All right. So I am really excited to be here with my friend Emily Bell, who is here to talk to us today about some animals. So say hi, Emily.

Hi. I'm so excited to be here. Oh, I'm so excited to have you. Thank you so much for talking to us. So tell us a little bit about who you are and what you've been up to. Okay, sure.

So, well, I guess I'll start by saying I am also not necessarily a biological animal expert,

but I have worked in the natural resources field for all of my career. So for about 12 years now.

My background is actually in social science. I majored in anthropology and sociology

in school and then kind of went straight into the workforce. I'm not like a master's or a PhD

person, but have been really lucky in that I started interning with the Nature Conservancy doing some. So most of my work revolves around

connecting people with the science and the information we need to make good decisions about our

natural resources. So it's bringing that social science to the forefront of the biological sciences

to help communicate and make an impact

and change behaviors and stuff like that.

So I was an intern for the Nature Conservancy, and I kind of just got thrust into this

world of invasive species work through that because what they brought me on to do was initiate

a survey among landowners in northeast Florida

about the plants they were dealing with. It was basically priority setting on where to put our

resources, what to put our resources towards working on on invasive plants in the area. And so from there,

I decided kind of, you know, typical out of college story, didn't really know what I

wanted to do, but really was interested in natural resources. And I just started applying for

park ranger jobs because I was like, that would probably be cool. That does sound really cool.

Yeah, and I got really lucky because I applied at some state parks and I applied at this place called the,

and it's a mouthful, the Guana, Talamano, Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Nailed it.

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