Category Archives: Summer Scholars

Rounding the Bend

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Last week we executed an experiment to begin to answer our new question: what is the relationship between nutrient concentration and uptake rate?  As I explained in my last blog, we filled bladders with four different nutrient concentrations and deployed them at mid-estuary and lower-estuary marshes.  My main task for the week was to be in charge of lab prep.  Artificial sea water needed to be made, bladders needed to be filled, field supplies needed to be organized, nutrient samples needed to be taken, and so on.  Besides being rather mundane and times, I enjoy being in the lab.  As I have expressed before, field work tends to stress me out because there are so many variables.  In the lab I have much more control over things.  I also have lots of time to think and brainstorm about my life outside of EPA including grad school and other post undergrad opportunities.  Often times I have to pause what I’m doing to write things down so I don’t forget! 

One of the main difficulties of working on this project is that it involves a lot of man power as well as several different people taking charge of various aspects of the experiment.  This can lead to problems because every part of the project needs to come together perfectly which sometimes does not happen due to lack of communication.  Unfortunately, this was a rather large problem with our deployment last week.  The tides were rather high, so we decided to deploy our chambers on low marsh benches.   We do know at what tide elevation that a particular marsh floods, but we do not know elevations of all of the low marsh benches in the marsh itself.  So, we decided to estimate, and our estimate happened to be rather off.  On Monday, the chambers were deployed at Winant Marsh in mid-estuary.  Using our calculations, we decided to add 10L of water to the bladders which will flood the chambers about two-thirds of the way.  Upon Caitlin’s, return from deploying the chambers, she realized that she forgot to leave out the high tide sample bottle, so she and Stephanie went out to the marsh during high tide to collect a sample.  When they got there, they were shocked to see that the tide was almost over topping the chambers – way higher than we thought it would go.  This can cause problems because it can result in a pressure difference inside and outside the chambers which may lead to leakage.  Leakage, especially from natural sea water infiltrating with our artificial sea water, can render our results useless. 

Where did the marsh go? The tide almost completely flooded our chambers.

That day, there was discussion and disagreement over how much water to add to the bladders for the subsequent day’s deployment.  This is where several people thinking different things about the same project can lead to issues.  Caitlin and I knew (or thought) that the low marsh bench at Hatfield flooded higher than it did at Winant.  So we thought that our bladders for that deployment deserved little or no extra water.  Ted on the other hand wanted to add 5L just to be safe.  The problem with adding too much water is that it can greatly dilute the water that enters the chambers making it difficult to extrapolate out what the exact uptake rate actually is.  I’m getting carried away… haha.  Anyway in the end, we only added an extra 2L to each bladder because we realized that we didn’t have enough artificial sea water to add 5L and Jody found extra low sites to deploy the

I did get to go out in the field for a bit on Wednesday. I was enjoying being out in the sun!

chambers at (lower than our calculations were for).  Again the tide came up really high and we didn’t have enough water as was needed leading to possible infiltration.  The next day we made sure to add extra water and we found higher elevation sites, so we ended up having too much water!  Ugh!  It’s so difficult to get it just perfect. 

After taking our salinity measurements and finding the final volumes, we compared our results to our initial measurements to see if they matched up (they should be the same if no water was gained or lost during the deployment).  We found that a couple bladders may have had external leakage, but it is not as bad as it could have been.  Hopefully we will have some usable data from UC Santa Barbara in a few weeks.   

This week will be spent preparing for my presentations on Thursday and Friday as well as analyzing data.  I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that this internship is almost over.  I just hope that I can find a place to live before I move back to Hawaii!

Please feel free to read and enjoy my personal blog to learn about my summer outside of the EPA here: sarasoregonadventure.blogspot.com

Sea_Gil’s Blog Pt.8

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While the past week was spent adding a number of new species to the spawning period spreadsheet, a good chunk of my time was dedicated to working on my powerpoint for the symposium. My mentor is not going to be in this week, so I wanted to get a rough draft prepared for him to look over. I ended up giving a practice presentation for him and two other EPA colleagues on Thursday. After I went through the whole presentation, we then went back over each individual slide and discussed any changes to be made. There were quite a few suggestions, but I am glad for the constructive criticism because I would like for this presentation to be good.

On Wednesday, I headed up to Corvallis with Betty and Diego to see them (along with Becca and Chris) play at Bombs Away! Hats off to them for a good show!

Friday was the day  I finally got to go out into the field! On a HOVERCRAFT! It was totally awesome! I’d seen a hovercraft going around when I was in Turks & Caicos and it looked pretty cool. I never thought I would actually get to ride in one. I went out with another intern and an EPA worker to help them with collecting some cores in mud flats. Needless to say, I got a bit muddy. Also, I had my first experience with these contraptions called Mudders. They’re these types of “shoes” that are designed to keep you from sinking into the mud. It was weird walking around in them, but I was glad for them because the intern, Rachel, told me she had gotten stuck in the mud a few times on earlier trips when she didn’t have them on. She said she had to be dug out because she couldn’t lift her legs from the mud!

So that was my work week. My weekend was very fun. Betty, Diego, and I went to Zumba on Friday. A bunch of Hatfield interns then invited us to watch a movie called The Abyss. I confused it with some other movie about people getting stuck in a cave. This one was about divers getting stuck deep in the sea and meeting some interesting, new friends while down there

Betty and I went to the Yaquina Head Lighthouse on Saturday. I always see it in the distance when walking along the jetty, so I wanted to check it out. Also, I wanted to take some pictures for my grandma because she really likes lighthouses (just emailed her some photos!). We parked outside of the actual park and took a nice walk up there. We didn’t get to go inside because there was a long wait, but it was still nice to just see it.

lighthouse

Yaquina Head Lighthouse

For dinner, we got to go to BBQ in Siletz at the HMSC director’s house. There was a lot of great food, since it was a potluck. At this point, I’m mostly used to microwaved veggie burgers and tomato soup, so it was nice change. That night, we went out to Nana’s where there was a band playing. After Nana’s, we headed over to Moby Dick’s for some karaoke which is always fun!

This week will be filled with more slideshow preparation since the Symposium is on Thursday. Hopefully my presentation goes well!

Oh and I’d like to give an early birthday shout-out to Betty! Wooohooooo!

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!

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

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)

Taking out the trash

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Today is a bit out of character in comparison to the other days of my work week. I am frantically running about to finish some last minute items that were thrown at me at the end of yesterday and trying to get ready to leave town in 2 hours. AH! Needless to say, this is going to be a bit of a whirlwind post. I’ve got caffeine roaring through my veins and I’m ready to conquer my to-do list.

I’m not going to spend much time in this week’s post commenting about what I did this week. The major items put on my plate were more impact statements and doing some metric reporting. Metrics are categories that you use to compare or measure the success of an institution. In my case, I was gathering data about how OSU marine sciences measures up against other ocean-focused universities. Once again, another tedious and slightly boring project, but it serves a necessary purpose. Since I am still in waiting for people above me to make some decisions about the workshop I was suppose to plan, I have realized that my internship has really evolved (or…maybe devolved) into supporting administrative tasks at OSG. As I described it to a friend at lunch the other day, I’m kind of the equivalent of a garbage person right now. I get punted tasks that no one really likes to do, but in the end need to get done. While its a bit boring and frustrating at times, I am involved in work that is a fact of life for any institution. Seeing as I eventually want to be a Director of a research institution or non-profit, it’s good that I’m getting experience with this stuff now.

Other news from Planet AnnaRose: I interviewed for a job to be a sea turtle ecology research assistant in Shark Bay, Australia last week. I have been notified that I am in the top 5 candidates for the position and I’ll be notified in the coming weeks if I get it. My work would be drastically different than what I do for Oregon Sea Grant. In the early morning, we would get up and use a ski boat to chase sea turtles into the shallows. Then, one of us will dive off the front of the boat and grab the turtle with our bare hands to bring it back to the boat. We’d then take measurements on the turtle and epoxy a camera to its shell that will pop off 8 hrs later when the epoxy dissolves. I’d then be responsible for helping out with the data management of the video. Way cool. Cross your fingers I’ll be an Aussie this coming Oct – Dec.

I’ll be off on vacation for the next week and then heading directly to the GREs (dun, dun, dun…..). I may be posting next week, but if not, I’ll write you a novel when I’m back.