{"id":3645,"date":"2017-05-22T13:48:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T20:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/?p=3645"},"modified":"2017-05-31T10:11:21","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T17:11:21","slug":"sea-grant-funding-engineering-students-build-portable-deep-core-may-help-save-endangered-native-mud-shrimp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/2017\/05\/22\/sea-grant-funding-engineering-students-build-portable-deep-core-may-help-save-endangered-native-mud-shrimp\/","title":{"rendered":"With Sea Grant funding, engineering students build ‘portable deep core’ that may improve studies of native mud shrimp"},"content":{"rendered":"

A parasitic isopod known as Orthione griffenis <\/em>is\u00a0decimating mud shrimp populations in coastal estuaries\u00a0ranging from British Columbia to northern California. Most\u00a0surviving mud shrimp populations are heavily infested with the parasite, threatening their existence.<\/p>\n

“From Bamfield, Canada, down to Morro\u00a0Bay, California, the native mud shrimp,\u00a0Upogebia pugettensis<\/em>, are either\u00a0gone or the populations are severely depressed,” said John Chapman<\/a>, an Oregon State University invasive species specialist who works out of OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center<\/a> in Newport.<\/p>\n

Mud shrimp are valuable prey for birds, fish and other animals in estuaries, and some ecologists believe they have provided\u00a0a steady food source for ocean-bound juvenile coho and Chinook. Mud shrimp are also important to the ecology of estuaries: each day during their feeding, they may\u00a0filter as much as 80 percent of the estuary’s intertidal water.<\/p>\n

Studying the shrimp, which can burrow to depths of\u00a0two meters, involves extracting them with quantitative sampling devices. These devices traditionally have been either handheld cores and shovels, which can damage the shrimp beds,\u00a0or a “yabby” pump, which sucks up only medium-sized and large shrimp\u00a0and is not quantitative. Neither method is reliable for quantifying the most\u00a0important reproductive sizes, and both often damage shrimp in the process of collecting them.<\/p>\n

The solution? Create\u00a0a new device that’s not only long enough to reach the deepest shrimp, but gentle enough to bring them to the surface unharmed — and also simple enough to allow for rapid, inexpensive sampling by just\u00a0a few researchers.<\/p>\n

\"Engineering<\/a>

Engineering student Cade Burch demonstrates his team’s “portable deep core.” (Photo by Rick Cooper)<\/p><\/div>\n

To develop the device — a “portable deep core” —\u00a0Chapman enlisted the assistance\u00a0of\u00a0OSU Engineering professors John Parmigiani and Sharon LaRoux, who would oversee\u00a0the student design teams* and participate in the field testing and implementation. Chapman and Parmigiani\u00a0also secured $9,000 in funding from Oregon Sea Grant, to help defray materials\u00a0costs and other expenses.<\/p>\n

Between\u00a0January and May 2017, three student teams, each working on a different design, researched, planned, designed, built and tested the components of their respective devices, and on May 19 they unveiled the working prototypes at OSU’s Undergraduate Engineering Expo.<\/a>\u00a0“Each of the three designs\u00a0will be evaluated and combined over the summer by a graduate student into a single, final prototype,” said Parmigiani.<\/p>\n

According to Chapman, the newly designed deep core “will, for the first time, give us\u00a0access to the entire range of burrowing shrimp populations,\u00a0and let us gather the information we need to help\u00a0slow or reverse the mud shrimp’s decline.”<\/p>\n

*Design teams
\n<\/strong>205a: Cade Burch, Eric Beebe, Omar Alkhaldi
\n205b: Patrick Finn, Jacob Garrison, Connor Churchill
\n205c: Zachary Gerard, Evan Leal, Derrick Purcell<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Mark Floyd, OSU News and Research Communications<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A parasitic isopod known as Orthione griffenis is\u00a0decimating mud shrimp populations in coastal estuaries\u00a0ranging from British Columbia to northern California. Most\u00a0surviving mud shrimp populations are heavily infested with the parasite, threatening their existence. “From Bamfield, Canada, down to Morro\u00a0Bay, California, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1324,1223987,1320,309,1223973,6508,826,1223965,1223976,1223964,1223970,1223996],"tags":[872,202282,202281,202283,911],"class_list":["post-3645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology","category-engineering","category-environment","category-fisheries","category-grants","category-marine-animals","category-marine-science","category-news","category-oregon-sea-grant","category-oregon-state-university","category-salmon","category-shellfish","tag-engineering","tag-mud-shrimp","tag-portable-deep-core","tag-sea-grant-funding","tag-students"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p64BdL-WN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3645"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3660,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3645\/revisions\/3660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/breakingwaves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}