Category Archives: Former scholars

Misadventures in Tillamook

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Yes, it’s Wednesday – not the usual time for a new post from all us scholars. But today was such a strange day that I felt that it needed it’s own post.

As I mentioned Monday, I’m up in Tillamook Bay doing subtidal clam surveys. Today was a good lesson in what to do when things go wrong.

Some questions that were answered today:

What do you do when the divers’ communicators stop working?
What do you do when the dredge doesn’t sink to the bottom due to a high current?
What do you do when your anchors don’t set because the current is strong?
What do you do when the dive boat suddenly won’t turn on?

and finally,

What do you do when your boat starts taking on water?

Let’s tackle that last one first. Fortunately no one was hurt or got wet, but it was quite a scene. I was on the dredge boat, handing bags to the divers so they could begin our next sample when suddenly we got a call on the radio.

“Hey guys… I mean, Sax to Tresus” (Chase boat)
“Hi ladies, what’s up?” (Stacy, the assistant project leader for SEACOR)
“An anchor pulled out our boat plug and we are taking on water. We are going to the marina.” (Chase boat)

… Panic. Everyone on the dredge boat turned around and we saw our chase boat (the one that sets anchors and point buoys all day), the Saxidomus, speeding away toward the marina.  We then learned that even with their bilge on, one person was still rapidly bailing out water.
While on the radio, Stacy ran through a list of options out loud for them. 1) Could they get the boat trailer in time to get the boat out of the water? – no, they were taking on too much too fast 2) Run the boat aground into the boat launch ramp – the bottom will get scraped up, but as long as the motor and prop is lifted the hull should be okay 3) run onto a mudflat – but it’s hightide and there aren’t many easily available. 4) the divers offered to fix the boat plug, something we hadn’t even considered, but by then the Sax was too far away to be helped by us.
Luckily, the ladies on the Sax had the same idea and went straight to the launch ramp. They had considered the other options as well, but were not positive it was a missing boat plug that was causing the flood of water and wanted to get to shallow ground ASAP.
About 5 minutes later we heard back that everything was okay. Whew. It was a missing boat plug afterall and Natalie was able to reach over the back of the boat and stick one in after getting to the safety of shallow ground.

Comparatively, the rest of our problems today were minor, though they seemed important at the time. The divers ended up pulling on a rope line to signal us; we got the dive boat working and didn’t turn the engine off until we were completely done for the day; we added extra hose and line to the dredge, which added enough weight and length for it to sink down to the bottom; and we had to be extremely conscious of how our anchors were set in the current so as to ensure our boat would not drift while the divers were below us.

All in all, an interesting day. Happy Wednesday, and look out for part 2 of my adventures in Tillamook this coming Monday.

Dialing it in

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Among the myriad duties we have at the Visitor Center, the one giving us the most trouble has definitely been Ocean Quest.  Ocean Quest is our 30 minute presentation about underwater volcanoes off the Oregon Coast given to the public every day at 1:30.  Our mentor Bill gave us a “first draft” of the presentation the first week we were working but we werent expected to present until a few weeks ago when we were more comfortable with the material.  At this point we are all pretty comfortable with the material but the challenge has been relating it to an audience of kids, adults, and grandparents.  Our latest move was to cut about 10 slides out of the show that contained material a little too abstract for everyone to understand.  The newer version still goes around 30 minutes and we are able to spend a little more time explaining tricky slides.  Last week I did quite a few of the Ocean Quest presentations and I feel as if I dialed it down a bit more and found ways to make it a little more interesting and relatable.

Adventures in Tillamook, Part 1

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Greetings from Tillamook!

This past week has been quite an experience, to say the least. Remember a few weeks back when I spent 2 days doing subtidal dredge surveys in Yaquina bay around the NOAA dock? Well, I did the same thing in Tillamook Bay this week and I will be continuing for all of this week as well.

While the basic dredge idea is the same as before, we have different divers this time and A LOT more clams. It is a tad ridiculous how many clams we have, actually. Unfortunately we have been too busy on the boats to take many pictures, but I will try to get some this week.

We are doing this subtidal dredge survey to try and get an estimate of clam populations in Tillamook Bay. The SEACOR team has done intertidal population studies for the last 2 summers, and this is the first time they are doing a subtidal study. The recreational clam population was studied back in the 1970s, 1980s, and a general study was done in 1996. This provides us with the unique opportunity of tracking changes in the populations across decades. Its unfortunate I wont be around when the data is analyzed! But I am having a blast getting to see the wide variety of clams in the bay.

Luckily this time around I don’t have to pull up all our point markers and anchors by hand – we bought a pot puller to do most of the hard work for us. This is making a huge difference in my energy level, which is good because we have been averaging 10 hours out on the boat per day. Add on another hour or two measuring all the clams we got and that makes for a very long day, and week!

I spent my one full day off this weekend at the Oregon Country Fair. A huge group from Hatfield went and we had a blast! I really loved seeing all the people dressed up and all the craft booths.

Right after I got back from the fair I went straight back to Tillamook and I will be here until Thursday, so stay tuned next week for part 2!

Week 4: Phytoplankton Limitation Experiment 2

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Ahhh another week, another experiment! The joys of science! This past week we again collected water from our same four sites throughout the estuary. Having mastered, or at least improved, our procedures and techniques for the experiment we were looking to clarify some of the results from our first run through. As you may or may not recall, our first week suggested that the OSU had a significant response to the “+N” and “N+P” treatments, suggesting nitrogen limitation. While the sites further upstream tended to show “P” limitation, with Elk City showing some variability. These are all results we were looking to clarify. Would OSU still be nitrogen limited? Or had we sampled during a period of weak upwelling? Would Elk City and the sites up river have a clearer response?

As we progressed through the week, and hadn’t had many answers to these questions, we began to grow a little nervous. 3-4 days of results from the mesocosms weren’t providing many answers. This seems to be how these nutrient limitation experiments go, as often times there are fews signs that point to limitation, and then all of a sudden a huge response. This is difficult to account for as the week comes to a close, and the difficult decision of whether working on a weekend will produce results needs to made, as it could be that no response is the actual result. This week we decided to go for it and see if Saturday would give us the breakthrough we were hoping for.

It turned out that Saturday was largely a success. We determined that there was in fact a significant “P” and “N+P” at Elk City. Cannon Quarry showed similar results, but with more variability in the “N+P” treatments. Toledo also showed significant responses for these two treatments. As for OSU? Less clarity than had been hoped for. The week’s data trends point to “P” limitation as opposed to the “N” limitation that initially occurred, perhaps indicating stronger summer upwelling. However, there is fairly large variability in the “P” and “N+P” treatments, meaning the statistics are throwing a wrench in our quest for results! There may be bright spot though, as  our chlorophyll extractions could provide clearer, more accurate results. This is a big maybe though. We seemed to have some problems with severe degradation in our samples during the first run through, so hopefully those problems magically disappeared! We were quite puzzled as to how it could have happened. And so with that sense of bewilderment fresh in your mind, I will again leave you in suspense! Tune in next week for the results of the chlorophyll extractions! Will the mysterious source of degradation strike again? Or will the chlorophyll respond to my careful, sweet nurturing? Until then! Good night and good luck!

 

 

Writing and Resumes

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The highlight of this week was meeting with Robert Allan, the director of student development at CEOAS. (Some of you may remember him as the man who met with us briefly at Bombs Away during our orientation.) Robert is amazing. I first met with him the previous week for a brief professional development consultation. I had no idea what a professional development consultation was at the time, but I ended up learning quite a bit—hence, the second meeting.

During the meetings we discussed post-college options such as graduate school and employment. Robert had a lot of insight about where to find resources and information that I most likely otherwise would never have known. We also reviewed my resume and made some changes to the structure and vocabulary that I think will give it more of a “wow” factor and better represent the skills I have to offer. If you want to know about the science of resume writing, Robert is the man. While working with him, I quickly found that not only is he good at what he does—but he loves his job. Robert’s communication skills are terrific, which makes him easy to talk to, and his enthusiasm is contagious. I recommend that anyone who can make the time meet with him.

Flying By!

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As the July 31st date for the workshop looms ahead, Stephen and I spent the last week trying to balance getting everything done that can be done, without getting ahead of ourselves.  I realized this week  that event planning like this can be verrry circular. This is because there’s a laundry list of things that need to be done (reservations, finalizing the agenda, sending out information on listservs, catering orders, etc), but at some point they are become interdependent and, this week everything was mostly dependent on the list of attendees. We set a registration deadline for July 13th (last Friday) but as I scan my email inbox, I can already tell responses to our invites are still filtering in, slowly but surely. It will take a certain amount of faith for sure, to start dividing those confirmed into breakout groups, and make decisions about seating, coffee, materials, etc when just over 50% of invited people sent responses back. An interesting obstacle to this planning process is the dissemination of information;  it appears that sometimes that because of the number of agencies involved and communications about AIS(Aquatic Invasive Species)/marine debris, I can easily be left out of the loop about who actually will be attending. Often, confirmation of attendance has come to me from someone else, or in an email chain forwarded to me.

Now as the registration process comes to a close, we finally can do all of the things that depended on it. I have a feeling that first on my list will be to go through the list of those requesting travel support, and open up a discussion with the steering committee and Oregon Sea Grant’s fiscal officer, Melissa Metz, about the status of funds and who we can afford to send to the workshop. It might be a little but of a scramble getting there, but I’m excited for the workshop and to see my efforts come to fruition!

The Ground is Thirsty!

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It is currently raining/misting here in Newport. It is strange to me that just a few hours ago I was in nearly cloudless, sunny weather in the valley. We drove from near Eugene to Newport from the Oregon Country Fair and from Corvallis we could see the clouds layered over the hills as we drove toward them. Such are the drastic weather differences on the coast vs. the valley. Yesterday I also experienced my first heat of the summer at the Fair (mid-80s) and got to see thousands of very interesting people. This fair is known for its eccentricity. There was also great music, food, dancing, and lectures. I heard part of a talk by the author of a book called Biology of Belief whose talk went from discussing Native Americans to religion to the House of Representatives to the Higgs Boson to support his ultimate point…but I had to leave before I could hear it. I may look into the book sometime.

My work has also been going well this week. It has been very busy with the overnight trip to Bandon to do our experiments in the Coquille estuary. The logistics were complicated as I had expected. We had tons of water to keep cool and samples to keep frozen and equipment to wash outside of the comforts and convenience of our home laboratory. But we were flexible and it all worked out in the end.

One problem we are having is the water in some of our chambers is draining before the hour can be completed. To get a realistic representation of the rate of nutrient flux in these marsh habitats we need the water to stay around, but the ground drinks it up too fast. We had this problem at Coquille where the sediment was very sandy and we are having the problem in our projects at the Aquarium Marsh where the marsh is high and rarely gets wet by the tide, so it less saturated with water already. It is frustrating as a lot of work goes into preparing to go into the field, getting to the sites, setting up the experiments, cleaning up from the experiments, and analyzing the data, and sometimes we get nothing for all our efforts. For instance, on Monday 5 of 6 chambers drained early. Our final sample ends up getting taken with only a centimeter left of water and we take up part of the sediment, which is probably leading to the strange results I discussed last week.

Knowing that hard work is not always leading to results is difficult, but such is the nature of research and often life in general. Our lab group is still pushing forward, though. We plan to try a different instrument next week to analyze nitrogen amounts and we may try staying lower in the high marsh to where the soil may be more saturated. Next week we carry out more experiments and I think we are going to the Nestucca estuary. Friday is also the mid-summer check-in with the Oregon Sea Grant. It’s amazing how fast the time has gone by!

Week 4: The true meaning of Glory

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On Monday (my day off) I spent a few hours helping out with a “fish cutting party” that was be hosted in the NOAA building.

On Tuesday the aquarists took nearly all of the steelhead out of the “Open ocean” exhibit to see if that would stop the herring mortality’s. There has not been a herring mortality since then. We mostly worked on our projects that day and finally opened one of the wave tanks (the erosion tank) to the public. The exhibit seems to be quite popular. I got the idea for testing how a large sand dune might be able to dampen the effect of a tsunami. To test this i created an artificial sand dune (made of 50% sand and 50% glue) that i plan to coat with a varnish (for water proofness) for the tank.

On Wednesday I did an estuary walk at 11AM and later me and Brian tag teamed the Ocean Quest presentation. I also got to spend a lot of time manning the touch tank on Wednesday. We also attempted to get a video that i had downloaded (of Mt. St Helen’s erupting) to run on the ocean quest. For some reason it runs so slow that it just looks like a still picture (oh well). The day before we switched Squirt (our octopus) with Aurora. Aurora is much more shy than Squirt was and seems to be having trouble acclimating.

On Thursday I did another estuary walk . Later on i talked to mark about some of the building materials that i would like to have (ie. legos) for the tsunami tank and if there was a good place in town to buy them in bulk. Instead he just told me that i could buy whatever i needed off of the Lego website as long as I kept it under $100 (Alright). The tsunami tank has recently been having endless computer glitches that we are still trying to work out.

On Friday I did my first solo ocean quest. Fortunately (or unfortunately) only two people showed up for it.  Aurora finally came out from hiding in the corner (which was exciting for people) and explored the rest of the tank. The erosion tank while popular as proven to cause quite a mess when kids end up spilling sand and water on the floor. We are think of making some modifications to prevent this.  I decided that i did not want to run all the way back to my dorm to get a quick snack so I ended up buying some “astronaut ice cream” from the gift shop (or as what most people refer to it as, “chalk”).

On Saturday I did the estuary walk again in addition to Ocean Quest in exchange for taking a longer lunch break. Saturday was not as busy as it has been in the past (likely due to the county and country fairs). We also had to cover up the octopus tank due to the high amounts of stress that Aurora seemed to be under going. We will probably have to take her off of the exhibit and put Squirt back instead. We were able to get off at 4:15 that day in order to attend a barbecue for all of the visitor center volunteers. Good food, good time.

Surveys!

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This week, I added a new element to my job as I started conducting intercept interviews. These interviews basically consist of me walking up to visitors at the sites where I conduct pressure counts and asking them if they would be willing to take a survey on the place that they are visiting. The survey is very short and has many questions about distance traveled, travel cost, and opinions and general knowledge on marine reserves. Although the survey is very brief, it still allows ODFW to extract a lot of data about the type of people that visit the marine reserves and how they would be affected by the implementation of the reserves. The data can also be further analyzed for impacts on the local economy.

So far I think the surveys have gone much better than I was expecting. I was able to fit in 33 surveys over two days, and I have hardly ever been turned down. It’s so nice to be able to talk to people while I am in the field, and most of all I think it has given me an appreciation for being able to live on the coast this summer, because almost everyone gushes to me how much they love the area and how far they have traveled to enjoy it!  I have even surveyed people from as far away as Germany and France! I also encounter the occasional odd person,which helps make the day more interesting. One man tried to tell me all about his 5,000 year old pinniped tooth that he had found in the area previously and bragged that Cape Perpetua is the most bio-diverse place on the planet…I will have to do some fact-checking on that one haha. Another man lectured me that the marine reserves won’t solve the problem, because the problem is the ethics of the humans species….I just stand there and nod for these conversations.

I now wear a brown ODFW jacket for my job as well, which resulted in my question-load doubling because many people mistake me for a ranger. Luckily, I spend so much time in the area that I feel like I can answer most of the questions! I have learned that creating and conducting surveys for social science is actually very difficult, but luckily my mentor has had a lot of practice so I can avoid a lot of first time mistakes. All of the answers for each questions must be coded numerically so that the data can be quantitatively analyzed. I must also work hard to avoid bias while I am giving the survey, so when people try to have a conversation during the survey or pry me for more answers, I have to keep them focused. I am hoping that I can get in about 100+ surveys during my time at Cape Perpetua to give ODFW a really good idea about how people interact with the areas slated to become marine reserves.

 

Crabs revisited, carpentry, and a BBQ.

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Last week was pretty mellow and represented what one might call “more of the same,” but not in a bad way. In my last blog post I wrote that I was excited to begin my cockle project in earnest this past week. Well, turns out I got my dates mixed up, because that’s actually happening this coming week.

The week started off with some light carpentry work at a storage space in the marina. ODFW will be moving some supplies (boat, crab traps, waders, misc. tools) from one storage garage to another, and we needed to build some shelves to accommodate the gear. It was simple construction involving electric screwdrivers and circular saws and served as a reminder that jobs in fisheries science aren’t always spent in the lab or in the field. It’s important to have a variety of skills in any profession, I think, and be prepared to use them when circumstances demand. The rest of the day and much of Tuesday was spent in front of the computer practicing my GIS and database skills. Scott introduced me to a series of nautical charts from NOAA called S-57 charts. They’re fairly powerful in that dozens of geographic features can be added or eliminated to create a chart that’s suitable to one’s needs. I had to download an add-on for ArcGIS in order to use the charts, and after some initial frustrations was successful in getting it to work.

The rest of the week involved revisiting the Red Rock crab (Cancer productus) life history study. After some exploratory analyses, it was determined that we need more data, so on Wednesday Scott, Jim (another shellfish biologist at ODFW), and I re-deployed the crab traps in Charleston marina in an effort to capture more crabs for tagging. We set 13 traps throughout “A-dock” in the inner boat basin. Thursday and Friday mornings were spent measuring, weighing, and tagging crabs just as we had the previous week. By now I’ve gotten pretty efficient at it, and it’s something I’ve developed a real enjoyment for. I’m very interested to see how the data will pan out towards the end of the year.

On Wednesday one of the biologists brought his grill to work, and we had a cook-out for lunch. Burgers, hot dogs, salad, halibut—all the basic necessities were there. I have to say that I’ve been eating quite well here in Charleston. OIMB employs professional chefs who always produce wonderful feats of culinary creation. I don’t think we’ve had the same thing twice yet. Thumbs up to the meal plan.

This week’s agenda includes urchin sampling and the beginning of my cockle study (for real!). Cockle sampling will occur Wednesday through Friday, and since I will be in Corvallis on Friday for midsummer check-in, Scott says he’ll recruit an extra person to help gather data. Looking forward to more exciting experiences with ODFW. Will hopefully have more photos to share.