Category Archives: Former scholars

Wave tank extravaganza!

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Who knew that my wave tank would cause such chaos?!? This past week we opened up the erosion wave tank to the public with certain items such as large rocks to represent rip rap, bags of gravel to represent dynamic reventment, plastic vegetation, legos to represent a seawall.  There were also a small squeegee to design the sand with and to move the sand from one end of the tank to the other end.  I wasn’t sure if we should open it to the public yet because there weren’t any signs around or directions really and there weren’t any containers for the objects.  In addition, 2 school groups with 20 kids each ranging from 1st graders to 6th graders were going to use the tank when it first opened.  Oh Man, it was crazy!!! Kids were created such imaginative things in the sand that I wouldn’t even be able to think of it.  Their minds were amazing and I was happy I got to see them at work.   I was a lurker this past week to see how different people used the tank and I got some great feedback and notes on it.  Overall, this past week I’ve been working at the front desk and touch tank most of the day while doing estuary tours and the Ocean Quest presentation.  One of the main fun things I did was go to the Volunteer and Staff picnic where I got to talk to volunteers and staff a like in a more casual setting with good food and good conversation.  I had a blast and got some terrific leftovers like awesome tuna stakes and hamburgers plus dessert.

It looks like Aurora the octopus is adjusting to the tank in the visitor’s center.  She is showing small signs of stress.  We have her shrouded and in the dark to try and help her but it makes it hard for the visitor’s that come specifically to see the octopus or feeding it.  We had to cancel the feeding this past Saturday which upset some people, but most understand that Aurora is a live animal, not our pet.  Hopefully we can help her and make her feel more at home :)

Tomorrow, I will be thoroughly working on my wave tank.  I’m gonna try some new methods with the tank like putting in new ramps to distribute the sand or new toys that will be more durable in the tank for kids of all ages.  I  went to the Lincoln county festival and it wasn’t too shabby.  I got some good fair food, saw a few animals and rode a few rides.  Overall, for the $5 admission fee, it was worth it.  Also, I got sleep in on my weekend (Wednesdays and Thursdays) as well as go to seal rock and the historic bayfront of Newport.  My next stop at the Bayfront will be local ocean, because I love seafood and I hear it’s the place to go.

Week 4 – Giant Pacific Octopus, and gearing up for planning session

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This week I was actually on vacation most of the time. I took my kids to Seattle with various stops on the way up and back.  One gem that I originally didn’t think was going to be that amazing was the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville Oregon.  They have the actual Spruce Goose!  It was HUGE.  We even got to go up into the cockpit which I found quite exciting, and my 4-year-old did too until we had to go back down the skinny, steep stairs.  I have a post on BioGeoNerd.blogspot.com about the places we went to if you’d like to hear more about it (and see pictures which I should have up by Monday I hope).

I worked in the visitor center today for part of the day, helping to open and close.  Aurora, the Giant Pacific Octopus who was moved to the front this week, was having a hard day and had the shades put up all around the tank. I hope she will be okay soon. It must be scary to be in such a new place with all these people staring at you. The octopus is really the central exhibit for the VC. Not only is it literally in the center, but many people come mainly to see the octopus. Naturally, they were rather disappointed. I think also the fact that the octopus at the aquarium across the street is always hiding in a dark corner and the exhibit itself is in a dark corner, probably draws people to Hatfield even more. Here they can (usually) get a much better look at this beautiful animal.

I opted not to go to the volunteer barbecue which I’m sure I’ll regret but I had a ton of laundry to do and wanted to catch up on some research after being gone most of the week.

This coming Monday I will have the chance to meet with my mentor Nancee Hunter as well as Shawn Rowe and Mark Farley to go over the plans for the Climate Change exhibit. It’s my opportunity to present the things I’ve researched and then, as a team, we’ll discuss the desired direction of the exhibit. I’m looking forward to working with these great people and getting their feedback and ideas. It will be great to have some concrete direction on the exhibit. I look forward to sharing the valuable information I’ve gathered and fully participating as a member of this team.
I’m gaining a cornucopia of experiences on this internship and I will walk away from this summer having made great connections and refined my skills in teamwork, creativity, organization, interpretation, presentation, and more.

Let me tell you a bit about presenting

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WEEK 3 and the VC is running about as smoothly as it possible could considering we are implementing a state of the art wave tank for the public.  Much of the week was spent brainstorming ways to create an erosion exhibit friendly to both children, adults, and grandparents.  The idea is that the public will create their own erodible beach and see how different structures on the beach are affected by waves.  We are playing around with miniature jetties, trees, dynamic revetment, etc.  It’s all pretty fun and nearly all of Tuesday was spent playing with sand and Legos.  Not to shabby of a day if you ask me.

Our new octopus, Aurora, was moved from the back to the front tank on Sunday.  Pearl was released because she laid a couple thousand eggs.  Normally octopuses stop feeding after the lay eggs but that wasn’t the case with Pearl.  The aquarist and the vet decided because she kept feeding she would still be a reproductively viable female in the wild.  Aurora spent much of Sunday exploring the much larger tank in the VC.  It was really fun to the curiosity get the best of her.  She was playing around with the anemones and quickly found out they sting.  Today the aquarist turned off the lights above the tank and put a shade on one side of the tank to give her a break from the public and allow her to acclimate to the environment.

The most interesting part of work right now is Ocean Quest, our 30 minute presentation on deep sea volcanism off the Oregon Coast.  The powerpoint has been a work in progress…first we have to learn about this stuff, then present it, and finally reevaluate to see what parts of effective and which are not.  We worked out a lot of the kinks with the initial powerpoint and now have one that is more relatable to people of all ages.  The most valuable lesson learned this week: know your presentation before you give it.

Week 3: Happy 4th!

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Well first of all, happy belated Fourth of July! This past week I spent time further analyzing the data from the first run through of the experiment, while also doing all the preparation necessary to start it up again. Interestingly, a test used to more accurately measure chlorophyll (a different test from the initial results) showed less confidence in our data set. As a consequence we have decided to add another replicate to each treatment. For those keeping track at home, the math now changes to 4 x 4 x4 or 64 bottles floating around in our little mesocosms. I won’t bore you with the details, but this significantly adds to the work involved in running the experiment.

I promised last week to discuss the consequences of nutrient limitations in estuaries, so lets delve into that a bit. Nutrient limitations of phytoplankton are an interesting topic of discussion. You may have heard about two relatively popular topics in the media related to these ideas. These are iron fertilization and the dreaded “dead zones.” These topics show the potential benefits of understanding nutrient limitation, and also the potential for havoc. They are two sides of the same coin. Iron fertilization seeks to enhance phytoplankton blooms in an under productive area of the ocean in an attempt to remove carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In these areas, iron is largely seen as the limiting nutrient. “Dead zones” in contrast to the less productive open ocean, usually occur in the productive areas and result in eutrophication. Eutrophication is the direct result of an abundance of the nutrients in a system. These nutrients may come from natural processes like upwelling events and nitrogen fixers, but also from human wastes. These nutrients, in contrast with the iron limited open ocean, are largely nitrogen and phosphorous. Eutrophication decreases the available dissolved oxygen in the water as an abundance of phytoplankton bloom and ultimately die like all life on earth. This decrease in available oxygen is the reason for the term “dead zone.” As you can imagine, a decrease in available oxygen is undesirable for marine ecosystems.

So what does all this mean for Oregon’s estuaries? Well, if out of our 64 bottles a treatment shows a significant response for say phosphorous or “P”, we know that region is phosphorous limited. For an agency like the EPA, this directly translates into tools for management and policy. My advisor is  working on tools for scientists from states throughout the country to be able to identify conditions in which nutrient limitations may be a factor. Regulations may also be crafted to prevent phosphorous wastes in fertilizers and other sources from polluting aquatic systems and ultimately harming species by depleting the available oxygen.  And so, while I spend my hours of the day pulling bottles out of a tank and doing science on them, I can take pride in knowing that yes, this matters. Alrighty, that’s all for this week. Stay tuned for next week in which I may have some more results from the experiment! Here’s hoping for clarity!

Workshop Happenings

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This last week planning for the upcoming workshop really took off. I soon found out how easy it is to miss an important message or reply in a string of 20 emails, and how complicated collaborating and communicating with people across the U.S. can be.

I spent the first part of the week catching up on the last week’s email communication and keeping my eye on any emerging tsunami marine debris/invasive information, mostly because the entire steering committee still wanted to wait on any word from D.C. about the proposal. As confirmation about its acceptance filtered through, plans to get the formal invites out began.

The second half of my week I worked remotely with a Knauss Sea Grant fellow on amending the invite list, and then with others to draft an invite letter and modify it according to the steering committee’s wishes. After a conference call to nail down some important details, I began work personalizing each of the invites (some 90!). The hope here was to reduce transmission of invite letter around to other non-invitees, simply because while interest in this topic is high, a productive workshop cannot be held with hundreds of people trying to contribute.

The invites are due to go out early this week, and then work keeping track of RSVPs will begin, as well as figuring out the best ways to compensate participants for travel, and also allocate funds for facilities, refreshments, AV equipment, and more!

How to weigh and measure a gaper clam

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After spending 3 days this week digging up gaper clams (Tresus capax) to weigh and measure, I’d like to think I’m an expert. So here’s a how-to for what I was doing most of the week!

Step 1: Find your clam! Gapers have fairly large siphon holes and you can feel their siphon retract when you stick your finger in the hole (also called a show). They can be found in sandy areas about halfway down the tideflat.

Step 2: Dig it up! Gapers are one of the hardest clams to dig up because the actual clam body is found deep under the sand, sometimes over 2 feet under. My team used a combination of shovels, shrimp guns, and hand digging to get them out. But be careful! Their shells are surprisingly fragile.

Step 3: Measure them! We take a length and a width measurement of the gapers. For length, you start at the siphon edge (the flat edge of the shell on the left in this picture) and travel across the valve (single shell; clams are bivalves, meaning “two shells”) to the longest point. For width, you place the calipers over the umbo – the raised portion where the two valves connect, on the top in the photo- and measure across the widest spot. Finally, you weigh them on a scale.

Easy, yeah? But it’s not as exciting when you have 50+ clams a day to measure, and you don’t even get to eat them.

You are probably curious why we are doing all this digging and measuring in the first place. We want to determine the size/weight distribution of gapers in the Yaquina. We dug up clams in the sand flat under the bridge (Bridge Flat) and the sand/mud flat behind the Hatfield EPA office (Idaho Flat). We noticed right away that there were a lot more gapers in Bridge Flat, but they were smaller than the ones we found in Idaho Flat.

After we were done with the clams, we gave them to a food share here in Newport so they can be eaten by those in need. I was really surprised and happy to see this, as I have a personal interest in our nations food system. There is a lot of food that gets wasted in our country, especially in scientific experiments where things are often frozen and thawed and thus cannot be used for food. I didn’t specifically ask why we couldn’t return them to the bay, but I think it is because these clams live so deep and they wouldn’t be able to dig back down before getting eaten/harmed.

As far as adventurers in Oregon, we had quite a week with the holiday! We had a wonderful potluck on Wednesday and I brought some homemade berry pie. This weekend I rode my bike over the bridge with Kate to the farmers market and then went surfing this afternoon with Hilary and another intern, Liz.

The next 2 weeks at work will be very long, so I apologize in advance if I post at a strange time. I will be doing subtidal dredge work (like last week) in Tillamook from Tuesday to Friday, and again Sunday to Thursday of next week. It will be quite an adventure I think!

Also, because we can’t go “picture crazy” here, I made a separate blog so I can post as many pictures as I want. check it out!  http://travelingtegula.blogspot.com/

 

Until next week, stay classy Oregon Sea Grant…

 

Difficulties of Experiments in the Field

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This past week we traveled to Salmon River again and to Siletz Bay for more testing on the nutrient uptake project. I chose to work on the chambers placed in the channel at Salmon River and we were surprised to find shortly into our experiment that the tide was coming in fast. Apparently the low low tides we’ve been having also come with high high tides. The experiment takes one hour so we hurried to get the clock rolling. Near the end, however, water was close to pouring over the top of the chamber, but we managed one more water sample before it all was ruined.

We’ve also looked at the results from our first two days of experiments testing the effects of temperature and nitrogen to phosphorous ratio on nutrient uptake of the harsh marsh behind the aquarium. In previous experiments, our graphs for nitrogen content in our water samples have a set height at time zero, indicating the amount we know we put in, and a lower bar at time sixty minutes, indicating the marsh plants have taken up nitrogen. We were surprised to find in our first day of these new experiments that some of the treatments were gaining nitrogen as time progressed. These odd results were sporadic throughout the treatments and the second day showed none of these oddities.

While discussing these results with my mentor, I mentioned that on the first day there was some dog poop on the path to our study location. One of my coworkers stepped in it and he put his foot on the boards we used to pound the chamber in. Everything stunk after that as the poop clung to the boards. My theory was that some of the poop may have fallen in and gradually leeched into the water. My mentor then said, “So all this data from the first day is sh*t.” I replied, “Yes, literally.” Who knows? But the moral of the story is that we cannot use that data.

Next week we do more replicates for our experiments and we have an overnight trip to Coquille, which is three hours away and we need to time the tides right. I feel like all the logistics will be a challenge for this trip. There will be two field days in a row and we have to keep the water cold for the second day, so we’ll need 8 large coolers with ice. It should be interesting.

Celebrating the 4th in Newport was enjoyable. We looked at the tide pools in the morning, and then I went clamming with my roommates Hilary and Maryna, and managed to dig up…one! Maryna is very good at it, though. Sticking my hand into a dark hole of mud to find a squirmy, shelled creature is a little scary to me. I must be more brave!

New Octopus and Movie!

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You know when an announcer talks over the PA system at a grocery store or department store and you ask yourself, “What’s she saying?…Huh?”…That’s what I feel like.  I talk on the PA system quite a bit and for many different reasons.  To announce the estuary walk, ocean quest as well as movies. All of these announcements have made my voice become scratchy as well as highly known to the Visitor’s center staff.  At least the other staff members say they can hear me loud and clear on the PA system and quite like it.  Even with all the ocean quest presentations, estuary walks and announcements, the newest and coolest thing that occurred this week was the new octopus being put in.  First of all, Aurora (new octopus) is very friendly and moves around the tank quite a bit.  Also, moving all the sea creatures that live in the tank with her like sea anemones and sea stars needed to be taken out and the tank cleaned; that job is a huge deal in itself.  Squirt will be put back into the visitor’s center tank in 3 weeks, so for now our lovely aurora will be on displey.

Overall, I learned so much this week including different ways to give the estuary tour, how to present Ocean Quest, and a delicate way to tell people that they have misidentified a sea creature such as that sunflower sea star is not an octopus.  I love that I keep learning more and more about how to be an aquarist and what goes on in the sea creature tanks as well as what goes on behind the scenes.  Challenges come up all the time since I know less about the state of Oregon and some of the marine like here than the volunteers, but overcoming them is becoming easier and easier as time goes on.

I’m really excited that I found someone living at Hatfield who also has Wednesdays and Thursdays as their weekend and has a car.  That way I can do more new things such as sand dune surfing, scuba diving, going to Tillamook and various other things.  Also, it’s awesome that she plays rugby, that way I can  have more rugby talks with someone here.  I am exited to be planning my 4 day trip that includes 2 days in Vancouver, Canada and 2 days in Seattle, Washington.  It’s not until mid-August, but I still cannot wait.  For the Visitor’s center, the only knew things for me will be working more and more on my section of the wave energy tanks and trying to feed our new octopus.

My section of wave energy is about how it effects erosion on sandy shorelines.  I’m really excited because we got brand new sand that works really well in the tank, new items to put in the tank such as mesh bags with gravel to show dynamic reventment and rocks to simulate riprack.  My advisers love my ideas so far and my enthusiasm for my project.  The visitor’s center is supposed to open it up to the public next week, but we’ll see how it goes.  Sometimes water, toys, sand and kids don’t mix.  Yet, I have the highest of hopes for it and have more ideas to put towards it.  Lego’s, plastic plants, rocks, sand, blocks and other fun things get put in my tank and so far it’s working out well.  Even if my project is not totally ready, I still want kids to be able to try it out, because it’s one thing for 20-40 year old to love it, will a 10 year old? Also, will that 10 year old understand what it’s supposed to show? Children are the future and should be treated as such, thus I need to make sure my project is fun, informational and child-proof…looks like I’ve got some work ahead of me! Wish me luck!!!!

The Amazing Adventures of Nicholas Pitz (week 3 blog)

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On Tuesday we started giving the “Ocean Quest” multimedia presentation in the visitor center. Some of the sciences of the presentation seemed to go over the heads of some of the younger people present and needless to say that the number of people present in the auditorium was much higher at the beginning of the presentation than it was at the end. For the rest of the day we helped to work on Diana Roman’s project on shore erosion (in one of our new wave tanks). We removed the sand from the tank (which was clouding up the water) and replaced it with plastic pellets.

Wednesday was the 4th of July. For the occasion I wore a little British Union Jack button. I also gave an estuary tour on that day. Several of the people on the tour desperately wanted to see a small crab. I spent about 5 minutes chasing a good sized Purple Shore crab through the rocks in our salt water stream. When I finally caught him, he pinched me on the finger; ouch! Finally i just picked him up in my hat, that seemed to be amusing enough for the people. Around noon some strange person came into the visitor center and started asking us about the possibility of “artificially creating hurricanes in order to reflect more sun light in an effort to combat climate change”. We told him that that might be a tiny bit problematic but that we would be sure to ask an expert about.

On Thursday we did another ocean quest presentation. Fewer people left this time and I sat in the audience and took notes on the presentation so that we might find ways of improving it. I offered to do the estuary walk a second day in a row. This time I was able to keep the crowd busy the entire time by letting them play with the shrimp slurped out on the mud flats.

On Friday we got to work on our wave tanks again. Some of the calculations that we had been playing with in the previous week for the Tsunami tank were entered into the computer. Now the wave tank would not splash as much. We gave another Ocean Quest Presentation as well. I think that they are starting to get better but we still have a few bugs that we need to work out, such as getting more exciting videos of volcanic eruptions.

Saturday was my last day. We did yet another ocean quest presentation and an estuary tour. I had forgotten to eat breakfast that day so i ran into the gift shop and bought some “Astronaut Ice cream.” It was interesting to say the least, I don’t know how they figure that its ice cream though. The day was nearly as busy as the fourth of July had been. It finally winded down by 4:00. During the day instead of showing one long film (like Blue Planet) we decided that it would be better to “control the crowds”. When we locked up for the day we discovered that a family was missing their daughter. After a 5 minute search she was found hiding in the Woman’s restroom. Crisis averted.