Category Archives: Fisheries & Wildlife

What ties the Panama Canal, squeaky swing sets, and the Smithsonian together? Birds of course!

Have you ever wondered why you see birds in some places and not in others? Or why you see a certain species in one place and not in a different one? Birds have wings enabling them to fly so surely we should see them everywhere and anywhere because their destination options are technically limitless. However, this isn’t actually the case. Different bird species are in fact limited to where they can and/or want to go and so the question of why do we see certain birds in certain areas is a real research question that Jenna Curtis has been trying to get to the bottom of for her PhD research.

  • Jenna conducting field birding surveys on Barro Colorado Island (BCI)
  • Jenna next to one of their (absurdly heavy) autonomous recording devices

Jenna is a 4th year PhD candidate working with Dr. Doug Robinson in the Department of Fisheries & Wildlife. Jenna studies bird communities to figure out which species occur within those communities, and where and why they occur there. To dial in on these big ecological questions, Jenna focuses on tropical birds along the Panama Canal (PC). PC is a unique area to study because there is a large man-made feature (the canal) mandating what the rest of the landscape looks and behaves like. Additionally, it’s short, only about 50 miles long, however, it is bookended by two very large cities, Panama City (which has a population over 1 million people) and Colón. Despite the indisputable presence and impact of humans in this area, PC is still flanked by wide swaths of pristine rainforest that occur between these two large cities as well as many other types of habitat.

Barro Colorado Island can be seen in the centre of the Panama Canal.

A portion of Jenna’s PhD research focuses on the bird communities found on an island in the PC called Barro Colorado Island (BCI), which is the island smack-dab in the middle of the canal. To put Jenna’s research into context, we need to dive a little deeper into the history of the PC. When it was constructed by the USA (1904-1914), huge areas of land were flooded. In this process, some hills on the landscape did not become completely submerged and so areas that used to be hilltops became islands in the canal. BCI is one such island and it is the biggest one of them in the PC. In the 1920s, the Smithsonian acquired administrative rights for BCI from the US government and started to manage the island as a research station. This long-term management of the island is what makes BCI so unique to study as we have studies dating back to 1923 from the island but it has also been managed by the Smithsonian since 1946 so that significant development of infrastructure and urbanization never occurred here.

Large cargo vessels pass next to BCI on their transit of the Panama Canal

Now back to Jenna. Over time, researchers on the island noticed that fewer bird species were occurring on the island. There are now less species on the island than would be expected based on the amount of available habitat. Therefore, Jenna’s first thesis chapter looks at which bird species went extinct on BCI after the construction of PC and why these losses occurred. She found that small, ground-dwelling, insectivore species were the group to disappear first. Jenna determined that this group was lost because BCI has started to “dry out”, ecologically speaking, since the construction of PC. This is because after the PC was built, the rainforest on BCI was subjected to more exposure from the sun and wind, and over time BCI’s rainforest has no longer been able to retain as much moisture as it used to. Therefore, many of the bird species that like shady, cool, wet areas weren’t able to persist once the rainforest started becoming more dry and consequently disappeared from BCI.

Another chapter of Jenna’s thesis considers on a broader scale what drives bird communities to be how they are along the entire PC, and what Jenna found was that urbanization is the number one factor that affects the structure and occurrence of bird communities there. The thing that makes Jenna’s research and findings even more impactful is that we have very little information on what happens to bird communities in tropical climates under urbanization pressure. This phenomenon is well-studied in temperate climates, however a gap exists in the tropics, which Jenna’s work is aiming to fill (or at least a portion of it). In temperate cities, urban forests tend to look the same and accommodate the same bird communities. For example, urban forest A in Corvallis will have pigeons, house sparrows, and starlings, and this community of birds will also be found in urban forest B, C, D, etc. Interestingly, Jenna’s research revealed that this trend was not the case in Panama. She found that bird communities within forest patches that were surrounded by urban areas were significantly different to one another. She believes that this finding is driven by the habitat that each area may provide to the birds. 

Jenna has loved birds her entire life. To prove to you just how much she loves birds, on her bike ride to the pre-interview with us, she stopped on the road to smash walnuts for crows to eat. Surprisingly though, Jenna didn’t start to follow her passion for birds as a career until her senior year of her undergraduate degree. The realization occurred while she was in London to study abroad for her interior design program at George Washington University in D.C. where on every walk to school in the morning she would excitedly be pointing out European bird species to her friends and classmates, while they all excitedly talked about interior design. It was seeing this passion among her peers for interior design that made her realize that interior design wasn’t the passion she should be pursuing (in fact, she realized it wasn’t a passion at all), but that birds were the thing that excited her the most. After completely changing her degree track, picking up an honor’s thesis project in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Zoo on Kori bustard’s behavior, an internship at the Klamath Bird Observatory after graduating, Jenna started her Master’s degree here at OSU with her current PhD advisor, Doug Robinson in 2012. Now in her final term of her PhD, Jenna hopes to go into non-profit work, something at the intersection of bird research and conservation, and public relations and citizen science. But until then, Jenna will be sitting in her office (which houses a large collection of bird memorabilia including a few taxidermized birds) and working towards tying all her research together into a thesis.

To hear more about Jenna’s research, tune in on Sunday, October 6th at 7 PM on KBVR 88.7 FM, live stream the show at http://www.orangemedianetwork.com/kbvr_fm/, or download our podcast on iTunes!

Are Microplastics the New Fish Food?

Geologists have considered an entirely new geologic era as a result of the impact humans are having on the planet. Some plastic material in our oceans near Hawaii along are hot magma vents and is being cemented together with sand, shells, fishing nets and forming never before existing material — Plastiglomerates. This new rock is a geologic marker providing evidence of our impact that will last centuries. Although rocks seem inert, that same plastic material floating around our oceans is constantly being eaten, purposefully and accidentally, by ocean creatures from as small as plankton to as large as whales and we’re just beginning to understand the ubiquity of microplastics in our oceans and food webs that humans depend on.  

Our guest this evening is Katherine Lasdin, a Masters student in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, and she has to go through extraordinary steps in her lab to measure the quantity and accumulation of plastics in fish. Her work focuses on the area off the coast of Oregon, where she is collecting black rockfish near Oregon Marine Reserves and far away from those protected areas. These Marine Reserves are “living laboratory” zones that do not allow any fishing or development so that long-term monitoring and research can occur to better understand natural ecosystems. Due to the protected nature of these zones, fish may be able to live longer lives compared to fish who are not accessing this reserve. The paradox is whether fish leading longer lives could also allow them to bioaccumulate more plastics in their system compared to fish outside these reserves. But why would fish be eating plastics in the first place? 

These are the locations of Oregon’s Marine Reserves. The sampling for juveniles and adult black rockfish is occurring at Cape Foulweather which is between the Cascade head and Otter Rock Reserves. PC:
Black rockfish are a common fish off the Oregon coast and due to their abundance it’s a great study species for this research.

Plastic bottles, straws, and fishing equipment all eventually degrade into smaller pieces. Either through photodegradation from the sun rays, by wave action physically ripping holes in bottles, or abrasion with rocks as they churn on our beaches. The bottle that was once your laundry detergent  is now a million tiny fragments, some you can see but many you cannot. And they’re not just in our oceans either. As the plastics degrade into even tinier pieces, they can become small enough that, just like dust off a farm field, these microplastics can become airborne where we breathe them in! Microplastics are as large as 5mm (about the height of a pencil eraser) and they are hoping to find them as small as 45 micrometers (about the width of a human hair). To a juvenile fish their first few meals is critical to their survival and growth, but with such a variety of sizes and colors of plastics floating in the water column it’s often mistaken for food and ingested. In addition to the plastic pieces we can see with our eyes there is a background level of plastics even in the air we breathe that we can’t see, but they could show up in our analytical observations so Katherine has a unique system to keep everything clean. 

In order to quantify the amount of plastics in fish, you have to digest some of the fish guts. PC: Katherine Lasdin

Katherine is co-advised by Dr. Susanne Brander who’s lab studies microplastics in marine ecosystems. In order to keep plastics out of their samples, they need to carefully monitor the air flow in the lab. A HEPA filtration laminar flow hood blows purified air towards samples they’re working with in the lab and pushes that clean air out into the rest of the lab. There is a multi-staged glassware washing procedure requiring multiple ethanol rinses, soap wash, deionized water rinses, a chemical solvents rinse, another ethanol, and a final combustion of the glass in a furnace at 350°C for 12-hours to get rid of any last bit of contamination. And everyday that someone in Dr. Brander’s lab works in the building they know exactly what they’re wearing; not to look cool, but to minimize any polyester clothing and maximize cotton clothing so there is even less daily contamination of plastic fibers. These steps are taken because plastics are everywhere, and Katherine is determined to find out just big the problem may be for Oregon’s fish.  

Katherine Lasdin working in the laminar flow hood that blows purified air towards the samples in Dr. Brander’s lab. PC: Cheyenne Pozar

Be sure to listen to the interview Sunday 7PM, either on the radio 88.7KBVR FM or live-stream, to learn how Katherine is conducting her research off the coast of Oregon to better understand our ocean ecosystems in the age of humans.

Listen to the podcast episode!

On this episode at the 16:00 mark we described how every time you wash clothing you will loose some microfibers; and how a different student was looking at this material under microscopes. That person is Sam Athey, a PhD student at the University of Toronto who also studies microplastics.

Environmental planning in an age of human-animal interactions

Many people enjoy their time visiting wildlands whether it means hiking, birding, or searching for exotic mushrooms, but as more people visit the outdoors there are more and more layers of expected uses for a single patch of forest. Since a 1960 Congressional act, National Forests have been designated multi-use which includes managing the land for “outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.” Hikers and bird-enthusiasts may have overlapping expectations of calm and serenity when stepping foot on the trailhead, but that’s a far cry from what a mountain biker wants out of a trail system where speed and steepness are prioritized. Additionally, there are demands for timber production vital to rural community survival and finding recreational areas for hunting and fishing. With all these expected uses, there is no doubt there will be conflicts. The vexing questions that simmer for land managers is understanding where on the landscape federal dollars can be utilized for maximum public good.

The way we’ve approached that question has changed over time. In the past, these management decisions were answered with a pure ecological understanding of the area such as: which soils can support mushrooms growth, or what trees species can support a bird species of interest. Making decisions completely within the ecological framework could miss the fact that the local community prioritizes river access because of its strength as a tourism hub for whitewater rafting, for example. Instead of spending money on a bird exploration trail they may prioritize the repair of a boat ramp or a wildfire prevention treatment around a heavily used section of river that is susceptible to summer fires. The latter two options are likely to have much stronger public support, gain local advocates in the process and, in the long run, make it possible to expand the range of successful recreational programs. Those ideas are examples of an idea where the ecology of the land and the social factors are taken into account to better focus management decisions in a process called Human Ecology Mapping.

Jackie Delie and brother, Anthony Delie, exploring the Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia Canada

If we can take into account the ecological factors of the area that bracket what is physically possible on the land and better understand the priorities of the local community, then land managers can make more informed decisions that are less likely to result in user conflicts and are more likely to create long-term positive impacts on the relationships humans have with the land. Our guest is Jackie Delie a Masters student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who is using the Human Ecology Mapping technique in a more visceral relationship: human and black bear interactions in Oregon. Jackie is advised by Dr. Kelly Biedenweg, a social scientist, who previously had another student exploring social spatial data for sustainable management in the Hood Canal between Oregon and Washington. This study suggested that this is a method that can yield positive results across a variety of user groups.

Black bear sighting on the river bank in the Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia Canada

Furry and curious or big and scary? Your immediate thoughts about black bears is likely related to your previous experiences with them. If you’ve seen bears napping in the sun from behind a glass enclosure at a zoo, you probably think they’re gentle giants. If you’re chasing bears out of your backyard while they scatter trash across your front lawn every week, you probably have different feelings. You may expect the more you are exposed to bears the more you know about them; however, what kind of exposure is critical to your feeling about bears. If you’re a hunter or hiker, you likely have very positive experiences with bears compared to a homeowner nestled in the wildland urban interface but does not recreate in the forest. Jackie is leveraging the spatial GPS data of black bears killed over the past decade, as reported from the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and examining how the cluster of those points relate to how people use the landscape and their experiences and values.

Jackie Delie checking on camera trap cameras in black bear habitat on the urban-wildlife fringe in King County, Washington

This is the first study of its kind that looks at the human dimensions of human and black bear interactions in Oregon, as Oregon is one of the few places that mandate GPS points be recorded for black bear kills. Jackie collected in-person interviews at 18 different trailheads throughout Oregon asking participants a variety of questions. One of them is to physically draw where in Oregon they use the landscape and for what use –  hiking, hunting, rafting, or another activity.  Using both spatial and social datasets she may begin to elucidate not only where there are overlapping user areas, but how those areas may influence the human perceptions of black bears in the environment. The larger goal of Jackie’s project is to help inform the management plan through the Oregon Department Fish and Wildlife so they can make better decisions on where to prioritize resources on the landscape to better understand why human opinions differ about black bears.

Jackie Delie conducting research in the Panama rainforest on the behavior of mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata) or you can say solo research time in the Panama rainforest

Merging two (somewhat) disparate fields of science is rare for a graduate degree, but knowing Jackie’s road to graduate school makes it seem rather natural. She conducted her undergraduate degree in Switzerland doing countless endeavors from Australia to Kenya learning about new foods, cultures, and sciences. After many travels and internships, she knew she wanted to purse graduate school. It was almost one year from the first time Jackie contacted her advisor until she became a student here at Oregon State.

Be sure to listen to the interview Sunday 7PM, either on the radio 88.7KBVR FM or live-stream, to learn how a holistic approach to land management can ensure a more successful project outcome, and how Jackie traveled the world and ended up back in the Pacific Northwest, an area she calls home.

Dr. Biedenweg Research Website

Jackie Delie’s Website

 

Feather collections and stressed-out owls

Ashlee Mikkelsen holding a juvenile northern spotted owl. Photo courtesy Ashlee Mikkelsen.

For six months out of every year, Ashlee Mikkelsen spends her days hiking for miles off-trail in the Ponderosa pine-filled forests of central Washington, hooting like an owl, and carefully listening for responses. These days, responses can be few and far between. You see, Ashlee isn’t just a wildlife enthusiast; she is a research assistant in a long-term US Forest Service monitoring program focused on the northern spotted owl.

Since being listed as threatened by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990, populations of northern spotted owls have continued to decline. In some areas, the number of spotted owls has decreased by more than half in only 20 years (see (Dugger et al. (2016)). Northern spotted owls are inhabitants of old-growth forests. Although northern spotted owls historically could be found in almost every forest from northern California to British Columbia, as forests have shrunk in size through timber harvesting and through changing land use, the amount of suitable habitat has drastically decreased. A second major contributor to the decline of the northern spotted owl is arrival during the last century of the barred owl, which are native to northeastern North America. Barred owls competed with spotted owls for territory and resources, and have been observed fighting with spotted owls.  Ashlee’s master’s research at Oregon State aims to quantify the stress experienced by spotted owls.

Northern spotted owl. Photo courtesy Ashlee Mikkelsen.

When birds experience stress, their bodies respond by releasing larger-than-usual quantities of the hormone corticosterone. Similar to cortisol in humans, corticosterone is always present, but having levels that are very high or that are very low is associated with poor health outcomes. It used to be that in order to measure the physical stress response of a bird, researchers had to take a blood sample. The problem with this is that the process of taking a blood sample itself is a source of stress for the bird. Recently, however, a new technique was introduced based on the fact that corticosterone is also present in feathers. Being able to use feathers is a distinct advantage: birds are constantly dropping feathers, so collecting feathers is fairly non-invasive, and importantly, similar to the benefits of measuring cortisol in hair, feather corticosterone measurements show the average level of the hormone over a long period, rather than just the instant that the feather is collected.

Ashlee banding a juvenile northern spotted owl. Photo courtesy Ashlee Mikkelsen

Ashlee banding a juvenile northern spotted owl. Photo courtesy Ashlee Mikkelsen

Working with professor Katie Dugger (who, incidentally, was Ashlee’s supervisor in the owl-monitoring field crew for the two years prior to beginning graduate school), Ashlee is analyzing a collection of feathers that spans over a 30-year time period. Measuring corticosterone levels in feathers is a high-tech process involving organic chemistry and radioactive isotopes. Although there are many complications that need to be accounted for, tracking the levels of corticosterone in these feathers gives Ashlee insight into the impact of stressors such as environmental degradation and competition with barred owls. Because the data spans so many years, she is able to examine the average stress in spotted owls over periods of change in the populations of barred owls. Ashlee’s data shows a strong response in corticosterone in spotted owls when the number of barred owls in the neighborhood goes up. This supports the view that spotted owls’ woes are not just due to habitat loss, but also due to competition with barred owls.

To hear more about Ashlee’s path to OSU, experiences in research, and of course about northern spotted owls, tune in Sunday, February 16th at 7 PM on KBVR 88.7 FM, live stream the show at http://www.orangemedianetwork.com/kbvr_fm/, or download our
podcast on iTunes!