Category Archives: Former scholars

Saving Oysters in Oregon – week 8

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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!

Lots and lots of EMAILS!

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Hello again,

I apologize for my second late blog post. I always make a note to do it Monday morning, and then I get caught up with work and it all goes out the window!

Last week was a pretty productive week. I was able to meet with Sher Fenn of Central Web Services and get both the calendar and the news feed up and running. Now the home page of the “OSU Marine Sciences” website looks a lot like the Oregon State home page! On Wednesday (I believe), I attended a meeting with members of Oregon Sea Grant to discuss the current state of funding as well as other projects that are going on. It was fun to be able to see the Sea Grant people from Hatfield on screen during the meeting!

I met with Jenna after the meeting and we discussed what has been done so far, and what remains to be done. We decided that it might be a good idea to add an “Opportunities” tab to the website where we can include research programs offered here at the university (such as the program we are all a part of). I dedicated the rest of the week (as well as this week) to getting in touch with students to potentially feature in the “student researchers” section of the site.

I never knew that emailing could take so much time!!! I spent the end of last week and the beginning of this week just sending emails. I contacted faculty members from all of the colleges and departments represented within the Marine Council, as well as other university representatives to inquire about outstanding undergraduate and graduate students that would be worth featuring on the website. I have created template emails, but I still have at least 100 emails out that I get responses to on a daily basis. Once I get student names, I contact those students (using another template email), and get their information and feature pictures. As I receive this information, I upload it to the website. Sometimes I have had to make edits to students’ text (sometimes people are in a hurry), but for the most part I think this has been an efficient means of going about it. If I rewrite the text myself, I have to get it approved by the student, and more often than not they have a lot of edits for me anyway. I figure it is best not to mix up the details. I just received an email from a faculty member today encouraging me to take a peek at the Marine Biology Option blog posts. Today I plan to check that out and email some of the students that have posted.

As I wait for replies to my emails, I am working on several things. I have been uploading video transcripts to the site (accessibility rules require that transcripts be provided for all embedded videos). I will also be working on the “opportunities” tab mentioned above. When Jenna gets back, I plan to meet with her again to show her my progress. Hopefully I can get all of the student features done this week and be able to move on to the “Academics” tab next week.

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the sun (we haven’t gotten much sun yet this summer!)

Best of luck,

Shealyn

Finally some data!

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Sampling sea grass in Winant Marsh

Phew!  Last week was a well deserved break from all of the field work that I did the week before.  Oddly enough, I was excited for a few days of data entry and acid washing.  So Monday was spent doing just that.  Since I was finished with data entry on Monday, Tuesday I went back to Winant Marsh to help a coworker with sea grass biomass collection to follow up on the flume experiment.  Fortunately that didn’t take too long, so I was able to go back to the office and lab for the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, the processing part of the biomass collection was a bit of a pain.  Wednesday was spent counting and measuring shoots, and scraping blades of sea grass for epiphytes that are living on the plant.  This took all day long and was rather boring, so I was happy to be done with it.

The next day I learned that we received our data from UC Santa Barbara.  We found that we had some rather interesting data.  For a little background, back in April, we ran an experiment to see if changing the nutrient concentration in our artificial sea water affected the ability of the marsh plants to uptake these nutrients.  According to our ISUS data, which we now know is not reliable, this didn’t matter that much.   The UCSB data on the other hand, showed a vastly different uptake rate depending on the amount of nutrients that were given to the plant. This was not good news because from our ISUS data, we relied on the premise that the marsh plants could only take up a certain amount of nutrients at one time regardless of the concentration made available to them.  Alas, this is not the case, we now know that if you give the marsh more nutrient rich water it will compensate for that and increase the rate that it takes up the nutrients.  If this doesn’t through a curve ball in our experiment, I don’t know what does.  Analyzing in this data resulted in us revamping our whole experiment.  Now our new question is to determine what the maximum amount of nutrients that a marsh habitat can absorb as well as what the rate of uptake is depending on the concentration.

After this redirection, we designed an experiment to try to answer this question.  Our new experiment for this week is to deploy three sets of chambers at two locations along the marsh at three different low marsh sites.  We will have four chambers at each site with four different concentrations.  We are hoping that once we get our data back from UCSB, we will be able to roughly estimate an equation for the nutrient uptake rate dependent on concentration.  So, the end of last week was spent preparing for this experiment, while this week will be spent out in the field and in the lab making sure everything runs smoothly.  I feel like now that I’ve finally gotten the hang of things, I now have less than three weeks left.  Nevertheless, it has been a great experience so far and I have learned a lot!

Check out my personal blog to learn about my life outside of EPA here: sarasoregonadventure.blogspot.com

Picture Blog Fail…Guided

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This is (was) a Picture Blog!

This week, I decided to document my week with pictures and screenshots. Yes, I will put captions to describe what each picture means, as some will be screenshots of the documents I have been working on. So hold on tight.

  • Monday… workday! all I got was a screenshot

Monday... Panel content, emailing everybody in the world, and adjusted my timeline

You won’t believe what just happened… I lost my phone, retrieved it today, finding that all of my pictures disappeared. No more picture blog… sad sad sad day.

Tuesday, was a busy day. I finished my text content for the panels and started working with the Steller sea lion bones to find out how big this animal truly is. I am planning on putting these bones (part of them) on the final panel with the life history transmitter tag inside of it to show visitors how it works. I had pictures of this huge skeleton, but they are now in a technological black hole. I also met with the man who will produce the final product when I’m gone (unless somebody…im looking at you OSG… finds some more cash to keep this Puerto Rican around a bit longer). He was very nice and extremely experienced. He once built an entire exhibit by himself, without any previous plans or sketches… that’s art right there. We talked about some ideas for the panel, from which I made some sketches of, and am showing my graphic designer in the near future. That night, I headed out to Portland to hang out with Betty Mujica, and assist her through her endeavours (mainly of driving through roads with people inside of cars). We spent Wednesday in Seattle, where we went to the Pikes place market (again, pictures not available), and returned to Portland that night too late to find any good food, so we ended up eating Wendy’s (did I mention the same happened the night before, and we ate at the Shilo Inn Lounge?).

Thursday, we went to Portland to hang out, and I got a haircut, pizza and homemade cranberry soda from hot lips pizza, and gelatto. We had a very nice day and headed back that afternoon to Hatfield… aka: reality.

Friday, I worked at the VC by myself all day, in an effort to relieve my friends and fellow interns since they had important compromises elsewhere. It was, thankfully, a slow day. Where I worked on the curriculum, and obtained some cool sea lion pictures from Dr. Horning.

Saturday and Sunday were work days… Reaaally longgg workk days. Since I am done with my content for the exhibit, all I could do was wait for the graphic desginer for the poster, and in the meantime…more curriculum work and fixing exhibits left and right. I did go clamming with Betty and Margaret, from which a beautiful clam/spinach pasta was made…

This week, I expect to have something set up for the exhibit, in order to collect some data from the visitors. I will also be performing at Bombs Away on Wednesday, August 3rd… starting at 730PM!

See you there!

 

 

INTERVIEW WEEK!

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As promised, this post will mostly recount the trip I made to Portland and Seattle last week!

 

Monday- First thing I did on Monday was secure and rental car and hotel for my trip.  I decided to stay in Portland for 3 nights (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) just in case some of the contacts I hadn’t heard back from got in touch with me and I needed to schedule anything else.  After picking up the car at lunch time I made a few more calls and sent out some confirmation e-mails then headed to the apartment to pack.  I chose mostly business casual clothes, keeping in mind potential job opportunities.  After getting an audio book, I loaded up the car and headed out around 5 (just in time to beat Portland traffic).  I stayed at the Shilo Inn by the airport, as my first interview was AT the airport! Airports are my favorite places onearth because of the endless possibilities– they’re like a gateway to everywhere– needless to say I was excited to get the behind the scenes.

Tuesday- My meeting with two authorities at the Port of Portland was at 9am, so I made sure to show upearly (maybe a little too early) partly to calm my nerves and partly so if I got lost I’d have time to get found.  I got to tour the Port’s newly built office facility, which is beautiful, and then drove around the entire airport checking out the different cargo facilities.  I got the impression that while PDX isn’t the biggest airport, it has a lot of things going for it.  There is a lot of enthusiasm for growth projects at the airport and the expansion of the seafood export business is definitely one of them.  After the tour I was able to conduct an interview and get their

Cargo Plane at PDX!

thoughts on the direction of the industry and what they thought the Port’s biggest strengths and weaknesses were.  It gave me the impression that there is a lot of teamwork and collaboration that goes into attracting new carriers, hearing from the community, and acting upon those needs.  My second interview was downtown with the Director of the Portland U.S. Export Assistance Center.  This was probably my toughest interview, as he was presenting a less hopeful more realistic approach to the issue of shipping seafood.  He pointed out that Oregon’s issue is with critical mass.  There isn’t enough supply coming from one source to reduce costs, pointing to an economies of scale situation.  In Washington, there are bigger producers and the smaller ones go through a freight forwarder and can ship out of SeaTac (Seattle’s airport).  He was definitely a lot more intense than other people I spoke with, but I appreciated his view as someone who doesn’t necessarily have a personal stake in the issue.  I realized that up until then I had been speaking with people who have a pretty biased opinion about transporting seafood and his was probably the first objective opinion I had received, aside from my own (which is probably a little biased at this point).  My third interview was at a coffee shop in NE Portland with a NOAA inspection manager.  This was a very casual interview, but I was glad to hear from someone at NOAA about the different issues producers have brought up about the inspection procedure.  Even he had a hard time explaining the high cost of inspection and thought the idea of creating some sort of shellfish coalition sounded like it could help reduce those costs.  Overall, it was a LONG day of interview, but I felt I had received a lot of information to make my document a lot more well-informed and researched.  Also, Diego’s days off were on Wednesday and Thursday, so he was able to join me Tuesday night for the rest of my trip!

Wednesday- Early Wednesday morning, we saddled up and drove to Seattle.  Originally I was set to meet with one freight forwarder at Express NW, but that morning I received an e-mail from someone I had contacted at FedEx Cargo saying that he could meet as well.  Once we got to Seattle I gave him a call and hoped to meet before my meeting at Express NW, but as time got close and he didn’t call me back, I wasn’t sure.  Finally, he gave me a call and had spoken with someone at Express NW saying that we could have our meeting there.  That was really convenient and I was actually able to interview both men at the same time.

Diego at Pike's Place

That created a good conversation with a lot of feedback.  In speaking with them, my hope was to see how Washington is involved with Oregon’s seafood industry, but also to get their opinion on why Oregon isn’t doing as much in terms of volume.  Again, it came down to 2 major factors — lack of direct flights and lack of volume.  When I brought up the idea of creating some sort of shellfish marketing coalition to pool resources and reduce costs, both seemed receptive to the idea.  Another thought that came up in a few past interviews that I brought up here was the idea of capitalizing in products that are abundant along the coast, but not marketable in the U.S. (for example: sea cucumbers, gooey ducks, etc.).  It was good to get the perspective of other people who have no direct affiliation with Oregon’s seafood transporttion issue, but are well-versed in the industry.  After the interviews, Diego and I went down to Pike’s Place Market and grabbed some late lunch, some peaches, and some ice cream! I tried honey lavender, which was delicious.  Seattle is a really cool town and I wish we could have spent more time there.

Thursday- Thursday was left open, hoping to hear back from one more Portland contact.  While I didn’t get in touch with him, Diego and I were able to do some personal maintenance in the city before heading back to Newport.  My hair needed a trim pretty desperately and Diego’s mullet was out of hand, so we headed to a local barber shop and got some pretty swanky cuts! After lunch and a quick stop at the Goodwill, we drove back to Newport and finished the first half of my book on tape.

Overall, it was a great trip and now I have all the information I need to finish my publication.  I know everyone’s said it, but I can’t believe the program is almost over.  I was about to say summer, but I suppose that since I’ve graduated summer is kind of a loaded word.  If I don’t get a job, then I could live in an endless summer OR maybe summer really is just a season now, not a time for recharging your batteries before putting on your backpack and heading back to school…maybe I’m getting a little too introspective.  Anyways, I’m nervous about putting my work down on paper, but I hope that once I’m done assembling it, it makes sense and is helpful to those who use it.

This weekend was fun and relaxing, I picked berries with Margaret, watched a lot of movies, exercised (Oregon has inspired me to get fit!), and cooked a lot of blueberry treats (none that I’m overly proud of…the muffins were a little dense!).  This week marks the beginning of my outline and writing process, which I can barely get started on.  I feel a little overwhelmed, but I know I’ll get it done!

Also, I’m excited for Zumba with Margaret tonight..your first class at the Newport Rec. Center is free!  Gotta take advantage of all the fun stuff in Newport before we head out of here AND if you’re in Corvallis on Wednesday night you should come see Diego play a show at Bombs Away!

Sea_Gil’s Blog Pt.7

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So, we Sea Granters have only have 2 and a half weeks left of the Summer Scholar Program. It’s crazy, I can’t believe we’re almost done here.

Well, this past week I got some new books to look through. One is called Distribution and Abundance of Fishes and Invertebrates in West Coast Estuaries and the other is titled Marine & Freshwater Products Handbook. I’ve already gone through the other books and I’m about to start on the products one. Hopefully, I can find some useful information from it, if not I’ll just have to return it to the library (I’ve been getting some good use out of my temporary library card at Guin Library).

After I finish that up, I’m going to start looking through articles that my colleague, Katie, has been gathering for me. I have a feeling that I will just find data about species that I have already listed in my spreadsheet, but maybe they will have some useful information that the books didn’t have.

I’ve also started working on my powerpoint. My mentor will not be around after next week because he’ll be going on vacation to Yellowstone (lucky!). I’d like to get him a rough draft before he leaves so we can discuss how I can best present what I’ve been doing this summer. So far, it’s about 7 complete slides and about 5 more that are still in an outline stage. There’s a lot of information I have to get across in a 10-12 minute presentation so it’s important that I manage my time effectively so I can relay as much of my story as I can. I think it is important to keep in mind that, though important, my work is only a small piece in a larger project studying how climate change will affect different environments across the globe.

But enough about work, I’ll get to the fun stuff now. On Friday, Betty, Deigo, and I went clamming. We got a pretty good amount and used shovels instead of the “clam guns” (I don’t really know what they’re actually called). I think the shovel approach works better for me because I found a lot more than I usually do with the guns. Betty made some clam pasta with our findings. I tried some and it was very good! 

On Saturday, Betty and I went blueberry picking at a place right outside of Corvallis. I thought I was going to turn into a blueberry like Violet from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory because I ate so many blueberries that day. They were so good! I ended up picking about 4 ¼ pounds and paid $5.50 for them, which I think was a pretty good deal. We then hung out in Corvallis for a little bit. I got two books from this cool store that sold them for about a half of the normal price. Betty brought some lavender from a store called Cat’s Meow and used some for a blueberry crisp. Yum yum!

Blueberries!

Yesterday, I just relaxed and went for a walk on the jetty out towards the beach. The beach ended up being a bit too chilly for what I was wearing so I didn’t get to walk on the beach for as long as I had originally wanted to. Oh well. At least it was nice and sunny out!

Oh, and I’m going to try out a Zumba class at the Newport Rec Center later. Hopefully that’ll be a fun workout!

Public Awareness |wk.7|

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We’re online people! No sooner had I finished writing my blog from last week when Bob Swingle uploaded to both YouTube and ODFW’s website my first video: a brief assessment of Redfish Rocks MR/MPA. This was actually the video I made for my advisor Mike for his presentation. I wanted to use it as kind of a ‘test run’. I’m ‘planning’ to complete a more rounded highlight video of Redfish. I’m amazed at how time-consuming it is to sift through video and get it together. Here it is:

My second video took a bit more work. Since I am concentrating in fish biology for my biology major, I’m a bit partial to them, which is why I began with a fish species video from Redfish Rocks. Most of the 15 species in this video are rockfish. Keep in mind that while I managed to find footage for these 15 species, they definitely don’t occur in equal frequencies. I see blue and black rockfish the most with kelp greenling following in third. The yelloweye rockfish clip was especially hard to find. I also plan on making an invertebrate species video and a habitat video by the end of this week. Here’s the fish video:

So what’s on the agenda for this week? Next week is our final symposium for Sea Grant where we will be presenting our projects. I’d like to present a somewhat partial representation of our GoogleMap interface at that time so I’m going to try to get that put together. I’m not sure I’ll complete the Cape Perpetua hypoxia series video by then but I am going to try my best! I am going to be very busy until next weekend. I might be going out on an ROV cruise later this week. I’m a little apprehensive about it because I’m not sure how I’ll fare with the waves, and, I have so much work to do! It sounds exciting though! As a ending note: many thanks to Bob Swingle for his help, input, and time.

I was actually pretty scared of the claws here

This weekend Lauren and I took advantage of two of Oregon’s delicious resources: crabs and blueberries. Friday night Lauren and I headed down to Waldport for a midnight high tide. We set up camp with several other groups of crabbers on the docks. After Lauren gave me a good introduction on how to bait, set up, and throw the traps we were in business. For the first hour or so our traps were getting plenty of crabs – but they usually either too small or female. As time wore on, however, we began to get fewer crabs and larger males. Let me tell you – the anticipation of pulling up a big crab and flipping it over to reveal whether or not it is male or female is intense. Everytime we flipped a legal male I freaked out! Point blank, what a GREAT experience! At the end of the night, tired and damp as we were, we had very happily caught four male dungeness crabs. The next day (after hitting up Newport’s Saturday market – where I purchased some amazingly good salsa and tomatoes) we cooked ’em up!

Saturday evening I accompanied Lauren to a small work party which was super fun because I got to get to talk to some people who I had only previously been introduced. Sunday we went blueberry picking in Corvallis. We had wanted to get rasberries as well but that place was closed. I’m pretty sure I got enough blueberries to make up for it though!

The Big Moment!

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ODFW Adventures: VII

This weekend, instead of just cooking my food, I went out into the wild and caught it myself! Nicole, a fellow intern, and I went out crabbing on Friday night. Luck struck us as we pulled up our nets and to find four worthy male crabs, who we named Nacho, Maximus, Philip, and Fatty. We got slightly attached to our new pets, but hunger took over as we boiled them thick with seasoning the following afternoon. Cracking away for nearly two hours, we each ate one crab and cracked another to make crab cakes in the future! Not only was it a delicious meal, but one we both worked hard for!

In the office, I had a very exciting week. Why, might you ask, was this week so much more exciting than all the other typing and fish-egg counting weeks? Well, I would like to inform you all that I have OFFICIALLY determined the herring fishery quota in the Yaquina Bay, Newport!!! After starting the maps last week by downloading the points to GIS I made polygons of the areas in which spawn was found and then recorded their area and converted them to shape files. With the newly determined area and estimated percent coverage and rock size recorded on the sample tags for each area location, Ali and I calculated the density (eggs/ft squared) and “corrected area” including the other factors such as rocks (area x percentage x rock are conversion factor) for every area. Using the calculation for the corrected area, we multiplied it by the density to get the spawn (total eggs in the area), which we then divided by 144 (the approximate number of eggs each adult lays–but remember that only females lay eggs, meaning they lay around 288 eggs for both them and the male) to get the herring biomass, which we converted to tons. Then we calculated 20% of the biomass for the quota, meaning that with 10 minutes of hard work after all of the data was organized, we had our quota! I would categorize this as being in the top 10 moments of my life. I mean really, how many people get to determine the quota of a fishery, even if it is a small one?! So there you go, the main task of my internship has been accomplished, and it’s smooth sailing from here on out! (Actually not really…but it’s a motivating thought!) With the shapefiles, I created a density map of the spawn in the Yaquina bay, making two different maps, one of February and one of March, due to the overlap in area of the spawning events. Although it took me an entire day to make the maps just right, it was one of the best days I’ve had in the office so far, and my final product certainly is beautiful!

Since I was so busy with the herring project, I once again did not do a lot for the Nearshore Strategy Update. I worked a little bit more on the annotated bibliography, but I still have a long ways to go on that project. Let’s find out how many more journal articles I can read in the remaining three weeks!

With the time I have left I will also be writing up protocols for nearly every task of the herring project, as it has become a project that is passed around the office in the past few years, and a protocol would make it a much smoother process for the next herring person. I will be writing up how to make the maps, determine the quota, and likely revising the egg counting protocol as well. So hopefully whoever gets to do this next year will have an easier time of it!

What a great week!!

Saving Oysters in Oregon – week 7 (?!)

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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)