Hi, my name is Will Fennie and I am a Robert E. Malouf Scholar. I am working on my PhD at Oregon State University and really interested in the early life history of rockfishes. Rockfishes, like many marine organisms, have a planktonic larval phase where their young drift offshore and develop in the pelagic waters off Oregon’s coast. As they develop, these young fish must feed, grow, and return (or recruit) to nearshore reefs. Rockfish face many challenges during this journey. My research aims to understand how the oceanographic conditions young rockfish experience affect their growth. In addition, I want to study how rockfish early growth contributes to a juvenile rockfishes ability to survive the journey to nearshore reefs.

Sorting pelagic rockfishes during the 2016 NOAA Pre Recruit Survey. Photo Curt Roegner.

To study how ocean conditions affect juvenile rockfishes’ growth, I have to collect juvenile rockfish during their pelagic life stage. To determine how early growth determines recruitment to nearshore reefs, I need to collect juvenile rckfishes during their pelagic life stage, their settlement stage (right before they recruit to nearshore reefs), and their poste-settlement stage (once they have settled to reefs). Because the ocean off Oregon’s coast is so wild, I’ve needed to team up with some amazing people to get on the water and collect rockfishes. I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Ric Brodeur a year and a half ago and because we shared similar interests, he allowed me to come on his NOAA research cruise to collect pelagic juvenile rockfishes.

Next, my lab mate Dani Ottmann paved the way for OSU students to work with Dr. Kirsten Grorud-Colvert at OSU and with scientists at Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (ODFW). OSU and ODFW scientists have developed a nearshore groundfish recruitment monitoring program. These scientists deploy moorings offshore of Oregon’s nearshore reefs witha standard monitoring unit for the recruitment of fishes (SMURF) to collect setttlement stage fishes. SMURFs are plastic garden fence mesh cylinders that mimic the kelp canopy habitat juvenile fishes recruit to. The Oregon Coast Aquarium and ODFW provide vessels to reach these moorings. Once there, snorkelers jump into the water to retrieve SMURFs and collect juvenile fishes. Finally, I have to SCUBA dive on nearshore reefs to collect juvenile rockfishes that have settled to benthic habitat.

Left: Dani and I retrieving a SMURF in Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve. (Photo: Kelsey Swieca)
Right: Dani displaying a SMURF with Redfish Rocks in the background.

Thanks to all the help I’ve had, I have enough samples to start my research. Through my collaboration with Ric Brodeur, I have access to pelagic juvenile rockfish samples of several species from the last 12 years, and access to the early life stage of black rockfish. Thanks to OSU and ODFW’s SMURF project, I have access to several hundred settlement stage black and quillback rockfishes. Thanks to several OSU dive buddies, I was able to collect settled juvenile black and quillback rockfishes on Oregon’s nearshore reefs.

Next quarter I will be busy working up these samples. Stay tuned for information on how to measure the age and growth of juvenile rockfishes.

Cat Dayger Goes Global

As a fellow, much of the work I do is behind-the-scenes. Editing drafts of documents, taking notes during conference calls, sending emails to follow up on action items, introducing myself to the main players on a given issue. To describe what I am working on during my fellowship, I usually reference the main projects I’m involved in, but skip over the actual day-to-day work I do in support of them, because “send emails” isn’t very descriptive or interesting. Nearly everyone in nearly every job sends emails. Now I have a tangible product of those emails to tell you about.

One of the issues I spend a large portion of my time thinking about in my role as a Policy Fellow is ocean acidification, often shortened to simply OA. What is ocean acidification? The ocean reacts with atmospheric carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, making the ocean more acidic. If there is a high concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, more of that carbon will end up in the ocean and the ocean will become more acidic. By the way, the ocean is not “acidic” per se, but rather closer to being acidic. That’s a problem because it can prevent shell-wearing creatures (plankton, crabs, clams, oysters, etc) from making their shells properly. No shell, no critter. You can read a more detailed explanation of ocean acidification and why it’s a big deal on the West Coast here.

A bunch of the projects I work on deal with combating ocean acidification in Oregon and on the West Coast more generally. For instance, the newly formed International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification, or more simply the International OA Alliance, supports governments and other entities in addressing ocean acidification.

A few weeks ago, the OA Alliance called entities from all over the world to sign on to the Alliance at the 3rd Annual Our Ocean Conference in Washington DC. The Alliance aims to support those committed to taking action to combat ocean acidification. Our Ocean 2016 brought together governments, non-profits, universities, and more from all over the world to focus on ocean issues, including ocean acidification. Highlighting initiatives together builds greater momentum for each particular issue, making the OA Alliance appearance at Our Ocean 2016 a “big deal”. My contribution? To prepare for the Conference, I worked with a team to develop website copy and short handouts describing the OA Alliance. Yes, that included emails and conference calls and lots of track-changes editing in Microsoft Word. You should check out the OA Alliance website! The OA Alliance had a positive reception at Our Ocean and is moving right along to their next steps. I’m helping with those steps and deliverables too, so stay tuned!

It is fun to have a tangible (is a website tangible?) outcome to show people with pride when asked how my Fellowship is going. Celebrating milestones is essential in the incremental business of science policy.

This past Tuesday I was confronted with a shocking sexist letter directed at a woman applying to the College of Forestry in 1957. The woman was blatantly told that she could not enroll in the College of Forestry because the social constructs of the time would not allow it. The forestry jobs post college are only suitable for male employees, field trips for the college require sharing sleeping quarters, which would “pose a definite problem as far as a girl is concerned”, and a woman would not be able to fulfill the internship requirement because no forestry organization would hire her. Yikes. The culprit college behind this letter? Oregon State University. Fortunately the College of Forestry has come a long way since 1957. In 2015, 142 men graduated from the College of Forestry as well as 91 women, from 0% female graduates to 39%, a significant improvement.

This letter was brought to my attention during a search advocate training workshop I am taking this week put on by Anne Gillies, the Associate Director of Affirmative Action and Advancement in the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access at OSU (what a mouthful!). Working in the research and scholars department at Oregon Sea Grant puts me directly in the process of requesting and reviewing applications, and therefore I figured I should know how to navigate this process in a fair and equitable manner. While I certainly do not purposefully attempt to introduce any bias into this process, I am also aware that many employers believe that they are conducting a just search such as I do, and yet there is still a stunning lack of diversity in many STEM fields. Now why is that? Due to this vast discrepancy, I, and the rest of the research and scholars team, am taking action to ensure we are aware of potential biases and how to avoid them.

Focusing on increasing diversity in applicants applying for and selected for OSG fellowships is necessary seeing as there is very little diversity currently in the fisheries field. A fellowship with OSG gives fellows unique opportunities to network and expand their skill sets, as well as provides a competitive edge for their resume when applying to future jobs. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that OSG fellows may have an advantage when applying for some fisheries positions. A study conducted by Arismendi and Penaluna in 2016 found that women and racial/ethnic minorities are sorely underrepresented in fisheries science both in higher education institutions and in federal employment. Despite the fact that slightly more (52%) women are earning PhDs in biological science, the majority (74%) of federal fisheries scientists/managers are male, and over 70% of tenure-track faculty in fisheries are male. This study points out that there is not a lack of well qualified women and minorities in the fisheries field, however, these groups are not ending up being selected for the tenure-track faculty or federal positions. Clearly something needs to change.

Why should we focus on increasing diversity in the fisheries workforce? The main reason is that every individual, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., deserves the same unearned privileges and opportunities. Another important reason is that diversity in general is actually beneficial to a workforce. “Previous research has shown that a diverse workforce generates new ideas, promotes innovation, leads to better problem-solving (Østergaard et al. 2011), enhances scientific productivity (Horta 2013), and increases the chances that the science will be high impact (Freeman and Huang 2015).” – Arismendi and Penaluna 2016. There is nothing to lose, and much to be gained, by incorporating diversity into the workforce. I look forward to entering into day two of the search advocate training workshop tomorrow and furthering my knowledge on this topic.

First Results for Tillamook Bay!

It seems as though the end of the Malouf scholarship is drawing nigh and that this will be my last blog post. I’m not quite sure where a year went as it seems just a month ago that I was meeting with Dr. Malouf and the other scholarship recipients, happily discussing our research and the work ahead. That said, from another perspective it seems a lifetime spent over the last year slowly grinding forward. In terms of progress, much of the hard computer modeling work is nearing a close and we are transitioning into the significantly more fun results stage. In this pursuit I am working with Jon Allan at the Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) to make flood maps for public consumption. There is a wealth of progress to be made in this regard, comparing our results to DOGAMI’s and FEMAS flood maps and tracking down the important processes controlling flooding. It feels like a breath of fresh air to be finally getting close to the answers and (hopefully) community shaping results that I began working on years ago. For a problem of this size it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the little details and forget the big picture and the reason why you are here!

While this part of the project is nearing an end, I am considering it only part one of the story. Many lessons have been learned and part two will incorporate these changes as well as input from communities and stakeholders. The two main points that will be tackled in this new approach are:

1. As per community and stakeholder request, a fully probabilistic approach that both encompasses scientific uncertainty and allows a determination of risk to be placed in the hands of local communities
2. A generalizing of the modeling process that allows for assessment at multiple locations instead of single study sites.

I have just started spinning up this new part of the project via a collaboration with Peter Ruggiero at Oregon State. I have also restarted a collaboration with Sally Hacker in the integrative biology department to try and transfer our predicted future hydrodynamics to changes in the biosphere. So while the sun is setting on the first stage of the project, it only means a rebirth of these important questions.

Newport Sunset

I want to end by expressing my vast gratitude to the Oregon Sea Grant folks for funding this project initially (before I was even a student here) and then funding me through the Malouf scholarship. Their vote of confidence has provided me the funding and motivation to continue onward when things get hard. I hope that when my PhD eventually comes to a close, everyone who has read this blog will be at my defense for the true final blog post update. Thanks Everyone!

The summer is just about over and school is starting again in a couple weeks. But what a summer it has been!

Just after school ended, I had the opportunity to go to the upper peninsula of Michigan to attend the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management (ISSRM). Students and professionals from all over the world were in attendance. I got to go on a field trip hosted by the Keweena Bay Indian Community, who showed us around their fish hatchery, native plant greenhouse and garden, nursery, a restoration area that was a previous stamp mine dump site, and their dance ground. They were very hospitable and answered our (numerous) questions.

There were a lot of talks, on a wide variety of natural resource and human dimension topics, and the keynote speakers were extremely interesting. On the last day of talks we were eating lunch and looked outside; it looked like midnight. Then the wind came. Then lightening. Then torrential rain. I was one of the few (ahem, unwise) adventurers to walk the 10 minutes back to the afternoon talks through the brunt of the storm. I had to wring out my pants and still had my own personal puddle at the end of the talk. Ah, the Midwest. Despite that, we had a wonderful picnic on Lake Superior with one of the local delicacies: meat pasties. It’s like a hearty oblong meat pie, and is delicious.

I got to present my poster at the poster session, and had people from several countries as well as from the local Native American community asking questions. I had a particularly interesting conversation about the differences in the meaning behind “tribe” with a fellow from Africa.

The rest of the summer was quite busy as well, including helping a couple fellow students with field work, getting my field work off the ground, and a phone survey job that had me asking questions of Oregon residents on their opinions and knowledge of Oregon marine spatial planning and reserves.

Currently, I am traveling back and forth between Portland (my current home) and the Oregon coast conducting interviews with tribal members for my thesis. This is extremely exciting and is going extremely well so far.

The amount of work to get to the point of interviewing tribal members is a lot more than I initially thought. Each tribe is a sovereign nation, meaning in part that they each have different procedures and timing for approving any type of research. This is especially important when the research includes traditional knowledge, which is the topic of several of my interview questions. I have had to draw upon my experience working for a tribe prior to going to graduate school. There are extensive data protections that have to be put in place, as well as a sensitivity when interviewing tribal elders that can only be learned with experience. Nonetheless, I have found the experience to be a great learning experience and I look forward to continuing the project.

Since this is my last blog post, I would like to take the chance to express my tremendous thanks to Sea Grant for accepting me and my project into the Malouf scholarship program. The funding has made my graduate experience much more extensive, with being able to go to several local and one larger conference. The funding also allowed me to get the equipment needed for the interview set-up, as well as the travel up and down the coast for interviews, meetings, and trainings that helped make this project possible. I am also thankful for the connections that Sea Grant has made possible, which has made for a very rich networking experience. I highly encourage students to work with Sea Grant if at all possible for the opportunities this great organization offers.

My experiences this summer were incredible. I wish that I could stay a Sea Grant Scholar forever. Unfortunately, this is not possible and I will have to continue on my career path through different avenues.

This fall I will return to the University of Alabama to complete my final semester. I will graduate with a B.S. in Marine Science/Biology and a minor in Geology. During my last term on campus, I will be taking slightly fewer classes that I have before. This will allow me to increase my participation in research opportunities on campus. I will continue to serve as a research assistant in the geology department. This semester will be unique in that I have been given the opportunity to conduct my own project on oyster shells from gulf coast aquaculture. Secondly, I will begin work at the Geological Survey of Alabama. I will be working in the survey’s ecological monitoring department. My duties will require my participation in field work and the entry of data from the fish we collect.

After graduation in December, I plan to pursue a fisheries observer position in Alaska. My observer training would begin late February. My intentions are to hold this position for approximately a year and pursue a master’s degree starting in the Fall of 2018. I also have aspirations to work as a raft guide in the summer leading up to my graduate studies. I am at an exciting point in my life where my path could go many different directions. I look forward to my future adventures and am grateful for all I have learned and all who I met during my time as a Sea Grant Summer Scholar.

This weekend was great! We went whale watching in Depoe Bay where a resident group of gray whales reside. Our tour guide, Carrie Newell is a retired researcher from OSU who has dedicated her life to researching gray whales. Another cool thing about our tour was her dog, who can smell whales and let us know when a whale was nearby by lifting up one ear.

He senses a whale!

I was dubious at first but I can say with conviction, that dog definitely has a unique talent for spotting whales. We saw three grays, one of which was sleeping! We cut the engine of our boat and floated nearby watching the sleeping whale bob up and down in the choppy waves.

The rest of the week was spent preparing for the Sea Grant Symposium presentation and poster session. It was a great opportunity to share my research with my fellow interns and other researchers at Hatfield. While preparing for the symposium I also found myself reflecting on how much I have learned this summer. After reading over 60 scientific papers related to ocean acidification I feel much more confident in my grasp of the subject. I also know that there are many gaps in the literature and the scientific community has a lot of work ahead of them if we are to fully understand how our changing oceans will affect marine life. I hope I am able to apply the knowledge I acquired this summer and contribute to this field in my future career, hopefully starting this fall when I will be doing my oceanography senior thesis.

This morning researchers up and down Oregon’s coast set out before the sunrise in search of green crabs. As part of a simultaneous sampling effort, I have trapped at my most productive field sites over the past three days. This morning alone 32 green crabs were collected at one site. This is an exciting number as I only captured 52 at the site over the whole summer. I can’t think of a better way to mark the end of my incredible 10 week internship.

I have absolutely loved my time here in Oregon. The research I participated in kept me excited and provoked in me ideas for future research. My position allowed me to receive valuable career advice from several very successful figures in the science community. By participating in several different projects, I was able to further refine a field a study to target for my graduate studies. I lived and worked with some truly incredible people. I am sad to say goodbye, but I look forward to hearing of everyone’s future journeys. If all of this wasn’t enough, I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural scenery that I have seen. From crystal clear rivers, to vast sand dunes, and thriving marshes, Oregon’s coast has it all. I fell in love with this place and I plan to be back in the future.

This week started off early, 4 am to be exact. After noticing we were starting to lose our minds in the office, my mentors let my officemate and I off of desk duty for the day to get some field work experience. We assisted with recovering and replacing nutrient samples in a kelp bed in a section of the Yaquina Bay mud flats. We were up before the sun to take advantage of the low tide.

Fun in the mud!

It was a great time, squelching across the mudflat, trying to watch the sunrise while at the same time making sure not standing in one place too long and risk getting stuck in the knee-deep mud. 

Later in the week I went to help out with another sea star wasting survey. This time we were at the Otter Rock Marine Reserve. The tide pools that morning held all sorts of cool critters. There were the usual purple urchins and green anemones along with some more rare finds including a blood star, a couple of different types of nudibranchs and some lined chitons. We measured and noted the condition of over 100 sea stars. Most of the stars we found were a small, six-legged species however we also found a good number of large ochre stars. 

I did still spend a lot of my time in the office this week working on my research despite the field opportunities. I have been working on getting my presentation and poster ready for the Sea Grant Symposium. As far as my research goes, we plan to meet with the rest of the CBRAT team and come up with risk thresholds on Monday so I have values to present for decapods.

Sunrise at the Otter Rock Marine Reserve

Lately, I have found myself especially intrigued by nautical tales. Specifically, those that share a fisherman’s humbling experience with the powerful ocean. While exploring the vast world that is Powell’s books in Portland, I picked up a copy of Earnest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”. I usually take my time reading books, but I couldn’t put this one down. The book stimulated my thoughts on learning through failure, a skill I find particularly applicable to the field of science.

Oddly enough, soon after finishing my new book, I encountered an old man with quite a few stories about life on the sea. After a long day of work with no lunch, I found myself sitting at the bar of our local pub. Next to me sat a man in his 60’s with a thick grey beard, missing more teeth than he had. It didn’t take long for conversation to start. It was obvious that I was not from the area. I came to learn this man had worked on commercial vessels for longer than I had been a live, a strange life to contemplate for a boy raised in the suburbs on Nashville, TN. Our conversation delved deeper as my curiosity grew. He shared with me stories of 30 foot waves and a captain too greedy to return to port. Upon their boat capsizing, a nearby vessel flipped as well in an attempt to save the crew. My new friend had to be rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter while wearing nothing but jeans and a sweat shirt. His only advice to me was “Wear your dry suit!”

I’m sure aspects of his story were exaggerated, but the tale struck a chord with me. It allowed me to reflect further on the acceptance of uncontrollable variables. Throughout life, unexpected circumstances are inevitable, especially when at sea. Accepting change and reacting accordingly is a trait I personally find crucial in achieving success across all aspect of life. Throughout my future travels, I look forward to the fishing tales that will find their way into my ears. I leave you with a quote from “The Old Man and the Sea”.

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”

-Earnest Hemingway