Category Archives: Former scholars

Erupting into high gear

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(An expanded version of this post including a bunch of great photos is now on my blog: http://biogeonerd.blogspot.com/2012/07/week-5-of-internship-erupting-into-high.html

This week I had a meeting with my mentor Nancee, as well as Mark and Shawn, other Free Choice Learning guru’s. I showed them all the stuff I had collected and we talked about the next steps. I feel I have a much more clear view of what’s going on with this exhibit and I’m ready to start the next phase. That is to talk with visitors to do some informal research on what things are going to work well for the exhibit. This will help me with my planning. It’s kind of crazy to think that I only have 5 weeks.

So some people may have heard about the disturbances that happened at Yaquina Head with the common murres. I happened to be there that night when it all went down. I heard about helping to volunteer with this research by interpreting to the public and I jumped at the opportunity.
Juvenile California Brown Pelicans came in and went through this infuriating (to me) routine of flapping their wings to scare away the adult murres, and at this point many of the chicks fell down to the water. All they seemed to be after was to steal whatever fish the parents had brought to feed their chick. When the murres got scared they would drop it and the pelican would eat it. Sometimes the pelicans would eat small chicks, and sea gulls being the opportunists they are rushed in to eat many chicks with the parents scared away. The pelicans were also seen swallowing a chick then spitting it back out then swallowing again and repeating until the chick was dead. I don’t know what the pelicans got out of this since they didn’t eat these chicks.
The colony was thinned to a fraction of its original size that night. It was sad to watch. I also went down to the beach the next day and saw many dead chicks washed up. Apparently hundreds of them were further down on the beach.

This weekend when I was off, my kids and I went to central Oregon and discovered volcanoes! (Hence the “erupting” in this blog title.) We got to drive to the top of a cinder cone and walk all around the rim of it, take a hike amidst a huge lava flow, and walk through a lava tube cave. We also went to the John Day fossil beds at Sheep Rock and the Painted Hills. Super cool! I thought going to central Oregon would be a short and slightly boring trip but I realized after arriving that there was so much to do I could have easily stayed for a week.

The Trilogy and Other Lab Adventures

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It has been another action packed week on the nutrient uptake project! The pictures below show the onslaught of the tide as I work under pressure to get the samples taken. Inside the chamber is a relatively controlled environment with artificial water and carefully measured nutrient concentrations, so an invasion by the raging sea would not be conducive for reliable results.

Salmon40-1207-03-scn-08In this particular instance we had to shorten our time intervals for sampling so we could get what we wanted before what happened in the second picture. It was great fun sticking my hand in to collect the sea grass from the bottom, especially with all the sediment swirling up so I couldn’t see what I was doing.

 

Salmon40-1207-03-scn-11

In the midst all this fieldwork we also spend some time in the lab. It is always strange to walk inside after a day in the field. Going from sun and mud to fluorescent lights and shiny tiled floors shocks me a little. Last week I learned a new instrument, the Trilogy. Because of the strange results we were finding in our nitrogen concentrations over time using the ISUS instrument, we decided to try this new instrument which measures the same thing in a slightly different way. The Trilogy is situated in a room with a fume hood and no windows and we wear white lab coats and gloves, quite the contrast to the field atmosphere. We also cannot engage in any horseplay as we are dealing with a carcinogenic nitrogen reducing agent in the form of a powder. One sneeze will kill you. Our results still came out funny but a different kind of funny, so we’re not sure what to do about that yet.

Another activity we carry out in the lab is plant biomass sampling. In the field we cut down all the plants in a chamber and in the lab we sort out dead and live plants to be dried and massed to determine percentage live plant mass. This involves untangling each individual blade of grass, separating brown from green. Each chamber takes about an hour to do. If this fact wasn’t overwhelming already, today we learned that the contractors who are working on the project with us do not have this part of the project in their contract…so only us interns are allowed to work on it. Such is the nature of government-contractor politics! And there are three of us interns and thus no time to get this done. So we will freeze the plants until an unspecified date. I am relieved.

This past weekend we had our mid-summer check-in with the Oregon Sea Grant. It was great to hear about all the other interns’ projects. I also worked in the Sea Grant booth at the DaVinci Days and showed many kids about the dangers of pollutants to the watershed. The pollutants for our demo were Kool-Aid, soy sauce, baking soda, and cocoa powder and spray bottles for rain. The kids were fascinated by the model of the town and all the flowing water. I enjoyed attempting to make an impression on young minds.

This week we do more field work. Who knows what the week will bring? There is always something new and interesting that happens. Like last Thursday we left one of the ~60 lb weights sitting in a mudflat in Nestucca, so today we had to use a regular old brick. We’ll have to venture back there with the hovercraft soon to retrieve it…hopefully the ground will not have swallowed it up by then.

Week 5: The Science After Dark Edition

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This past week was another busy one, and one in which a mystery was solved! I know you were all dying to know how the great chlorophyll mystery would turn out. Well, the verdict is in, and the chlorophyll was not degrading. It was instead being trapped underneath the filter paper in the bottom of the centrifuge tubes. With this problem solved we collected higher quality data, but data that still had some variability in it. We might have to work on this a little more, but it was good to at least identify the major problem, and confirm that we were largely seeing “P” limitation in Yaquina Bay. We probably weren’t noticing our little problem in the first run through of the experiment, because working with chlorophyll often means that you are working in the dark. Which brings us to the theme of this week’s post! Science after dark! Sounds scandalous, but I assure you the discussion that follows is family friendly in its entirety.

Towards the end of the weekend, and our rendezvous in Corvallis to discuss our internships and set up Sea Grant’s DaVinci Days booth, I got a call from my supervisors asking if I was available on Sunday night to collect the samples for the coming week’s experiment. I of course replied in the affirmative, and we met up at the EPA at about 8:30 PM. We finished at about midnight, and needless to say we were pretty tired. It was a fun, if not tiring, little twist to our summer experiment though. Working in the field at night, much like in a dark lab, presents some unique challenges when trying to do science. Mainly, how to juggle your flash light with all of your equipment and notebooks. Which is to say, I should probably invest in a headlamp.

Hopefully, with our earlier collection to start the week, our results will be a little clearer by the time Friday morning rolls around. Something tells me they won’t be though, but everyone keep their fingers crossed! Think positive thoughts. Encourage the phytoplankton from Elk City, Oregon to respond earnestly to our nutrient spikes. That’s all for this week! Until next time!

Sea Grant blog Earthdate 07/23/2012

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Last week saw the beginning of my cockle survey project for Oregon Sea Grant. Those of you who are regular readers have probably surmised by now that this is one project among many. However, I anticipate this project to be more focused and self-directed than the others. That is, I expect to assume more responsibility for data input, processing, and analysis than for some of the other projects. This expectation has already proven true, but let me first briefly describe our field procedure: after generating 60 random points along with their latitudes and longitudes (sites for our quadrats) via GME software, I uploaded them to a GPS unit and generated a map in ArcGIS. Then on Wednesday Scott, Jim, and I journeyed into the South Slough of Coos Bay to gather specimens. With the aid of the map and GPS unit, we navigated to the various points on the mudflat near Indian Point and dropped our 1-meter square quadrat. For each of the 60 quadrats, we raked the mud within the boundary in two swipes: first we raked a straight line in one direction and recovered cockles; then we turned 90 degrees, raked a second swipe, and recovered any additional cockles. Specimens were taken back to the lab where I measured all shell lengths, weighed each cockle, and input all data into an MS Access database. Of course, I’m leaving out many details of the field protocol for brevity, but hopefully you get the picture. We repeated the procedure on Thursday but used a different set of random points. The most challenging part of last week was, as usual, working with the computer software to generate random points and the map. ArcGIS is a truly exasperating program when one has no prior experience in it. I’ve been successful in generating useful maps; it’s just taken way longer than I think/know it should (several hour sessions). I just have to keep telling myself “You’re a student. You’re here to learn. This is perfectly normal.” Robert Allan gave me some contact info during our meeting at mid-summer check-in for whom to talk to on campus about taking some intro classes in GIS—something I definitely plan to pursue.

Mid-summer check-in was cool. It was nice to see what everybody has been doing over the last month. It was nice to be in Corvallis and sleep in my own bed for a few nights. Although some of the kids got overzealous with the simulated cow poo (actually chocolate sprinkles) on the watershed model, the booth at DaVinci Days was fun to help staff, and I met a lot of cool people. The Little Feat show was a highlight. They put on an awesome performance, and I even got one of their guitar picks.

The week that lies ahead will see me processing data for the cockle survey: generating summary stats and histograms for comparison to the Feb survey, querying out database tables, generating ANOVA and maybe some non-parametric hypothesis tests, etc., etc., etc. The Red Rock crab study continues with surveys and tagging on Mon, Wed, and Fri. Tuesday I’m helping staff the ODFW booth for a few hours at the Coos County Fair. If you’ve gotten this far and are still reading, congrats! Lets see if I can include a few photos…

Rakin’ Clinocardium nuttallii

Close-up of 1 m quad with rake

Measuring a heart cockle

Adventures in Tillamook, part 2

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Good news! I am back in Newport for the next 3 weeks!
I got back from Tillamook on Thursday afternoon, just in time to go to Corvallis on Friday morning for the Sea Grant Scholars mid-summer check-in. We got to hear an update from all the other scholars and got a tour of the Salmon disease Lab. I really enjoyed hearing from all the other scholars, especially the ones that aren’t staying at the Hatfield. I also really loved seeing the salmon disease lab, as I have done volunteer work back home with salmon. This lab was way bigger than the one I am used to! I also volunteered at DaVinci Days which was super fun, though at times I felt like I wasn’t completely prepared to explain the multitude of props at the tables. But we made it work, and people really seemed to like the watershed model.

I’m sure you’re dying to hear about my last week in Tillamook after the crazy day we had on Wednesday (see my Misadventures post…). So here we go.

After 7 full days of diving in Tillamook bay over the past 2 weeks we completed 89 sites – almost 20 more than we initially set out to complete. I think this is because the divers we have are extremely efficient and have experience diving in a variety of conditions. Even with a very strong incoming tide, they said it wasn’t a problem to continue working.
Because of our rapid completion of sites, Tony (my mentor, and the project leader) and Stacy decided to add extra points to sample. We went up from 200 sites to ~240 sites to sample for the entire field season. They did this in order to maximize the data we are able to collect with the divers. The way the contract works, we are allowed to dive for a total of 20 days – and that is all. So if we move quickly it is better to use our extra time to sample more sites and get more data.
After the NOAA dive days, the rest of us have also gotten very efficient at setting/pulling anchors and sorting the samples that the divers bring up for us.  One interesting thing about the dives was the diversity of sediment type in the channels. There were spots with lots of broken shell fragments (shell hash), coarse sand, eelgrass, and woody debris. Generally the locations with eelgrass and shell hash had the most amount of clams – we often had 2 full bags of unsorted material plus a bag half full of clams that were hand picked by the divers. The coarse sandy areas had few to no clams, and woody debris generally had a few small clams and crabs. At the end of the day we often had literally hundreds of clams to measure. Fortunately between the 6 of us it would usually take no more than an hour and a half to get them all weighed and measured.

Today we also got to watch a video of the divers working with the dredge from Tillamook. Tony recently bought a wide angle, low-light, underwater video camera to give to the divers so we can watch how they use the dredge equipment and help them fix any problems if necessary. It was really neat to see them pulling all the clams out of the sediment but I can’t imagine how difficult it  must have be to dive down there. Even with the low-light camera it was really murky!

Here’s picture of a bucket full of clams (one day we had about 5 buckets full) and a picture of a bag that had been sorted (notice the red rock crab!).

Now that i’m back in Newport, you would think that we’d be done with this diving stuff. But not so fast! If you think back a few weeks to the NOAA dive, you might recall that we were unable to finish all of our sites. So this week we will be back out in the Yaquina to finish up our work here. After that we will have a few office days to catch up with all the data entry that has stacked up from the last few weeks. And after that is intertidal dredging! But I will have to explain all that in a future post.

 

Good news and new projects

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This week we found out that Stephen’s “Ask a Scientist” column for Oregon Coast Magazine was accepted, which is fantastic. A regular column in the bimonthly magazine will be a great way to get the OSG name out.

Aside from that, this week was mostly filled with more work for the website and the start of a new project. I’ll be making a couple of videos in the next five weeks. The first will be a two-to-three minute piece about graduate research opportunities available in marine science departments at OSU, and the second (hopefully) will be a piece with the OSG interns and the work they have done creating the new free-choice learning wave exhibit at HMSC. After seeing everyone’s presentations on Friday at the mid-summer check-in, it sounds like the group is excited about the work they have done and I feel like a media piece will be a neat way to bring the concept together. I’m looking forward to working with everyone!

Week 5: Guns and Roses

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This week had a lot of excitement. In addition to the usual docent duties and estuary tours, this week also would be my first week without a day off. Earlier in the month I had promised to cover for Brian so that he could go to a family reunion. This works out well as I am preparing for my big “super weekend” in August.

Originally I was told that i was not going to be working at Da Vinci days on Saturday. However at the last minute I learned that I was in fact going to be manning the SeaGrant booth there.  I frantically emailed Eric Dicky to see if there was anyway that I could still get a room, fortunately there was plenty of room left in Dixon Lodge. Da Vinci days was fun, I worked in the booth from 10AM- 1PM helping with our little watershed and invasive species display. I also helped explain some of the cool artifacts that me and Diana had brought from Hatfield. After my shift was over I met my family in Corvallis and we attended Da Vinci days. I also bumped into my old high-school friend while I was there.

The two most memorable things that happened during the week was the Brown Pelican disturbance of a seabird colony at Yaquina head. People started coming in asking questions about what was going on. We (having only learned about the incident minutes before) attempted to find out as much as we could about it so that we could better answer peoples questions. On Friday an extremely inconsiderate visitor came to the center. The man (in the company of dozens of children also attending the visitor center) was carrying a 40 caliber handgun in a holster on his belt. After consulting my supervisor (and her in turn someone else in charge; and so on) we finally found someone “tall” enough to confront the man. The man finally left. What an unexpected occurrence.

I am looking forward to the long week ahead of me. Hopefully my legos will arrive soon so I can put the finishing touches on my tsunami proof building designs.

 

DaVinci Days and Power Surges…

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What a whirlwind time I’ve had this past week with not only project days, getting ready for DaVinci days, but also just having a 4 day weekend with some work.  My week started off with Aurora still not being as social as Squirt was when he was in the tank, but she still was good during feedings and would come out every so often.  I’m also doing more aquarist work; I got to de-leech more rockfish and check out some awesome animals brought into the Visitor’s Center like huge sand shrimp that are really pale and much larger than anything the aquarists have seen before.    This week, I was also able to work on my wave tank more by putting out new Beach Erosion Challenge signs.  These new signs seem to help a lot and have definitely cut down on the bad behavior while increasing the good behavior and knowledge.  I also helped Nick with his tsunami structures for a bit which was definitely something different, but cool to learn about!

The main thing I loved about my work week was going to DaVinci Days in Corvallis, Oregon.  First, there was the mid-summer check-in where I got to see where everyone else are in their projects.  It was awesome, because everyone is doing something different and everyone’s excited about their projects/ what they’re doing.  I especially like hearing about the differences the people who are doing policy work and others who are in the field all day.  Then came the most awesome part of the week/ weekend…..dun dun dunnnnnnnnn…..DAVINCI DAYS!!!! Oh My Gosh, it was spectacular.  On  Saturday, I volunteered from 1-6pm at the Oregon Sea Grant booth where I talked to various people.  Yet, before that I explored the DaVinci Days park area and watch the parade with all the human powered kinetic structures.  During the morning/ afternoon hours of Saturday I made various clay objects, my own print by etching in plexi-glass my own design and placing ink on it, gel beads, UV bead bracelets, star charts and more.  I also got free Odwalla products such as shakes and energy bars.  I got pretty much every free thing available there as well as did as many free things as I could including clay making and printmaking.

This week is going to be long since i’m working 10 days in a row, but I’m excited for new challenges in the wave energy exhibit and things like POWER SURGES 20 min before closing.  Thus, we have to restart all of the monitors and computer devices in the whole visitor’s center for the 5 people that were left.  It was an interesting task since some of the computer CPU’s are underneath tables, cabinets and hidden away so visitor’s won’t play around with them.I’m definitely becoming even more technologically skilled through this job and I’m excited for more challenges to present themselves.  Bring it on world, let’s test my skills!

Ups and Downs

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One of the things that I am enjoying most about giving the intercept surveys is being able to meet some very fascinating people while I am out in the field. One of the park rangers that I talk to frequently is a retired professor of veterinary medicine who grew up in South Africa. I enjoy hearing about his experiences with marine wildlife in South Africa, because I am hoping to travel there after I graduate. He also has a lot to say about marine reserves and I appreciate his opinions not only because he is very intelligent, but also because he has spent so much time in the area and he can see all the different dimensions to the situation. Another highlight this week was meeting a retired couple who were in the middle of a bicycle trip from Vancouver BC to Mexico, and they had some interesting experiences to share.

I have noticed a trend that an overwhelming number of visitors from out of town support turning Cape Perpetua into a marine reserve. On the other hand, locals tend to have more opinions on how the marine reserves might affect commercial fishing and recreation boating and are weary about how this in turn might affect their local economy. I had my first negative experience with the survey this week when one person, who was clearly against marine reserves, became very angry with me in the middle of the survey. This person misunderstood my role in the process and thought that the areas were going to be set aside so that students like me could do research on them. He began questioning my credentials, asking what I was studying and personally blaming me for the program. I just did as Melissa had trained me to do and explained that had no opinion on the matter and I am an just an intern who is trying to gather opinions. It also helps if I mention that I work for Sea Grant, because Sea Grant is not actually responsible for the implementation of the reserves like ODFW is. This method seemed to work and my interviewee started to feel bad and explained to me his back story about why he felt so strongly about the situation. I was pretty angry for having been slightly personally attacked after that survey, but when I stopped to think about it, I realized that as my sample size increases I am bound to get the occasional rude person so I am glad that I was able to practice dealing with it.

Next week will be my last week at Cape Perpetua and on Tuesday I am heading to Cascade Head with my mentor to stake out the best spots to do pressure counts, which I will start in August!

 

Gaining Momentum

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As I predicted, progress towards a finalized list of attendees removed a huge barrier from getting all the other logistics figured out, but I found out that the ‘barrier’ was actually more of a dam. This week, I’ve been swinging from conference call to conference call, and from one email deluge to another.  I even set up my own ‘logistics’ conference call, which included sending out the meeting poll, deciding on a time, and writing up a meeting agenda- All on my own! (commence back-patting). This doesn’t sound like much, but for me at least, speaking up on a conference call can be almost as intimidating as any other public speech. This was especially evident after I could barely squeak out my name during the introductions round at a 60+ participant regional tsunami marine debris update call last week.  So I’ve made quick progress, from name-squeaking, to leading a call with the NOAA coordinators in DC, representatives from USFWS, among others. This call also turned out to be crucial for getting the next few weeks tasks in order as we decided what to do with “no-response” invitees, listservs, travel reimbursement protocols, and tracking information among the different agencies involved.

The workshop is shaping up to be pretty interesting, initially it was designed to be a small event, with around 20 participants, and on my last count we have 69 confirmed attendees. Because of the size, the workshop structure is becoming increasingly complex, including 6 breakout sessions where different combinations of scientists, communicators, and people representing levels of response and management can discuss and contribute to workshop items. Another one of my tasks is to make sure we have people to lead (facilitate) these sessions, but also different people to take notes on the discussions and conclusions made in each session. Since we are only just deciding on exactly how many breakout groups there will be, combined with the fact that facilitators and note-takers need to be relatively neutral, and generally non-participants, I’m caught in a bit of a scramble to recruit people to these roles. It was even suggested on my call yesterday that I myself might facilitate one of the sessions (just when I thought conference calls were scary…)