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!

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.