Report Summer School ‘Aquaculture in Southern Europe: Basic and Applied Aspects’
By Robin Hogenboom
I never considered going abroad for a summer school course, until my teacher informed me about this course on aquaculture in Southern Europe. As my current curriculum focuses largely on animal physiology and how this is affected their environment, I was really interested in the eco-physiological aspects of the course. The course was set up by the University of Cádiz and apart from the lectures they also organised field trips and practical work and arranged the accommodation, which was above expectations.
On July 8th we arrived in Seville and boarded the train to Cádiz. The train ride gave us a nice impression of the Spanish environment and turned out to be an adventure on its own due to the different setup of these trains. Cádiz, turned out to be a small, beautiful town with a lot of history. Our accommodation was located on the cathedral’s square, one of the main attractions of the city. We spent our free afternoons visiting the sights around the city and spent some time on of the two beaches in the area. During our time, however, these beached would usually be crowded with bathers, mostly from Madrid.
In the evenings, the streets of Cádiz would be filled with terraces and everyone would be out for dinner and drinks. The food in Cádiz, which consisted mostly of seafood and tapas, was very good, but there weren’t any places close to our accommodation that were open after midnight. All in all, Cádiz was a pretty city to stay in, although we have seen most of the city in our short time there.
The Summer School
The course had a high information density: every day between 9 am and 2 pm two speakers (one 2-hour session per speaker) would discuss one aspect of local, European or global aquaculture, ranging from the physiological aspects regarding stress to the use of algae to increase the yield of aquacultural farms. The class was small, but nevertheless consisted of people from different regions of the world (Italy, Norway, Canada and of courseSpain and the Netherlands). The small class size gave us the opportunity to get in touch with the students from other countries as well as the teachers.
Most of the talks were hosted in the philosophy faculty in Cádiz, but on one day we went to the marine faculty in Puerta Real for practical work and a tour of the wet lab facilities (photos). To me, this was the highlight of the course, as we got to work with animals to practice our animal handling and sampling skills and we got to see the wet lab, a huge room filled with water tanks and aquaria hosting the various marine species they used for research. In comparison, the wet lab in Nijmegen is rather small (the labs, on the other hand, are much better in Nijmegen compared to Cádiz).
During this summer school, I learned a lot about the Mediterranean and European aquaculture and got in touch with a lot of interesting teachers and students. I would definitely recommend other students to do a summer school during their studies, as it is an enrichment of the things they see and learn in Nijmegen. While it is likely that I won’t end up in aquacultural research, the course taught me some aspects that will be useful in coral research as well and has given me a interesting back-up plan in case my coral research project does not get funded.
Me at the Faculty of Marine and Environmental Sciences of the University of Cádiz in Puerto Real, Spain.