This summer, I will be interning for the South Slough Estuarine Research Reserve (SSERR), near Coos Bay, Oregon. I mainly will be working on monitoring European green crabs (Carcinus maenas), one of the most invasive marine species. Native to the Atlantic coast of Europe and northern Africa, green crabs were first documented on the East coast of the U.S. in the mid-1800’s and in California in 1989. Green crab presence was first documented in Coos Bay in 1998. Green crabs can out-compete juvenile Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister) and disrupt native communities, including negatively impacting commercially important shellfish and eelgrass populations.

The SSERR has continued to monitor the green crab populations in the South Slough and Coos Bay since their discovery. Though the population has cycled through years of high and low abundance since the species was first documented in the region, the last couple years have seen a spike in green crab abundance. Along with other interns and staff, one of my main roles this summer will be to continue monitoring efforts throughout the South Slough, tracking their distribution and abundance at various points throughout the estuary.

This week, after settling in to my housing and meeting the green crab team and the rest of the staff, my first task was to conduct inventory on all the green crab trapping equipment to prepare for the season’s fieldwork. We use two main traps in the green crab research: 1) Fukui traps, and 2) Minnow traps. Fukui traps are intended to capture adult crabs, while minnow traps are aimed at smaller juvenile crabs.

Thursday and Friday were our first days out in the field. Traps have to be set during the morning low tide, and then are left until the low tide the following morning. On Thursday, we set traps at 2 sites in the estuary, and on Friday, we retrieved crabs from the traps.

Setting a fukui trap in the Metfield site in Charleston, OR.

Me holding a green crab caught in one of the traps. All of the green crabs caught are weighed and measured, and their sex, abdomen color, and number of missing limbs recorded. (My eyes were closed in every picture taken.)

Retrieving crabs in a fukui trap at the second site. Dungeness crabs, Oregon shore crabs, and sculpin (a fish) are also often caught in the traps. This site was extremely muddy, and we all got our boots stuck multiple times.

These two days of fieldwork were just a brief start to the green crab project, and we will continue monitoring at several sites throughout the estuary for the rest of the summer. Collecting data on green crab abundance and distribution will help us better understand their population in the region and hopefully mitigate and prevent damage to the native ecosystem.

Since session started and elected officials have been for the most part confined to the capital I have attended various in district meetings on their behalf. One particular meeting, or series of meetings, were held by Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for Seafood Processors who are facing a looming permit change. This is everything I learned about that process;

In February DEQ came and met with the Coastal Caucus to discuss their plans to meet with the actual seafood processors to better understand the challenges facing processors, to discuss DEQ’s need to update permit requirements to reflect the most current water quality standards, and to outline next steps.  Since that time, DEQ and Business Oregon have been working closely with Oregon’s seafood processors to better understand their operational needs, identifying challenges as well as opportunities.

The process of discussion around reviewing the 900J general permit for renewal started in Astoria on April 18th, this permit governs the waste water allowed be discharged after the processors have taken whole sea creatures and turned them into saleable products. DEQ has established an internal project team that has been working to identify and better understand technical concerns to be addressed in this permit renewal, informed in part by the feedback they received during sites visits in 2016. DEQ has reviewed operational variables (such as species processed, discharge volumes, seasonality of operations, treatment technologies) and location variables specific to the receiving water (such as water quality characteristics, pollutant restrictions/limitations, availability of dilution) that must be considered when renewing the permits. These meeting run by members of DEQ’s project team with seafood processors were a concentrated effort to keep those who will be affected by this permit renewal informed of their progress. In addition, a series of public information meetings were held in coastal communities to provide an opportunity for other interested parties and members of the general public to learn about the renewal of the 900J, ask questions, and provide comments that will inform DEQ’s process.

DEQ is now ready to begin the early stages of the public engagement process. After these meetings with permitted facilities DEQ returned to headquarters to review its findings, discuss the issues and challenges that DEQ anticipates, and identify anything they may have overlooked. They are currently preparing to present a permit timeline that will include renewal of the 900J general permit, renewal of expired individual permits, and issuance of new individual permits, where applicable.

DEQ has established an internal project team that has been working to identify and better understand technical concerns to be addressed in this permit renewal, informed in part by the feedback we received during our visits with the processors. Permitting wastewater discharges for seafood processors is complex. Twenty-four seafood processing facilities maintain wastewater discharge permit coverage under either the 900J general or individual National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. No two facilities are alike, and the water bodies receiving wastewater discharges vary greatly.

DEQ staff has compiled wastewater discharge and operations data from seafood processors currently covered by either the expired General Permit or individual NPDES permits.  DEQ has reviewed operational variables (such as species processed, discharge volumes, seasonality of operations, treatment technologies) and location variables specific to the receiving water (such as water quality characteristics, pollutant restrictions/limitations, availability of dilution) that must be considered when renewing the permits.  DEQ plans to continue with some combination of individual and general permit coverage.  This may result in some seafood processors operating on a different type of permit.

From May 26 to June 2nd I was aboard the NOAA research vessel the Reuben Lasker to help out with NOAA’s Pre-Recruit survey to help with federal fishery research and to collect samples for my own research. Below is a description of the cruise and a daily log of my time on the cruise)

The Pre-Recruit Survey is part of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) effort to improve stock assessment estimates of rockfish recruitment. Let’s see if I can break this down. Federal fisheries scientists (who work for NMFS) are tasked with tracking commercially harvested fish stocks and determining the appropriate amount that fisherman should catch in a given year to ensure the population persists and produces fish in future years. To give fisherman an accurate number, NMFS scientists need to be able to predict how their specific fish populations will change in size from year to year. Most commercially harvested fishes produce prodigious numbers of young every year, with relatively few surviving to adulthood.

• I’ll define recruits as fish that survive to adulthood
• I’ll define recruitment as the total number of fish that survive to adulthood from a cohort born in a given year.

Recruitment can be high or low for a given year depending on survival of the early life stages. The Pre-Recruit Survey collects Pre-Recruit rockfishes (a.k.a. young rockfishes that haven’t reached adulthood, but have passed through most of the gauntlet of high mortality associated with the larval stages) so stock assessment scientists can try to get a sneak preview of what recruitment in a given year will look like. Otherwise, stock assessment scientists have to wait several years for these fish to mature to adulthood and then be caught by fishermen (or fishery independent fish surveys) to know how many survived (isn’t it weird that fish have to be caught for scientists to know that they lived? Some groups are working on using remotely operated vehicles and other camera systems to get non-destructive estimates of fish abundance).

I am on this cruise to help sort fishes and will be using juvenile rockfishes collected in the cruise as part of my PhD research. My work aims to give us a better understanding of how environmental conditions (water temperature, food availability, and patterns of water movement) affect survival of the young life stages of rockfish.

Sea-date 1 :

Today I boarded the NOAA Research Vessel Reuben Lasker. To get to the ship was quite a trip. I drove from Newport, OR to Eureka, CA where I met up with another NOAA scientist, Paul Chittaro, who was going on the cruise. Paul and I have been on several research cruises together and are pumped for this cruise.

To get to the ship, we had to get picked up at the docks of the Eureka Harbor on a small skiff and cruise out to meet the Lasker. Every other time I’ve been on a research cruise, I’ve met the vessel at the dock, but this year to save time (it takes a full day to bring a large vessel into a port to load and offload passengers) the ship’s commanding officer decided to do an at sea transfer.
The weather and sea conditions were pretty exciting. The waves crossing the bar at the mouth of the harbor were a good 6-10 feet tall and outside the harbor the seas had been whipped up by some storm winds creating crisscrossing swells.

Approaching the RV Lasker from their transfer skiff. Photo: Will Fennie

This made an already exciting boat ride almost too exciting when we got picked up by the Lasker. The Lasker has a device much like a claw that slides down the side of the ship to pick up its skiff. Our boat driver had to maneuver the skiff alongside the Lasker and hold it in position, in choppy seas, so the ship’s claw could grab the skiff and pull it onboard. I am having trouble describing how weird it felt to be in a boat, lifted out of the water, and land on a larger ship, but anyway I’m on board and ready to start catching fishes.

Unfortunately the weather off Eureka wasn’t conducive to sampling, so the chief scientist decided to steam up to Newport Oregon where the weather was better. My first day aboard consisted of eating, and trying to adjust my sleep schedule over to the night shift. Juvenile fishes spend the daytime in deep water and come closer to the surface at night to feed. It is much easier to collect juvenile fish at nighttime because they are concentrated near layers of zooplankton (tiny planktonic animals) that they feed on, so all my work occurs from 9pm to 6am. “Adjusting” my sleep schedule to get used to the night shift really means that I spent most of the first day trying to sleep in my bunk and battling nausea.

Sea-date 2:

Bucket o’ pyrosomes. We had to rinse the pyrosomes in seawater to clean off any fish or other important organisms from the pyrosomes to figure out what else was in the water. Photo: Will Fennie

We arrived on station just south of Newport this afternoon and began our first night of sampling. Our sampling plan is to run transects of midwater trawls at specific location along Oregon’s coast. We starting sampling our shallow depth/nearshore stations at the beginning of the night, and move offshore to
deeper water as the night progresses. The idea is to get a long-term view of fish communities and see how they vary with distance from shore (bottom depth) and latitude. We use a mid-water trawl to get density estimates of fish and other organisms.
There is pretty high variability in the abundance and composition of our catches from year to year, but this year is pretty weird. Normally we catch lots of juvenile rockfishes (yellowtail, widow, shortbelly,

Sorting fish and krill from the pyrosomes. Looks like we caught some myctophids (lantern fish) and a king of the salmon (the long, skinny, red and silvery fish in the bottom right).

canary, dark blotched, bocaccio, blue, and black rockfishes), Pacific hake, several species of lantern fish, quite a few species of larval flat fishes, and some adult anchovy.
Tonight we mainly caught gelatinous zooplankton and in particular colonial tunicates called pyrosomes. Pyrosomes are typically found in more tropical waters, but with the warm blob in 2015 and the el Niño of 2016, waters off Oregon have been unusually warm and many tropical species are showing up far north or their normal ranges. While pyrosomes are pretty cool to see in the water, they are bioluminescent, they are a real bummer to sort through and have almost broken are net!

Sea-date 3:

We sampled off of the Columbia River mouth tonight. This is an interesting place because there is a huge source of freshwater that dramatically affects the oceanographic conditions for hundreds of miles. Freshwater is much less dense than salt water, so it sits on top of it (think oil and water, but less dense water and denser water…). As the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean it punches through the surrounding saltwater creating a wedge in the ocean. Oceanic water moving towards shore smashes into this freshwater wedge and sinks beneath it (like a tectonic subduction zone). This concentrates plankton at the interface between these two types of water, which attracts zooplankton, then juvenile fishes, then larger fishes and birds, then marine mammals and so on. The marine mammal and bird observer on the ship said he saw more birds in that area than he has seen almost anywhere else (this observer has been on research cruises for 30+ years all around the globe).

This is Paul who is pumped for our huge catch of pyrosomes. We lost a little enthusiasm when we learned that this catch had ripped the net. (Photo: Will Fennie)

Last year we caught hundreds of rockfishes along this transect, so I was very excited to see what we caught this year. Unfortunately for me, our nearshore station was dominated by adult anchovies, many of which were pregnant females, and there were very few rockfishes. Our second station was so full of pyrosomes that it ripped the net (see attached image of our net almost bursting with pyrosomes). We cancelled our furthest offshore station because we were afraid that we wouldn’t get any fish and needed time to repair the net.

Sea-date 4

Tonight we sampled off the Tillamook line. We had decent rockfish catches here last year, but like the Columbia River line, pyrosomes dominated this year’s catch. I am starting to get sick of wading through buckets of those things. However, we did collect several rockfishes. I wasn’t quick enough to take a picture of them, but we caught a couple of species: yellowtail rockfish (S. flavidus), shortbelly (Sebastes jordani), bocaccio (S. paucispinis), canary (S. pinniger), and widow rockfish (S. entomelas). At least this cruise is starting to live up to its name (Rockfish Pre-Recruit Survey)!

Sea-date 5

Tonight was our last night of fishing. We managed to catch quite a few rockfishes! We didn’t collect nearly as many as I was hoping, but certainly better than catching zero. I also saw a salmon shark while we were collecting larval fishes (click the link to
view, sorry it isn’t the best quality video!): https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_94ypdre8

While we didn’t catch as many rockfish as I hoped for, we still
found some, and it made the cruise worthwhile. I am looking forward to planning the next steps in my research which involve free diving and SCUBA diving to collect juvenile rockfishes that have moved from their offshore life stage (the one being sampled in this cruise) to their nearshore benthic stage where they grow up to become the adults that everyone loves to fish for.

Winter time in Oregon makes doing any field work along the coast dicey, so most marine scientists find other ways to keep busy. For many of us that means getting to work analyzing the past year’s field work data, and even writing up research findings. While publishing your research is critically important to getting through a graduate degree in science, Sea Grant has helped me realize how important it is to communicate your work to a wider audience. Outside of your field, few people will hear about your research if you only communicate it through scientific journals. However, if you step out of the science bubble and engage in scientific outreach with a broader audience, you can reach far more people and it can be an absolute blast. Over the past couple of months I’ve volunteered to communicate science to third – fifth graders through Oregon State University ‘s (OSU) Winter Wonderings program, to anyone who was willing to listen at Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Marine Science Day, and I’ve just completed training to be an interpretive diver for the Oregon Coast Aquarium this summer.

Winter Wonderings 2017

Last winter I participated in Winter Wonderings with another OSU graduate student to teach young students about chemical reactions. We had a blast doing a demonstration of how enzymes can speed up reactions, culminating in colorful foam blasting out of two liter soda bottles. The young students loved it, but this year, my friend Jack and I wanted to teach something a little closer to home. We drew on our own research to provide a marine science extravaganza. Jack studies anemone-algal symbiosis and taught about how anemones use stinging cells to capture prey as well as hosting photosynthetic microalgae to provide another source of food. I devised a lesson plan to talk about fisheries science and how fish otoliths (ear stones) can be used much like tree rings to age fish and provide valuable information on fish populations change over time.

Teaching winter wonderings students that everything thinks rockfish are delicious. Photo by Jack Koch

Showing young scientists how to read rockfish otoliths to determine a rockfish’s age. Photo by Jack Koch.

Both our lessons involved getting the students to use microscopes, which we were a little worried about at first. Fortunately, the students loved it and were transfixed by watching anemone stinging cells fire and absorbed in counting rings in adult black rockfish otoliths. This outreach experience was incredibly rewarding and inspiring. Seeing how curious 8-10 olds are and their enthusiasm for learning reminded me of how much I loved hands on experiences like this and has motivated me to seek more outreach opportunities.

Marine Science Day and SMURFs

Training new SMURF recruits in proper collection techniques. You can see the SMURF (the cylinder of green and black garden fence mesh) in the bottom right corner. Photo by Dr. Su Sponaugle.

Each year Hatfield Marine Science Center opens its doors to the public for Marine Science Day. All the labs put on demonstrations of their work to show visitors what it is we do at Hatfield. This event is a great opportunity to speak to a variety of people about your work. My lab focuses on the early life history of fishes and has some really high-tech equipment to image larval fish in the ocean. My research focuses on slightly later life stages and uses some lower tech, but better named equipment. To collect juvenile rockfishes as they make the transition from their pelagic larval phase to their benthic juvenile and adult phase, OSU and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife deploy standard monitoring units for the recruitment of fishes (SMURFs). I used a combination of a prop SMURF and some video to train visitors in collecting juvenile fishes as part of my research. Everyone from five-year olds, who could barely hold the net we use to collect SMURFs, to the grandparents who brought them enjoyed learning about juvenile fishes and pretending to collect them.

Volunteer Diving at the Oregon Coast Aquarium

While most people cannot join me to collect SMURFs this summer, I wanted to give people a feel for what it is like to be in the water with rockfishes. I began volunteer diving at the Oregon Coast Aquarium a few months ago. Most of my duties include cleaning acrylic and vacuuming exhibits. However, I dive on Saturday mornings and get to interact with visitors as they pass through the tunnels in the passages of the deep. I am thrilled every time I give a visitor a high-five or a fist bump through the glass separating them from the water. Never before in my life have I felt like such a celebrity for cleaning, but I really want to talk to guests while diving. This summer the Aquarium has a program where divers use special masks with microphones to talk directly to guests. I’ve just completed training to use this equipment and am ecstatic about the opportunity to share my diving experience with the public. I’ll be talking with aquarium visitors every third Saturday this summer starting June 17th.

Coming Up

The weather is transitioning to typical spring and summer patterns which means I am starting up field work soon!. I leave tomorrow for a NOAA research cruise that kicks of my field season. Stay tuned for updates on rockfish collections aboard the NOAA research vessel Reuben Lasker and future SMURF adventures.

Oregon Sea Grant is excited to welcome our ten outstanding Summer Scholars this coming June! After receiving a record high of 152 applicants, the Oregon Sea Grant review committee went through a thorough process to select ten truly remarkable undergraduates. The Scholars will be working on a variety of social and natural science projects from monitoring the invasive green crab to assessing market prices of experiential tourism to communicating marine reserves research to the public. We are excited to be partnering with a fantastic crew of hosts including the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Environmental Protection Agency, South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, Department of Land Conservation and Development, Wild Rivers Coast Alliance, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Oregon Sea Grant. The Scholars will be frequently posting on the blog about their work and experience on the Oregon coast throughout the summer, so remember to check back in! More information about the Scholars, including their placements, will be posted on our Meet the Scholars webpage in the coming weeks.

Blog post #3

Science and Art: A Natural Connection

In lieu of a strictly science post, I wanted to talk about a passion of mine that is as important to science as it is to my person. It is something I fall back on during challenging moments in grad school. It is something I utilize when I am at my most confused, most stressed, and most happy. It is something I use to help myself, as well as other scientists and my fellow person. It is a critical facet to every field of science that is often overlooked in books, museums, posters, and classrooms. I am talking about my favorite scientific tool: visual ART.

When I define art as a “scientific tool”, I am not referring to a lab instrument like a scale or pipette. Nor am I referring to visual imagery for data analysis, such as graphs (although these do indeed communicate science to an audience!). Rather, I am referring to the role of visual art as a universal translator for the often complex nature of science.

The old adage “one picture is worth a thousand words” is extremely apt in this case. The ultimate goal of science is to better understand the world around us and communicate this understanding, but science is often perceived as “difficult” due to its multifaceted nature. Science can break down the simplest parts of life into insanely complicated individual components and overwhelm the reader with numbers and information. This complexity has built a stigma around the sciences that the public often references (we are all guilty of assuming the “scientist = smart” stereotype). The “other worldy” aura surrounding science, which is often perpetuated by unaware or high-flown scientists, has prevented many capable individuals from learning science for themselves. This can ultimately lead to abuse of knowledge or misinformation. Only by dispelling the stigma we have built around the sciences can we unite humans under a common objective knowledge that will improve the state of our lives and our planet.

Politics and personal opinion are the usual suspects to blame for scientific communication breakdown, but I argue that over-complexity is just as problematic. Think about it: how can you learn and apply new knowledge in, for instance, fisheries stock assessment if you don’t know anything about basic statistics or basic fishery principles? The experienced statistician may fully understand the definition of a regression, but he may not know anything about fish ecology. Likewise, the experienced fisherman with extensive fish knowledge may not know anything about the statistics underlying the fish population. What’s more, a person who is neither a statistician nor a fisherman may not trust, learn, or even care about new knowledge in such a field (and rightfully so, if they are not properly informed).The problem boils down to one question: How can you communicate a complicated topic to a wide audience?

Herein lies the rub. If I want to apply this conundrum to my current research, I face the challenge of communicating chemical concepts that may be very familiar to chemists, such as microscopic compounds in the environment and mass spectrometry techniques, but wildly foreign to everyone else. Posing the above question to myself: how can I communicate the complicated topic of chemical environmental contaminants to a wide audience?

Now, I am speaking from experience here. When I started this chemistry-based project, I was a marine biologist, pure and simple. My background was the macroscopic – small invertebrates, large fish, and the ecology of lake and ocean systems that supported these organisms. When I embarked on a project that characterized a chemical compound at least 5000x as small as the smallest creature I had studied, I found myself faced with a wall of seemingly insurmountable chemical knowledge. I had to spend months just reading about chromatography and mass spectrometry to scratch the surface of a topic that I could have learned much faster if given a straightforward learning aid.

This is where visual art fits into science. Visual art is a wonderful way of bringing science to a large audience since it presents intimidating information in a comfortable, simplified, and easy-to-digest format. Pictures have a way of simplifying complex topics into a cohesive image that our brains can assimilate. Of course, the image cannot convey all the details, but it provides a comfortable foundation for learning and a fantastic way of getting the “take home” message of convoluted data. Anyone can become intrigued by an interesting image since it captures the eye and engages the brain. In my experience, children are also much more likely to pay attention if given an exciting visual aid.

The principle of learning science through visual stimulation goes both ways for the artist and the viewer. Along with many students, I learn better if I draw an image of something I am learning. I have drawn illustrations for other scientists’ research projects that I know very little about, and ended up consuming a plethora of information about a niche field that I would not have learned otherwise. The act of moving my hands and engaging my brain to make a visual representation of the topic I am learning reaffirms what I know and enlightens me on what I do not know.

Personally, graphite and ink drawings are my medium of choice for learning and communicating complicated scientific topics. I have used my art to show specific biological structure, biochemical pathways, or biomechanical dimensions, and to convey general concepts in single images (e.g. neuroscience engineering, chemicals in the environment, etc.). I have even used art as a social tool in the lab to generate a sense of community between individuals (what can I say? People love to talk about a new picture!). Art is my go-to tool for working and learning effectively. Think of the potential for art to bring awareness to important complicated topics that would otherwise be misunderstood or brushed aside in the wake of confusion! Art has the ability to connect all of us as humans under a common framework of understanding.

So, next time you are at an art museum, or even just staring at the pictures on the walls of your favorite coffee shop, keep in mind that the same underlying skill that was used to paint, draw, sculpt, or craft aesthetic works is also the key to understanding art’s seemingly antithetic friend, science.

I am the 2017 Sea Grant Legislative Fellow for the Coastal Caucus, and for the last two and half years I have been slogging through law school at U of O.  Most of law school is sitting in a class franticly typing everything your professor says, praying you don’t make enough eye contact to get cold called, or sitting alone reading really really boring cases. I think I actually forgot what is was like to be in a serious office environment. It’s taken me a few days to remember how to curl my eyelashes and never to wear heels. Although I miss yoga pants and messy buns something fierce but I’m glad to trade them for daily human interaction.

A lot of my first few months working for the Coastal Caucus has been spent learning what exactly the Caucus does and how it functions. The Caucus is made up of eight Senators and Representatives who represent coastal districts. Senator Jeff Kruse from District 1 is the Chair for the 2017 session so my desk is in his office this year and I interact with him or his Chief of Staff the most. I’m in almost constant contact with the rest of the members or their staff as issues come up. So far I have spent about 2 weeks total at my desk in the building and the majority of my work has been attending meetings around Oregon and answering emails from coffee shops. I know that this easy pace is about to change and I am so thankful for the extra time before session to get my feet wet.

Today is the first day of session, and the change from relatively low key to high energy is palatable in the building. For days I have been researching issues like tide gates and shipyards in an almost silent building, today I think I’ve been able to read 5 pages max. Lobbyists, staff, and constituents are everywhere discussing what this session will mean for Oregon. Tomorrow is our first 7 am Coastal Caucus meeting during session where we will start to prioritize and schedule all of the issues that have been discussed so far. Today is the final deep breath before the plunge.

Howdy, everyone!

My name is Daniel Sund, and this is my first ever blog post! I could not be more proud to be doing it for Oregon Sea Grant, an institution so very close to my heart, as a 2016-2017 Natural Resource Policy Fellow!

Seven years ago – when I officially transferred the focus of my academic studies to marine science – I passed along a nascent resume to my favorite oceanography professor in the hopes of gaining some hands-on experience. Low and behold two weeks later, after an out of the blue phone call from his colleague and then an interview I didn’t know I was walking into, I started work as a research assistant conducting a literature review on environmental hypoxia and its impacts on fish.

Since that first experience, which lasted nearly two years, Sea Grant and I have continued to have a long and fruitful relationship. I have had the distinct pleasure of mentoring other students developing their professional experiences in the Sea Grant Summer Scholars program, serving as a part of the interview committee placing students with mentors for the same program, interviewing for a few of Sea Grant’s fellowships myself, and, coming full circle, becoming a full-fledged Sea Grant Scholar.

Before accepting the Natural Resource Policy Fellowship, I spent that last four years as a field ecologist. I have spent endless days on the small bays in the Pacific Northwest looking at burrowing shrimp, juvenile crab, and intertidal habitats and endless nights watching video, making maps, and analyzing data to try to understand the role commercial oyster and clam aquaculture plays in the ever intricate and dynamic ecology of our estuaries. It surprises many people who know me that I have turned in my field gear and floppy old fishing hat for a position where I am at my desk 100% of my workday. My “fieldwork” now consists of organizing workshops, gathering sets of experts in a room to pick their brains, and rending even more time commitments from their busy schedules to inform resource management. All I have to say is that I am extremely happy with the transition.

As a fellow, I have stepped in as the only support staff in the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and am the only person within all of the state’s executive agencies entirely focused on Ocean Acidification (OA) and, on occasion, Hypoxia (OAH). For those of you who don’t know, OA refers to the process by which carbon dioxide (CO₂) is removed from the atmosphere by our oceans, where it chemically transitions to carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), a weak acid, resulting in seawater with lowered pH (acidified) as our oceans remove more and more CO₂ in response to increased atmospheric concentrations. Hypoxia (H) refers to an environmental condition of low oxygen dissolved within the water leading to decreased productivity and stress on organisms that respire on one end to massive fish die offs on the other. This focus of my position on OAH means that I am a single issue type of guy granted the unique ability to entirely immerse myself in the realms of science and policy to better understand and inform resource management as they relate to OAH along the Continental West Coast.

Day to day, my work duties include drafting emails, editing documents, reading literature, and compiling information. However, at a broader level, I have been an integral part of launching an international collaborative focused on combating OAH impacts across much of the globe (OA Alliance). I have also participated in high-level discussions between state, federal, and international governments. Additionally, I have organized regional-level efforts to understand how state governments are monitoring OAH on behalf of the public as well as started the process of identifying the monitoring improvements necessary to insure resource managers are able to respond threats to our coastal resources and the communities that rely upon them. While it may seem like a lot to have been part of in only two months, this list is far from exhaustive.

Being engaged in work that has tangible products with societal benefit is a very different experience from the academic research I have been a part of up until this point. After working as a technician and research assistant, I often felt that the information and insights we were generating were lost to the annals of a journal or our own filing cabinet. In comparison, this fellowship has placed me “where the rubber meets the road” with regards to being able to use research to create tools used both by natural resource managers and stakeholders. It seems to me that the efforts I am currently part of make a more immediate and meaningful impact than anything I have previously worked on. I look forward to continuing my work here and seeing where it takes me.

Hello Everybody,

It’s been a while since my first blog post, so it’s about time that I follow through with that second entry. As you guys may or may not recall, I am looking at the anti-diabetic pharmaceutical drug, metformin, as a contaminant of emerging concern (CEC) in the lower Columbia River. I know I promised to talk more about metformin as a drug, but I thought I would save this topic for next time. Instead, I am going to give a brief overview of my research methods that I have been busy developing for the past nine months.

In my last entry, I discussed the high incidence of Type II diabetes around the world and the discovery of metformin (the most commonly prescribed drug for Type II diabetes) as one of the most abundant pharmaceuticals being introduced into the environment. Metformin is not metabolized by the human body and excreted relatively unchanged into wastewater. Wastewater treatment does not necessarily target pharmaceuticals so much of the drug ends up in the environment.

My primary goal is to characterize metformin in the lower Columbia River in this environmental state. This means taking water samples and somehow measuring how much metformin is in each sample. So how do I do this? This is the question that I have been wrestling with since I started graduate school back in April. The short answer: Liquid Chromatography with Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS).

PLEASE DON’T RUN AWAY!! Those words scared me as much as you (unless, of course, you happen to be a chemist who loves chromatography). The LC-MS/MS machine scared me even more than that, until I understood that it is just an over-glorified “sorting machine”. I promise I’ll make this as simple as possible, for both you and me — it’s certainly what I’ve been trying to do since I first started my research. The pictures below sum up the bulk of my research and methods right now.

In fact, I’ve been participating in the OMSI Science Communication Fellowship to figure out how to simplify these convoluted methods. So far, I have completed three Saturday “Meet-A-Scientist” events where I try to communicate complicated scientific topics to a broad public audience (from kids to adults) by using a visual demo. I built a home-made “sorting machine” by reducing the LC-MS/MS machine to its simplest components. I would argue that I’ve learned more than my audience during this process – not only is my demo similar to the real machine in conceptual function, but it also requires an eerily similar degree of mechanical frustration.

(top) The Beast. Real LC-MS/MS requires a very scare machine. (bottom left) The Beast: Part Deux. Pretend LC-MS/MS also requires a very scary machine that breaks a lot. (right) The silver lining: kids love my home-made sorting machine!

What exactly is LC-MS/MS? Well, let’s start at the beginning: what is liquid chromatography (LC)? Liquid chromatography is just a way to separate something (i.e. a compound of interest) from a mixture. In my case, I use high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) which is just faster liquid chromatography under high pressure.

In its most basic form, HPLC requires a column (“stationary phase”) and a solvent (“mobile phase”) — in other words, two things that will interact with your compound in different ways. The stationary phase column is a tube packed with tiny porous spheres. The mobile phase is a liquid that is pumped through the column with your mixture. The idea is that your mixture is pushed down the column with the mobile phase and each compound in the mixture will stick to the column for a different amount of time. The compounds with greater affinity for the stationary phase will be pushed off later than the compounds that have greater affinity for the mobile phase. The goal is to get your compound off the column without other compounds coming off at the same time. The column can be highly customizable to better separate your unique compound, such as sphere size, column length, and modifications to sphere surfaces. The mobile phase can also be customizable depending on your needs, although it is typically water, organic solvent (e.g. methanol), or a mixture of the two. As you can imagine, half the battle with HPLC is selecting the appropriate column and mobile phase — the selection process can take many months of expensive and time-consuming trial and error (this was the first three months of my project!).

HPLC is the first part of the LC-MS/MS machine. The machine injects the mixture (river water, in my case) onto the column and rinses the column with the mobile phase. My mobile phase is a solution of water and methanol that increases with time. As the methanol concentration increases, the compounds in the river water are “pulled” off the column at different times depending on their unique chemical characteristics.

(left) The HPLC column (stationary phase) is a tube packed with tiny porous spheres. (right) The idea behind liquid chromatography. The mixture plus a mobile phase solvent is injected onto the column and the compounds in the mixture separate at different times as they interact with the column and mobile phase differently.

The stuff coming off the column is recorded by the computer and represented in the form of a chromatogram, which shows the amount of material coming off the column over time. However, the question remains: how do we know which compound is coming off the column at which time? This is where the second part of the LC-MS/MS machine comes in.

The liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) machine consists of two parts: an HPLC machine to perform liquid chromatography (LC) and a mass spectrometer to perform tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). The computer represents the data with a chromatogram which shows the amount of material coming off the column with time.

Mass spectrometry (MS) is essentially just an extra step of “sorting” based on the specific mass of compounds. After your mixture has been separated by liquid chromatography, a mass spectrometer identifies the compounds coming off the column based on their unique masses.

The mass spectrometer first excites (i.e. ionizes) the separated compounds coming off the HPLC so that the machine can use charges to sort and pull the compounds through the machine to the detector. Specifically, the ionized compounds follow a path through an acceleration chamber and into a deflection field produced by two magnets. These magnets will deflect compounds differently based on their mass. Think of it like being shot through a cannon: the light cannonball will go farther than the heavy cannonball; Calista Flockhart will go farther than Mama Cass. The machine can be programmed to only let one specific mass, several masses, or all masses through to the detector. The detector will then record how much of each ionized compound is coming out of the mass spectrometer.

A basic mass spectrometer. The compounds coming out of the HPLC column are ionized and pulled through the system. A magnet deflects compounds differently depending on their mass. In this picture, the mass spectrometer has been programmed to detect all ionized compounds, but it can also be programmed to detect only one or a few masses. (picture courtesy of Khan Academy)

In my case, I use tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS), which goes a step further and identifies the structure of the compound. A tandem mass spectrometer is just like a “basic” mass spectrometer, only the ionized compounds are broken into pieces in a modified acceleration chamber. Instead of sorting whole compounds based on mass, the machine sorts the fragments of compounds based on mass. You can then verify the structure of your compound of interest by looking at what fragments are present or not present. This is especially helpful if your compound of interest is in a mixture with other compounds that have similar masses, which is the case for metformin in river water.

Caption: A tandem mass spectrometer (MS/MS). The compounds coming out of the HPLC column are ionized and pulled through the system, just like in the basic mass spectrometer. However, MS/MS breaks up the compound(s) coming off the HPLC column into fragments. These fragments are then sorted by mass, rather than the whole compound. MS/MS can help verify the identity of a compound in a mixture of compounds that might have similar mass (as is the case for my river water samples).

THAT’S IT! LC-MS/MS is so simple, right?! Needless to say, the method development for LC-MS/MS is an extensive process. Nine months later, and I am just starting to realize this.

I am currently working with the OHSU Core Lab to fine-tune their LC-MS/MS machine for separation of metformin (and its primary breakdown product, guanylurea) from river water. I have a ton of Columbia River water samples from this fall that I am eager to run, so hopefully I will be able to start collecting data soon! In the meantime, I will try my best to separate any LC-MS/MS frustration from my mixture of scientific curiosity that brought me to this amazing graduate program!

Wish me luck!