Marine Bio Major Lone Filipino in Costa Rica Confab
A student in the Master of Science in Marine Biology program was the only researcher from the Philippines at a joint conference on tropical biology on June 22 to 27 in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Angelico Jose Tiongson was one of close to a thousand participants from 50 countries at the 50th joint anniversary meeting and conference of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and the Organizacion para Estudios Tropicales. There were only less than ten tropical marine biologists who attended.
The undergrad thesis of Tiongson, who finished Biology in Silliman in 2012, was also accepted into the systematics category. Titled “Morphological ifferentiation of two morphos of the seagrass Halophila spinulosa (R. Brown) Ascherson (Hydrocharitaceae) from Ilacaon, Island, Negros Oriental, Philippines,” the thesis was developed under Dr. Janet Estacion, his adviser, who is currently OIC Dean of the Institute of Environmental and Marine Sciences (IEMS).
“My thesis distinguished what is currently treated as a morph of the H. spinulosa, which is most likely a distinct species following a more thorough research with its reproductive biology and ecology,” he explained.
Tiongson used to be a research assistant at the IEMS. He has also been involved in various projects, from coastal resource management to cetacean (dolphin and whale) ecology. In 2012, he served as a volunteer research assistant on a humpback whale research for 2 months in Queensland, Australia. A year earlier, he was an exchange student at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan.
