presentation. presentation… presentation.

Hey y’all!

Sorry this last post is so late.. it’s been super busy!  I had my final presentation for Oregon Sea Grant last Thursday, a guest presentation on Friday for the COSEE program, and I will give another presentation tomorrow to my organization.  Presentations are the bane of my existence, but I made a BALLER powerpoint, practiced a ton, and was able to get through the first two without fainting or hyperventilating.  Not that I was that close, but I can just imagine that happening..

Our final OSG presentations weren’t scheduled for the end of our summer internship though.  I still have another week left, and I am on a sprint to the finish line!  I still have a few projects to finish before this week is up.  (I have to analyze all 96 videos from last last week, and I have to shoot more with the oyster clusters turned around)

reflection.

As for my thoughts on this whole experience.. It was amazing.  If you’re thinking about applying, DO IT.

I cannot express my gratitude to Oregon Sea Grant and my mentor for setting up such a great summer internship.  I came here because I needed more experience in the marine science/policy/mgmt arena to help my decision-making about graduate school, and I got that and much more.  Before, I knew I wanted to end up working with marine environmental issues, and I knew that I needed and wanted to get more schooling, but I didn’t know which way to go:  science? management? academia? government? etc etc.

Now, I have a better idea of what working in the marine sciences for the government is like.  Not only have I gotten experience with actual research, techniques and methods, but I have also been exposed to everything else that surrounds the science and definitely affects it.  Policy, money, bureaucracy, stakeholders, the citizens of Coos Bay.  It’s all in there.

I have also met amazing people.  Intelligent, hard-working, passionate scientists, directors, and managers, who have all been extremely friendly and willing to share advice from years of experience in the field.  I have learned a lot just by talking with them, and I’ll definitely take their advice when I start applying to graduate schools.  The students I’ve been living with have been amazing too!  The students here at Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and I went on some cool adventures in Coos Bay.  It’s been great.

And my mentor?  Awesome.  Since day one, Steve Rumrill has been there to answer questions, offer advice.. all those good things mentors should do.  He was always on the move, switching from one project to the next, planning another one down the road, and he always brought me along.  I came here looking to learn as much as I could and get as much experience as I could, and I definitely got that.  Thank you!

What’s next?

Although I don’t have a CONCRETE idea about which graduate program I will be applying to, I now know what I will be looking for in my search.  While that search is going on though, I will be in New Mexico, working with Sapphire Energy on algae biofuel for a few months.  Trying out the private sector!

It’s been a good summer, and I’ll miss everyone I’ve met here in Oregon.  I hope you all had fun reading this blog.  Sayonara, folks!

adventures with Half-and-Half

This week, I was studying how water flow is affected by the shape of oyster shells and larger oyster conglomerations.  I used a flume, which looks like this:

A propeller pushes the water through the flume, and laminators (not in this picture, sorry) that are placed right after the white tubing straightens the water flow through the clear plastic compartment.  The idea is to place an oyster or a clump of oysters into the center of the clear plastic portion, dispense a little bit of half-and-half into the flow, and videotape how its flow is affected!  Half-and-half makes a good indicator because it’s buoyant and thick.

Plastic walls and a room full of windows ensured that glare would be a constant foe, so we decided to block out almost all sources of light by making this:

It was a pretty cozy set-up.

That’s my half-and-half dispenser right there.  It exerts a tiny bit of pressure that pushes a small volume of half-and-half out of a curved glass pipette (I made it myself! glass-blowing skills, yeah!).

And you get something like this:

We used different shell combinations, different water velocities, and dispensed the half-and-half at different depths to see how water flow changes near the bottom of a shell, right at the center, or right above.  You can even go a little crazy and try to direct the flow through spaces between oysters and make the half-and-half corkscrew!

These are the different oyster formations we used:

Findings..

From the 96 videos we shot, we have learned that the shape of oyster shells or oyster clusters can ultimately slow down particles in the water by creating turbulence.  This can have implications for the benefits of arranging in clusters, by increasing rates of feeding and larval settlement.

next week…

preparing for my final Oregon Sea Grant scholar presentation on all my work I’ve done here!

bug bites & muscles.

The two things I have accumulated this week.  They can be credited to a great, oyster-saving feat full of brute strength, artistic genius, and self-sacrifice.

Nah.. I’m exaggerating a little.. but it was pretty epic, in my humble opinion.  Basically, we have successfully deployed our Oly-Rocs!  The brute strength comes from lugging >60 lb concrete formations down rocky hillsides to intertidal areas that are known to have good oyster larval recruitment, the artistic genius is just from the fact that they’re pretty pleasing to the eye, and the self-sacrifice comes from the many many bug bites I had to endure during this undertaking.

I’ll take you along this week’s experience with a step-by-step guide on how to deploy your own Oly-ROCS!

Step 1.

Place your newly formed Oly-ROCS into a vehicle for transportation to its future site. (A truck bed will do fine).  If you want to compare different Oly-ROC styles, you can copy this arrangement and deploy 2 with horizontally-placed shells, 2 with vertically-placed shells, and 2 with live juvenile oysters on shell or rocks.  Don’t lay them on top of each other; you don’t want to crush the shells!

Step 2.

Find a nice location at low-tide for the final resting place of your Oly-ROCS.  You should look for a muddy area near other juvenile oysters.  The point is to enhance the habitat for the oysters, so you don’t want to cover up other rocks or hard substrate that they would naturally select, but at the same time, you want to find someplace where you know oyster larvae will be.

Step 3.

Carefully carry the Oly-ROCS down steep rocky slopes or long muddy paths to the general area of where you want to eventually place them.  Do this with a friend!  These Oly-ROCS are made for partner work, and >60 lbs is a lot for one person to carry.  Tip: You can even put together a make-shift sling-carrier for more ease of movement (picture on the right)

Step 4.

Put each individual Oly-ROC into its desired location.  Drive stakes into both sides of the burlap to hold them in place.  We have used 3 on each side, but 2 may suffice.  Flag each Oly-ROC for more visibility so you can find them again (especially useful when the tide isn’t low enough), and use different colors if you want to be able to distinguish the different Oly-ROC styles. (Make sure to clear away any live oysters that may be on small rocks or loose in the mud before putting your creations down!)

Step 5.

Place them in a straight row so you can compare different Oly-ROC styles.  They should all be at the same water level, but do the best you can.   In our site, we were trying to avoid the protected native eelgrass, so it wasn’t perfect.

And… TA-DA!!  You are finished!  Well done.

You  may be fatigued from all that heavy lifting, and you may have suffered some blood loss from mosquito bites, BUT, you have done a great favor to all of native oyster-kind, and they will tell stories of your bravery and goodness of heart for years to come.

Make sure to tune-in next week for some tips on how to study water flow and turbulence related to oyster formations!

(I may or may not have read one too many “guide” articles on msn.com this week)

Call me Captain!

I now officially hold an Oregon boater’s license.  After two whole days of an online crash course, I should now know about the official road rules of the sea.. and the appropiate types of toilets for different vessels.  The course was very comprehensive, and after taking it, I know a lot about boating legalities and issues I had never even thought of before, but there was just so much information!  I hope I can keep straight who has the right of way on the ocean and what different honks mean.

The course, however, didn’t teach me HOW to drive a boat.  After I had my printed boating certificate, I excitedly got into our 16-foot vessel, and immediately realized.. “I don’t know how to START this thing..”.  I had two great teachers though – Ali and Adam.  Ali dealt with the fundamentals, like pump the gas to start the motor, and Adam dealt with the get-to-know-your-boat’s-limits, like quickly push the throttle to the max to see how fast it can go from neutral!  I’m starting to get the hang of it, but other boats should probably still watch out when I get on the water!

Oly-ROCS go into Mass Production

We are revving up for our first deployment of 10-15 Oly-ROCS into the bay!

It will happen next week, so I have been busy building.  Our prototypes seem pretty hardy so hopefully they’ll survive their new homes in the water.  If not, we shall see what’s wrong with this first deployment.  We’re also going to be testing different shell orientations in the cement – how they fare out against the elements, how well they attract native oyster larvae to settle, and how settled juveniles survive on them.

We have two different shell orientations we’re checking out:

1) Shells sticking up, and
2) Shells flat against the concrete.

Both orientations can be found in nature, the former usually found on the sides of smaller rocks or on rounded sides, and the latter usually seen on the flat sides of larger rocks (from my observation).

Also..

These are Pacific oyster shells (non-native, from Japan), that have native Olympia oyster juveniles on them.  Two years ago, these ‘shell bags’ were strategically put out in the bay to attract Olympia oyster larvae, but the oysters can’t stay in these orange bags forever.  Some restoration efforts have simply scattered those shells with the attached juveniles into bays, but they can be easily washed away with the tides or smothered with sand and mud.

Our idea:  A few Oly-ROCS will also be made with these shells, and we shall see if this is an option for them!

Minivan Diaries.

Good times with my good ol’ green minivan!  Drove up and down the central Oregon coast, getting some spectacular views, hitting up nice beaches, and went to a festival in Corvallis before driving back to Charleston.

Well, I was actually doing work, and it was a state car, but all of that happened!

At the beginning of the week, I collected a series of water samples from different docks and beaches in the Coos Bay area, so I could measure their pH.  There are several reasons for this work: 1. ocean acidification, which is caused by increasing carbon dioxide in the air from combustion being absorbed by the ocean, affects oyster shells, 2. increasing alkalinity in the bay may be a precursor of eutrophication, and 3. we wanted to check the accuracy of our field pH meters with a new, expensive lab pH meter.  I’ve probably collected 5-6 samples from 9 different sites, along with getting measurements at the sites with a handheld field meter.  We saw that the field and lab meters are slightly off, but pretty much at a constant rate, so there is a pretty good correlation between the two.  This took up a good three whole days, driving to different sites, lugging around a heavy “handheld” meter, and then coming back to the lab to measure the pH levels.  I hope the data and results I got will be useful!

Thursday morning (4:30am), my advisor, a grad student and I went to Florence (~1 hour north of Coos Bay) to monitor eelgrass beds that my advisor had planted a few years ago.  A bridge was to be built, but in the process, a protected species of eelgrass was going to be ripped out.  So they transplanted all the plants that would be affected downstream, and they have to be monitored quarterly to ensure their survival.  I am happy to say they are doing well!

Then I continued on to Newport, where I met up with my fellow Sea Grant Scholars.  We all had to convene in Corvallis Friday morning for a mid-summer check-in, where we would tell each other about our projects, talk about what is expected of us at the end, and possible next steps after this internship.  I had a great time hearing about what everyone else is up to.  We are all doing such different things, some working in the field to do experiments and collect data, others reading through literature to create databases of information, and yet others creating online websites and editing videos to spread information about marine issues!  I also found out that I saw a video edited by one of my fellow Sea Grant Scholars at a seminar in Coos Bay!  It’s nice to know that our work is being put out there and reaching people.

From there, I helped out at da Vinci Days!  A festival for arts and science (I think..).  I helped man the Oregon Sea Grant booth, and I will admit that I think I learned more than the people visiting our booth!  Not only did I have to learn quickly enough to explain what Sea Grant was about and answer questions about all the marine issues Sea Grant tackles, but I also spent a lot of time with our interactive learning activities (games for kids) because they looked so fun!  I had an awesome time and I have to make sure to go to more of those in the future!

I finally drove back down to Charleston Saturday afternoon (about a 4 hour drive). As much as I liked my quality time with the green minivan, I am spending the rest of my weekend walking around!

I have no idea what I will be doing this next week… probably one of the many exciting and interesting projects I’ve been working on, but not sure which one!  So I’ll let ya know =]

fourth of July!

(sorry, no firework pictures)

Remember how special and exciting those 3 or 4 day weekends were in school?  Didn’t matter which holiday it was, it was just an excuse to stay up late watching movies and spend the whole next day reading a good novel? .. maybe that’s just me.. but anyway. THESE WEEKENDS ARE SO MUCH BETTER WHEN YOU WORK.  I just did not know how to really appreciate those long weekends (that also make the next week go that much faster).

NOT TO SAY that I hate my job.  Far from that.  I loveee what I’m doing out here.  I just need some time to re-energize so I can go at it with a renewed vigor the following week!

Back to July 4th.  It was amazing.  A weekend full of long sandy beaches, calm bays, picnics with barbecued oysters (I DID eat one.. I could learn to like them), the quintessential fireworks over the water, and a last-minute visit from my friend, Jake Bruene!

I kept him pretty busy showing him my favorite nature spots, the oysters I’ve collected, and of course my Oly ROCS.  I guess I tend to ramble, because as I was trying to explain to him my work and the problems oysters are facing, he had to slow me down to be able to digest all this new information I was throwing at him.  He was impressed by how much I had learned in a few weeks, and at that point I realized.. Yeah!  I HAVE learned a ton.  If you want to learn more about a field, there’s nothing better than jumping right in to a hands-on project with a great advisor.  And that’s exactly what OSG provided ( <– mid-internship thank you for this opportunity).  I’m also beginning to understand the term “trusted broker of information” that is in the OSG mission statement.  I would say I’m starting to become one; I just need to slow down when I explain things, apparently.

Now, about this week’s tasks!

remember the Dredge Islands?

They contained all those oyster shells from the subtidal environment, and I collected those shells to be able to compare shell sizes with those in the intertidal environment.  Well, early this week, I was able to measure living oysters in the intertidal for the comparison… and guess what I found?  There was a similar bell-curve type of distribution for both intertidal and subtidal oysters, but on the average, the subtidal shells were a good 20mm larger than the intertidal ones.  The shells for this comparison were randomly selected to include the whole spectrum of sizes, so the next project will include comparing all the largest oyster shells to see if there is a significant difference in their maximum sizes.

boats and pH.

In Coos Bay and South Slough, my advisor has a good number of dataloggers that measure temperature, conductivity, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and pH every 15 minutes.  They have been recorded for at least a decade now, meaning that they have a significant amount of data to study the smallest changes that have been going on in these waters.  For good measure though, we wanted to compare the pH measurements of the field dataloggers to those of a more precise lab instrument.

So I took Jake with me on a nice, chilly and wet boat ride to collect some water samples near the dataloggers!  I’ve been trying to show him a good time in Coos Bay, but of course, that day had to be the coldest, foggiest day to be out on the water.  I had a good time though.  I was able to use field instruments, record data, and collect samples all by myself!  I felt very independent.  Well.. I don’t have my boating license yet so Adam was driving the boat for me, BUT I was able to drive the state truck the next day to different beaches to collect more water samples.  So all in all, this was a great week of gaining independence.

As for the pH comparison, it didn’t go so well.  It seems as though the lab instrument and the field instrument were not calibrated or standardized the same way, because I was getting slightly different readings.  No need to worry though, I’ll just try again next week!

And those Oly ROCS…

We did end up making more of those, and they’re definitely closer to what they need to be for implementation.  (I also recruited Jake to help make his first Oly ROC).  I think we’ll be putting them in the bay soon, so I’ll have those pictures for you when that happens!

office time.

For the first time in 3 weeks, I spent some good bonding time with my desk.  I finally got my internet, login credentials, email, etc figured out, so I spent a good portion of this week doing some office work.  Plus, the tides weren’t so great the beginning of this past week and it was raining, so it was best to stay in.

What I’ve learned:  Science isn’t all about the lab or even field work.  You have to spend time writing grants to apply for funding, putting together reports, seminars, or powerpoints for meetings, and gathering information into summaries void of scientific jargon so that the vast majority of people can understand them.  The last one is what I did.  I read many many many scientific articles, powerpoints from workshops, and shellfish restoration manuals, and pulled together all the important pieces of information.  I’ve noticed that my advisor has to spend a huge amount of time at his desk, too.  He’s busy writing grants to secure salaries, conference calling to inform and spread knowledge to policy makers, among other things.  I guess it’s just how things are.  I personally think it adds a bit more variety to the job.

I also did online research on how to improve my Oly ROCS (we’re going to implement those next week, so you’ll be hearing about those soon!).

searching for oysters.

There’s a plan to build a liquid natural gas pipe through Haynes Inlet of Coos Bay, and despite much community resistance, that plan was approved.  Was.  Then it was brought to their attention that the Olympia oyster (species at risk) may be inhabiting areas that would be affected by the current plan.  They wanted someone to go and check if they were there, so my advisor, Laura (a postdoc) and I did just that.

In some places, they were amazingly abundant.  Others, there were smatterings.  And in one area, none at all.  We could basically foretell where they would be by the different characteristics of each area.  The rocky shorelines  had more oysters than the muddy, almost anoxic flats.  It’s not always that simple though.  We also began to see that the residence time of water was a major factor of whether or not juveniles would be present.  Salinity is important too.  I also observed that there were many juveniles, but not many older, larger oysters in some areas.  I began to question whether these areas with seemingly abundant populations of oysters were actually good for them.  Did certain environmental conditions create hostile environments that led to premature deaths?  Is there good larval recruitment but something else that’s killing them?  Or are they thriving just below the surface where we can’t see them, and the ones above the tideline just can’t tolerate being out of water for that long?

I know I won’t be able to answer all of these questions, but I hope I can get closer to knowing the answers.  They’re important questions for the restoration effort.

What’s next:  probably more field work for their restoration, and working more on the Oly ROCS.  I’ll let ya know next week!

research by kayak. a break from science. playing with concrete

Sea kayaking. Is hard.

Steve, my advisor, wanted to visit the dredge islands of Coos Bay to collect oyster shells for several different projects, and he suggested kayaking to get them.  I immediately loved the idea.  Recreation and science together!  So we got buckets, trash bags, and ziplock bags to gather up hundreds of forgotten oyster shells and set off for these islands.

The dredge islands were formed the many times Coos Bay was dredged for the safe passage of ships.  Deep canals were created by digging up all the sediment and placing it on one side of the bay, creating heaps of stuff that used to be on the bay floor.  After years and years, grasses, shrubs, and trees colonized the newly formed islands and created what you see on the left.  Much of it is still inundated with water except during low tides as you can see on the right.  What’s most interesting about these dredge islands, is that they are comprised of thousands of old oyster shells that were picked up from the bottom of the bay along with all the sediment during the dredgings.  Apparently, oysters used to be abundant in the subtidal waters of Coos Bay, and you can still see their remnants by the hundreds in some areas, just like in the middle picture.

Hello there!

Now, on to more important things… What exactly am I doing during my internship with Oregon Sea Grant?

OYSTER RESTORATION!!

I am working to restore the Native Olympia Oysters, Ostrea lurida, to Coos Bay and the South Slough in Oregon.  They used to flourish in the estuaries and coastal waters off the west coast hundreds of years ago before the Native Americans harvested them, tsunamis and earthquakes buried them under sediment, Europeans brought over non-native Pacific oysters for large-scale production, and the usual habitat modification, sedimentation, overfishing, and so on from human use of coastal lands.

Oysters provide many indispensable ecosystem services, however, including:

• improving water quality through filtration
• ocean bottom stabilization
• providing a complex habitat for biodiverse ecosystems

and thus, it would be extremely advantageous for us to help these at-risk species recover to sustainable levels.

My Advisor…

is Steve Rumrill, a scientist at South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, an assistant professor at University of Oregon, graduate faculty at Oregon State University, and on the board for (it seems like) countless councils and advisory committees.  Even if I have only known him for a few days, I can say that he is an amazing mentor who is extremely willing to share his knowledge and expertise, offer opportunities for me to get as much hands-on training and experience as I can, and give advice on how to maneuver in the marine world career-wise.

What I’ve done so far..

1. I read tons and TONS of academic papers, packets on workshop proceedings, a powerpoint, etc on oyster ecology, oyster restoration efforts around the world, and the natural history of Olympia oysters in Coos Bay.  I didn’t know much about oysters to begin with, so I had to be caught up.
2. Made friends with the summer session and graduate students here at OIMB.  At first, I was worried that I was the only OSG scholar in Charleston, OR, which is at least 2 hours away from the rest of the group.  But the people here are extremely friendly and fun, and there are tons of cool things to do here.  I’ve already gone to a beach bonfire, tidepooling, trekked through a tunnel to find an isolated beach, and into Coos Bay a few times (had to go to Goodwill because, Daang! it’s COLDER than I thought it would be!)
3. Collected oyster shell bags and scrubbed them.  Bags of Pacific oyster shells (because there are a lot of them) are deployed in various locations in Coos Bay as recruitment sites for Olympia oyster larvae.  After a year or two, they are taken out of the water and cleaned to remove possible competitors, predators, sand and mud that may decrease flow-through, so that the juvenile Oysters have a better chance at survival.  They are also scrubbed so that invasive species are not spread when we re-locate bags.
4. Had meetings with other graduate students, postdocs, professors, and policy makers who are all involved in the oyster restoration process.

What I will do next..

1. Make Oly ROCS (Olympia – Restore Oysters with Cement Substrata).  We are going to construct, test, deploy, and evaluate a new technique to embed living Oly (Olympia) oysters into substrate that will hopefully attract more oysters to attach and settle for a more long-term arrangement than the oyster shell bags.
2. There are many more possible projects including installing & operating a water quality datalogger, and some personal projects of mine such as attempting to mountain bike to get to some cool sites around here, but I will explain more about those as they come up!

APOLOGIES for making this SOO long!  I wasn’t expecting to be such a talkative blogger, but SO much has happened in the past week!  I’ll try to take more pictures so you can see all my cool projects in-action, but as you’ll soon see, it can become quite a dirty job working in the field with mud.. not to mention a little dangerous for a digital camera when you’re working with water.

Until next time!!