ODFW Adventures: Week IV

After an adventurous but tiring weekend sandboarding with some other daring sea grant interns, I did not manage to make my next extravagant dish, but I plan on creating another food-wonder this coming week. In the mean time, I want to say a few words about one of my favorite food subjects: potatoes. You might think they originated in Ireland, or that yukon, red, yellow, white, and russet are the only varieties that exist. But there are actually over four hundred types of potatoes, and these handfuls of colorful potatoes are rooted in the Andean region of Peru. If there’s anything I miss more with my luch, it is a delicious and tasty baked peruvian potato–far more tasteful than any potatoes found in my local Fred Meyer. So if you ever get the chance to try a crAzy purple potato, my advice is do it!

This week, work at ODFW was a little bit more frustrating than I was anticipating. Now that I’m no longer bending over a back-breaking microscope, I miss the times when I counted hundreds of individual herring eggs throughout the day. Instead I have begun my days of desk work, sitting in my comfy chair with strained eyes. I spent the majority of the week working on citations, finishing a bibliography for the updated Strategy Species Table and beginning the largest bibliography of my time–an annotated bibliography for all of the climate change literature we have collected thus far. Having never done an annotated bibliography before, I am quickly learning how to summarize a fact-packed nine page scientific article into six sentences or less. I am also learning a lot about oceanographic climate change in the process, such as the negative affect of ocean acidification on the ability of shell-forming species to use CaCO3. I’ve also been doing google and library searches to find more local articles that will add to our expanding climate change library. 

Along with bibliographies, I attended many many meetings this week! Always a great break in the day, I listened to other people’s projects (Great job so far Nicole Matthias!) and learned more about the status of the updates for the Nearshore Strategy. My team is doing great, and moving at a quick pace to get these updates done before the deadline in December 2012. We have a good start on 3 of our 6 tasks, and the other three are beginning to be thrown on the table as well. It looks like I have more busy-work ahead of me; bibliographies never cease to be necessary.

All in all, things are rolling along swimmingly, and after a meeting with the gentleman that spent many years working with the herring data, I will be able to begin working with the GIS data this week! As well as finishing my bibliographies, of course! Until next week!