mermaid overlaid on a background photo from the south-coast of Texas, where the real species is found.
I wanted to create something to represent the time I was spending at a conference and all that I was learning. I ended up keeping track of all the different study species and compiling them in drawings as a way to illustrate that without getting too overwhelming with all the different projects involving those species. By also only revealing the names on the second page of the post, it turns it into a sort of game that is more interactive for the viewer.
I am an avid reader and wanted to showcase books that I was reading throughout working on my projects that were relevant to science. The posts were a way to allow followers to connect more personally to me, outside of just the science and outreach I was working on.
I had running posts for a while about this tiny 10 mL beaker I found around the lab. It served as a way to talk about more off-topic content while still being consistent with the rest of my page. Click on each photo for a closer look.
