This last week has felt very relativistic. I’m not sure what happened to all of the hours, which depression in the fabric of space-time continuum I rolled into. No one went to the field, every one retreating to their respective labs and offices. Politics continued to get crazier, NPR hard to listen to on the morning commute. Fred Meyer staged their eclipse survival supplies by the front door of every store. It even rained on Sunday! I continue to feel like a slinky on an escalator; the end near, while never quite arriving.

My proposal to stay on at the EPA as a volunteer and continue my work with respiration rates has been approved. I feel good. I have one more week to go in this internship, and then I’m on my own with the BOD bottles, data sheets, and the strange state of informed ignorance that doing science puts me in. September is coming, a time of beginnings and ends. 12 years ago, September found me with a canteen and a rifle patrolling a New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Ten years ago, I held back the tears as the bus drove away from the barracks, taking me and my brothers to an airfield and Iraq. If my old sergeant major could see me now, he’d probably shake his head. “Jennings, how’d you end up a geek, a fish-squeezer, a civilian?” “It must have been my people skills, sergeant major.”

For the last several days, my main task has been the construction of a poster for our final presentation this Friday. I was somewhat surprised to find that no one enjoys writing them. From the number of posters mounted along the walls of every hallway in the building, you might think otherwise. Many folks told me that they enjoy the process of preparing papers for publication, even the revision process, yet there was universal disdain of science posters. The results of my informal survey pointed to several issues: the lack of space to properly fit relevant items, the difficulty in keeping fonts and formatting from going screwy at the printer’s, and the seemingly impossible demand to turn quantitative analysis into sophisticated cave drawings with minimal text and maximum cool factor. Despite the odds, I managed to complete my poster by the deadline (Monday), and I took advantage of the many excellent examples around me to make the best poster I have ever made! To be honest, it’s only the second one I have ever made, but it’s a significant improvement over the last. I found excellent conceptual diagrams to use and minimized confusing figures or charts.

It feels good to make something that will be manifest in meat-space reality. It will be a tangible thing, unlike so many things that I make as a student. It’s a strange process, being a student who remembers mimeographs and typewriters: I conduct research and reading digitally, type a paper digitally, submit the assignment digitally, and look for my reward, a number in the “grades” tab on a website that means “good job” or “uh oh”. The dominance of the digital realm sometimes leaves me feeling empty, bereft of any proof that I have been, that I have felt, that I am here on planet Earth doing things. Posters erupt from the binary and claim their place among the living, reminding me that we are still just sophisticated animals that need to stare at things together, point and go “Hmmmm. What?”

I briefly mentioned in my last blog post that a couple of weeks ago I went to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston for one of their summer seminars. NOAA Marine ecologist Robert Pitman of the Southwest Marine Fisheries Science Center was presenting his research on killer whales in the Antarctic, and man, did I learn a lot. I have focused on terrestrial mammals for most of my degree, primarily domesticated species, and therefore have an elementary (if that, even) supply of knowledge about marine mammals. It’s kind of a shame and a bit embarrassing; I have lived in a coastal state for almost four years now and haven’t really realized how interested I am in the ocean and its inhabitants until this past year. It started when I began working for the Estuary Program in Morro Bay, watching the sea otters float past from our office and listening to the sea lions barking on the dock throughout the day. The combination of my insecurity about not having a ton of formal education in marine biology and probably the apprehension of breaking the news to my family (located in a landlocked state) that I might stay in ocean/coastal science forever has prevented me from seriously realizing that this is indeed what I am interested in. And yet, this summer it feels as though I’ve done quite a bit of catching up.

That’s why I was eager to see Robert’s lecture, and it also turned out to be a source of some significant connections with other people in the whale community. I met Joy Primrose, the president of The American Cetacean Society’s Oregon Chapter, mostly because I said I liked her tote bag, which was adorned with a Lisa-Frank-meets-Christian-Lassen style orca pattern. She was telling me about a photographer based out of Portland who has given whale photography workshops and that he just recently did some work out of Port Orford. Upon telling me we should connect, I realized she was talking about Erik Urdahl, one of the photographers that Dustin and I worked with a few weeks ago. Erik started The Spout, an organization dedicated to connecting people with whales and promoting their conservation.

I immediately emailed him asking if he is offering any more whale photography workshops, and he said no, but instead offered to take Dustin and I out to Depoe Bay for a casual whale watching excursion. He kindly lent me his telephoto lens and we took a Zodiac with Gary at The Whale’s Tail out on the water. You have to realize, I’ve never been near a whale. I saw a grey whale spout maybe twice from far away on a boat in Mexico last winter, but that hardly counts. In short, there was a lot of shrieking and profane language, because how else do you contain that kind of excitement? As Erik says, the excitement was up the wazoo. I also got to (yes, my use of the words “got to” are to emphasize what a privileged this was) experience the fragrant scent of whale ‘breath’ for the first time.

PICS OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN

Erik

That weekend, because I clearly didn’t get enough, I met Joy at the Devil’s Punchbowl lookout/Otter Rock Marine Reserve to help her survey visitors about their demographic information, their awareness of Oregon’s Marine reserves, and their knowledge about whales. Most of the visitors were not from Oregon; in fact, most of the ones I talked to at least were from the Midwest and hadn’t ever seen a whale. Some had never even seen the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully, a lone grey whale spent the majority of the morning meandering between Gull Rock and a large kelp forest a few hundred meters south, and it showed off its flukes many times for a number of excited people. We also may have seen a harbor porpoise! We then visited Depoe Bay and watched 6 or 7 whales surface over and over while they fed on mycids inside the bay. Later that day, we went back to Joy’s house and I bought this book and the most recently updated poster of cetaceans of the world.

The rest of the weekend was spent rushing to Boardman again for the sunset, exploring rivers with the roommates, and meeting some horses. Another unreal week down.

This past week was devoted to the August fish seining in South Slough. Since I already spent one blog post describing the process (http://wp.me/p64Blw-1cd), I figured that for my blog post this week I would highlight some of the fish species that we have been encountering during the seining.

The Pacific staghorn sculpin (Leptocottus armatus) is commonly found in South Slough. It has spiky projection on its gill cover that it can raise when threatened. They also sometimes vibrate when threatened. Here’s a tiny staghorn sculpin:

And a bigger one:

Many different species of perch live in the South Slough, including Shiner perch (Cymatogaster agregata), White seaperch (Phanerodon furcatus), Walleye surfperch (Hyperprosopon argenteum), silver surfperch (Hyperprosopon ellipticum) and Pile perch (Rhacochilus vacca).

This week we caught a striped seaperch (Embiotoca lateralis):

We also get a few different species of flatfish (fish that live on the seafloor and swim on their side, with both eyes on one side of their body). English sole (Parophrys vetulus) are most common, but there are also Speckled sanddab (Citharichthys stigmaeus), and starry flounder (Platichthys stellatus). We got a huge starry flounder this week, which was really unusual.

A tiny English sole:

And a starry flounder:

We also caught a bay pipefish (Syngnathus leptorhynchus). Bay pipefish live in eelgrass beds, and their bodies mimic a strand of eelgrass. Pipefish are related to seahorses, and the males incubate the eggs, just like seahorses.

Juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) also appear pretty frequently. There are both wild Chinook and hatchery-raised Chinook. We can tell wild-born from hatchery-raised Chinook from the adipose fin (a small fin behind the dorsal fin): hatchery Chinook have their adipose fin clipped, while wild Chinook do not.

It’s been so much fun seining and learning about the different fish in the South Slough this summer. I’m going to miss it!

This week, I finally made a stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory’s visitor’s center and had 2 scoops of caramel butter pecan ice cream. It was an unusual 88 degrees in Tillamook that day and we were headed to Garibaldi to install sensor rigging beneath a pier and collect water samples. It was a nice break from the car ride from Newport and the already long day. I had spent the morning learning how to analyze cholorophyll samples with the Turner Designs 10AU fluorometer. While not especially difficult, making sure to do every thing in the right order with the right checks conducted can get confusing fast when you’ve only had 5 hours of sleep. Analysis is conducted under low-light levels, and the fluorometer gives off a fire-red glow from it’s power button that is both sinister and sedating. It was a long morning with too little coffee, the 10AU glaring at me like the frighteningly incomprehensible machine that it is inside the dull black, ruggedized case. Science apparatus can often-times look quite frightening for no reason at all. The 10AU says, “I might explode,”, it’s red light screaming, “look out”. The fluorometer is just a fancy lamp, but it sure doesn’t look like that or feel like that when you’re sleep-deprived and concentrating on doing things right because the samples are not practice samples. Why can’t it look like an ipod?

After the welcome ice cream break, we launched the boat and tied up beneath the pier of interest. The installation of the sensor rigging and test package went off without a hitch. I took pictures to document the project, and collected water for BOD incubation and nutrient analysis. The test package, with a somewhat sacrificial sensor, will be retrieved shortly to check the data and see how the whole set up did with the tides.

My respiration runs have yielded interesting variation in rates, and as the time to present this research and talk about its implications comes near, I am forced to admit that I am intrigued by what I have found so far but cannot explain it or say just what it means in terms of pH, carbonate chemistry, or nutrient pollution. Perhaps the most important knowledge gained at this point is a sense of the magnitude of change involved in respiration rates, how those rates might change spatially and temporally, and how best to measure them.

I am incubating the last samples taken from beneath a pier in Garibaldi near the mouth of the bay. The three samples were taken over the time that we were there installing the rigging, as the tide changed. It will be interesting to see the results. The last sample was taken as sea water was rushing back in to the bay and was super-saturated with oxygen, unlike any sample incubated so far. Exciting!