ODFW Adventures: Part VI

This week I decided to try an old family recipie that has been passed down–but not from my family. My boyfriend Marc constantly talks about eating a dish called “Machaca,” which the internet says is a dish of finely shaved beef, but the Aros family creates with chorizo (mexican sausage) con huevos (with eggs). Although I didn’t have the exact recipie, I used my best judgement in making the dish by also using bell peppers, jalepenos, garlic, onion, cayenne powder, cilantro, tomatoes, avocadoes, and tortillas. My creation was, in my mind at least, a success! I have always loved the multiple uses eggs can serve in cooking and baking (including several fried egg sandwichs I made this week), and creating a new taste treat with them is always a pleasure.

At ODFW I had a fairly slow work week as I finished up couning the herring egg samples, for real this time! Ali and I began using GIS to map all of the GPS points, but we will delve into the full proccess this week. This will include mapping local distributions into polygons including all egg counts that had similar numbers into one polygon, creating layers to the map. We will the use those polygons to estimate the total number of eggs that were laid in the bay, therefore giving us a viable number to base next year’s quota off of. I am excited to be in the final working stages of this project, and when I am done I will have learned so many techincal details about the computer software I’ve been working with and about how fisheries in Oregon are run and determined.

The Nearshore Strategy part of things was also a bit slow this week, as I only worked on the extensive annotated bibliography that I began a few weeks ago. In this process, I have learned that there are likely billions of scientific journal articles that exist in the world, in many many many extremely research-specific journals, that explain even the smallest niches of our ecosystems. Which is acutally a pleasant surprise, because I have also learned how many species there are that are important to the ecosystem they live in that people don’t generally know about, which therefore leaves them unprotected to any vulnerability. This week the bibliography will begin to be useful as my team members begin to draft out sections of the climate change task for this revision, and I will continue to read articles relating to Oregon’s oceanographic and nearshore climate change to expand the bibliography during this coming week. I hope to be able to report solid progress on that for my next blog!