Hi folks, here is my post for this week. Would love it if you’ll leave a comment there (just to see who visited). Thanks bunches!
http://biogeonerd.blogspot.com/2012/08/week-7-of-internship-sea-lions.html
This week we started the second phase of the Yaquina Bay intertidal population study. If you think way back to the first week I was here in Newport, you might remember that I had to wake up really early to do RAM surveys. We took sediment samples, temperature readings, and counted the visible clam siphon holes at random points in different sand/mud flats in the Bay. Now we are going back to these same locations and dredging them to find out exactly how many clams are at each site.
Intertidal dredging is very similar to the subtidal dredging we have been doing, except we get to dredge this time, not divers. Surprisingly, the system is pretty easy to use and the most difficult part seems to be staying in one place when holding the bag end of the dredge. Because of the air in my drysuit a lot of times I just start floating away. Luckily we can only sample when the water isn’t very high (between 2 and 3 feet) so I can get myself back in the right spot fairly quickly.
To work the intertidal dredge requires 3 people: 1 person mans the dredge and sucks up the sediment/clams, 1 person mans the bag and makes sure that the bag doesn’t get clogged and that sediment/water isn’t going towards the dredge head, and the final person is on the boat manning the motor and sorting samples.
I very quickly learned how to do all 3, but I think it was very helpful that I already has indirect experience from all the subtidal work we have done. I was familiar with the data sheets and how the dredge system as a whole worked, so I only needed to learn the exact method of how to use the dredge in the water – and how to efficiently move around in a bulky dry suit.
Next week is more dredging, and at the end of the week we will prep for yet another week of work in Tillamook – and you thought I was done! hah!
While not out doing fieldwork (we can only dredge a few hours at a time during low tide), I have started a new data analysis project. This will incorporate the historical data I entered over the last few weeks, and some of the data we have been getting this summer. Hopefully I will be able to incorporate all of this together in a cohesive way so I have something to add to my presentation other than 15 slides of our various projects and methods. But don’t get too excited, it will probably just be comparisons of size frequency and abundance. I also don’t think I will have time to run any statistical analysis so I won’t be able to say whether any of the trends we see are significant or not.
During my free time, I have been attempting to enjoy the decent weather we have been having in Newport by surfing a lot, playing beach volleyball, and watching LOTS of Olympics. I feel like all the students here have really started to get along well, and it is a shame we only have 3 short weeks left before we all must continue our journeys elsewhere. Until next time!
I finally got my head to stop spinning long enough to write this post, so here it goes.
The workshop.
The days leading up to and after the workshop have been some of the most exciting and nerve-wracking yet. I also think that I could not have learned more in such a short amount of time. We’ll start from the beginning of the madness; approximately one week before the event, at this time all parties involved started to get a little anxious, with the pre-workshop groups still working vigorously on straw documents on communications and management protocols, workshop participants started turning to me to inquire about the status of things. This was in addition to the regular logistics emails from everyone from workshop participants to steering committee members, so before I knew it I was inundated with so many conversations and tasks my usual hand-scrawled to-do list couldn’t quite handle the level of organization I needed to get everything done. Half-way through the week things seemed to settle down, I was as caught up as I could be while waiting on a final agenda, straw documents, and travel reimbursement documents. and, then BOOM, everything I was waiting for and more came in, including the seemingly innocuous task of creating name tags.
A very important lesson I learned through this process is not to defer any decision to only one cook. I made the task of creating name tags infinitely more difficult when I didn’t let every cook in the workshop kitchen put in their two cents about name tags. Some (including myself) believed a stack of blank stick-on tags would be quite sufficient so that information about name, title, affiliation would be correct given the amount of time left to verify and generate name tag information. However, others believed at least the steering committee and organizers should have pretty printed name tags, and once I approved this plan and sent out a list of names, titles and affiliations to be approved by the rest of the steering committee the plan for name tags was forced to change several more times. Apparently there is a lot of ways to make name tags: in color, with affiliation and title, with affiliation only, with affiliation and the workshop title, in hanging plastic holders, in clip-on tags, on stickys, printed professionally, printed in our office, and so forth. I’m pretty sure each possible combination was considered given the amount of supplies and time at our disposal. Eventually, we figured out a way to keep everyone happy and also was within our means to produce, and it only took 4 hours to figure out. Next step was to go to the list and make sure (checked and double-checked) that names and affiliations were accurate. Once this was done, I happily accepted to help of my coworker Linda Larsen to type and print name tags. This was actually very fortuitous as other last-minute and off-the radar tasks came in.
The surge of activity continued into Monday morning as I tried to tie up as many loose ends as possible before heading up to Portland for one last meeting before the workshop Tuesday morning. Loaded down with a box of name tags, flip charts, pens, and registration list I eventually made it to Portland. The event probably wasn’t nearly as stressful as I think it was, but I think it seems that way mostly because of the daily nightmare that constituted my travel in and out of downtown Portland and Portland State University’s campus. Of the 3 times I had to get my way downtown each time I had a printed set of directions, once I immediately got off track and ended up lost, another time my directions lead me in an endless circle of one-way streets to nowhere, and Finally the very last time I made it back to he PSU parking garage where I paid exorbitant prices for all-day parking without any trouble. I think I can attribute much of the stress I felt those days to these hair-pulling adventures. And then there was the actual workshop, after I scrambled to get a registration table in order, name-tags packed away in their holders I actually got to sit back and watch the days unfold.
Because the 90-some participants came from a variety of different backgrounds and familiarity of Aquatic Nuisance Species and Tsunami debris issues, the first part of day 1 was spent giving introductions to the topics and updates from representatives from each state or province involved. States involved included Alaska, Hawai’i, Oregon, Washington, and California and there also a representative from Canada. This piece in particular was pretty interesting, because despite my efforts to keep up-to-date with all the goings-on in the different states, the ultimately is a big difference in the organization and structure of each state’s responding/involved agencies and this translates in a lot of ways in how apparent their efforts are. It was also interesting to think about how the geographic configuration of each state/province’s coasts has a large impact on any response and monitoring protocol agreed on regionally.
The rest of day one consisted of breakout groups, where different groups were assigned different pieces of the straw communications protocol document or the management straw document to discuss and offer suggestions for clarification or improvement. I served as a note-taker for one of these breakout groups and though that too, was a very interesting role where I had to be quick and efficient, but also be able to synthesize along the way so that my notes were coherent and representative of flow the discussion.
After many more talks and summaries of the breakout group discussions, I was pleasantly surprised and refreshed by a very detailed talk from phycologist, Gayle Hansen, who worked on identifying over 20 different algal species from the dock in Newport and a boat in Cape Disappointment. Her talk was very detailed, as she went into many of the different taxonomic tools and methodologies she used to identify species, some she was at first convinced were novel! This talk in particular, was useful to demonstrate the range of professionals present at this meeting, we had representatives from a range of NGOs, tribes, congressional staffers, and state and federal agencies. In the end, I think this truly was one of the major successes of the workshop, to bring all these people across the region together in one room to discuss these issues, but also more simply, to make each other all aware of who and where people are working on these issues, and how to get in contact with them. Silly for sure, but in my survey of logistics tasks to take care of I never thought about sending the detailed participant list that I have been working on for weeks out to everyone who attended the workshop. After having several people inquiring and request it though, the list went out during the workshop.
In the end, it is just the beginning however, and just as I thought my work here was done, there is still much to be done. Now the pre-workshop groups are post-workshop groups and they and the steering committee will begin re-drafting documents and deliberating over the next steps to implement a viable regional response protocol. Only more exciting news on the JTMD-AIS front to come!
Wow, I actually did write this blog post on time (last Friday) and then apparently never put the link on here! So I’m sorry this is late.
The last week for me has had very little to do with work and more to do with play. I was very lucky to have nearly a whole week off from working at the Visitor Center to go to a family reunion at Prineville Reservoir in Eastern Oregon. Prineville Reservoir is about 30-40 minutes outside of Bend and is formed by a dam on the Deschutes River. It is definitely a gem of a place to spend a whole week of summer. The high desert of Oregon in summer is hot. 90+ degrees hot with absolutely no moisture in the air. Compare this to the balmy high of Newport around 60-65 and you might get an idea of how much of a shift in climate this was for me. But it was one that was pretty easy to get use to after a day acclimating to my new abode next to the reservoir. All the kids ended up camping in tents while the parents stayed nice and cool in their air conditioned campers. The water level depends on the time of year and the previous winters snow pack and this year the water was pretty high which was good for us.
A day at Prineville usually goes about like this:
Wake up around 9:30.
Read/wait for people to get back from the morning water ski run
Eat a huge breakfast around 10:30
Go wakeboarding/wake surfing
Read and eat a small lunch
Go wakeboarding/ wake surfing
Read
Eat a delicious dinner
Campfire
Sleep around 10:30
Repeat
Because the water level was pretty high the ski boats weren’t too far of a walk (previous years the water level is so low that it is a bit of a trek to get down to the water). I had never gone wake boarding or wake surfing before and both those were a blast. Unfortunately I wasnt quite in “Prineville shape” and the first day I really tweaked a muscle in my arm which rendered my right arm pretty useless for the rest of the week. Besides that little mishap everything else about the week was awesome. I had a blast and am rested and ready for the rest of the summer at the VC.
The NOAA dock subtidal project is officially complete! On Thursday we finished our last 10 sites in Sally’s Bend in no time at all. We were only out on the water until about 11am! Even with measuring clams, we finished in under 8 hours that day, which was really surprising given all the difficulties we had the last time we were out diving in the Yaquina. Its a wonderful feeling to say that during the time I have been working in Newport an entire field project was completed, even if it was a short project.
The rest of this week was spent cleaning up from our Tillamook work (cleaning out the boats, temporarily stashing our equipment, etc) and catching up with office work. I thought bring in the office would a nice change of pace, but compared to the action-packed fieldwork I normally do, sitting in the office started getting old quickly.
Over the past few weeks, I have been slowly entering historical subtidal data from Tillamook Bay surveys. This has been my “go-to” task during the few times we weren’t out doing fieldwork. There is data from the 1975, 1976, 1977, 1985, and 1986 subtidal studies done in Tillamook Bay. There is data on where the transects/stations were located, how many and what type of clams were found at each station, and for most years, the length and weight measurements for the Bay Clams (Butter, Gaper, Littleneck, Cockle).
This week I basically finished entering the data and I just need to get it all looked over by Tony or Stacy to make sure the formatting is correct. Because we have already done a lot of work in Tillamook, I started noticing some difference between the data we have been collecting and the older data. The biggest difference is the sheer number of clams we are finding. Surprisingly, many of the samples we have collected this summer seem to have a much higher density of clams. However, in the past the highest densities belonged to Butter and Native Littlenecks. Presently we are finding A LOT of Butters, but very few Littlenecks. The clams we are finding seem to be in the same average size range as the ones collected in the past. This, of course, is based on what I noticed and can remember, and I can’t say what is or isn’t significant. That type of in-depth analysis can only happen in the winter once the Tillamook study is completed. And speaking of Tillamook, I have pictures!
Tillamook scenery
A full sample bag, yet to be sorted
A Butter clam with a tight grip on the leg of a Dungeness crab
This coming week is going to be a new adventure, as we are going to start intertidal dredging in the Yaquina, sometimes called “Megacoring”. All I know is that my first day is Tuesday and I have to wear a drysuit and learn to use a dredge pump that is slightly smaller than the one we used to get the subtidal samples. I am very excited to learn how to do this, but also a little nervous as I have never had to work in a drysuit before, much less use a dredge pump. But that is what this summer is all about, right?
This has been a thought provoking week for me. Since I am becoming more comfortable with the protocol for our experiments in the field, there is time between sampling to lay back, look at the scenery, and chat with my field mates. Wednesday’s discussion turned into an intense conversation on the nature of research at a government agency vs. academia and other topics regarding scientific research careers. There are pros and cons to taking up research at each place. At the EPA, people a number of levels up decide what questions they want to ask and the scientists are obligated to come up with projects that address these. There is less freedom than in academia. However, a government position seems more stable and less cut-throat in terms of acquiring funding for the research.
Throughout the week I have also been talking with almost everyone from the lab group and they all have different stories and different reasons for obtaining the degrees they did and taking on the position they have. Perspectives have been both positive and negative, so I am trying to take them in and not let any one opinion dominate or take over my own view of the world. I need to figure out what path would be best for me. After all of these discussions, I met with Robert Allan who is the Director of Student Development at the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at OSU. It was a very helpful conversation as it gave me a direction to go in toward making my own story, after I was overwhelmed by so many other opinions.
This week should be another good week on the nutrient uptake project. Last week we went to this beautiful marsh up the Yaquina called Winant. We are going to be doing a lot of samples there because it is our baseline marsh, so we may not be travelling as far in the next few weeks. This may give me more time to look at the data and start to figure out how I want to present my work. There are only four weeks left now to get so much done!
(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.
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.
In 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.
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.
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.