Saving Oysters in Oregon – week 6

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Call me Captain!

I now officially hold an Oregon boater’s license.  After two whole days of an online crash course, I should now know about the official road rules of the sea.. and the appropiate types of toilets for different vessels.  The course was very comprehensive, and after taking it, I know a lot about boating legalities and issues I had never even thought of before, but there was just so much information!  I hope I can keep straight who has the right of way on the ocean and what different honks mean.

The course, however, didn’t teach me HOW to drive a boat.  After I had my printed boating certificate, I excitedly got into our 16-foot vessel, and immediately realized.. “I don’t know how to START this thing..”.  I had two great teachers though – Ali and Adam.  Ali dealt with the fundamentals, like pump the gas to start the motor, and Adam dealt with the get-to-know-your-boat’s-limits, like quickly push the throttle to the max to see how fast it can go from neutral!  I’m starting to get the hang of it, but other boats should probably still watch out when I get on the water!

 

Oly-ROCS go into Mass Production

We are revving up for our first deployment of 10-15 Oly-ROCS into the bay!

It will happen next week, so I have been busy building.  Our prototypes seem pretty hardy so hopefully they’ll survive their new homes in the water.  If not, we shall see what’s wrong with this first deployment.  We’re also going to be testing different shell orientations in the cement – how they fare out against the elements, how well they attract native oyster larvae to settle, and how settled juveniles survive on them.

We have two different shell orientations we’re checking out:

1) Shells sticking up, and
2) Shells flat against the concrete.

 

Both orientations can be found in nature, the former usually found on the sides of smaller rocks or on rounded sides, and the latter usually seen on the flat sides of larger rocks (from my observation).

 

Also..

These are Pacific oyster shells (non-native, from Japan), that have native Olympia oyster juveniles on them.  Two years ago, these ‘shell bags’ were strategically put out in the bay to attract Olympia oyster larvae, but the oysters can’t stay in these orange bags forever.  Some restoration efforts have simply scattered those shells with the attached juveniles into bays, but they can be easily washed away with the tides or smothered with sand and mud.

Our idea:  A few Oly-ROCS will also be made with these shells, and we shall see if this is an option for them!

 

 

 

 

 

Octopuses…Guided

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Lesson #1: The plural of octopus is octopuses. NOT octopi. It is a Greek word, hence the weird ending. I will have to correct my freshman biology teacher.

Hi. Hello.

Sad, but true. I am writing this blog entry on a Sunday… at work, while most of my co-seagranters are going hiking somewhere in the Oregon mountains. Oh, the price you pay to play with octopuses.

This week was very productive. I had Monday off, which is a pretty cool thing because everybody in Hatfield is working, which allows me to really relax, or do work. I did both that day. And almost finished my interpretative panel (fancy word for poster) design. The entire days of Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked on my panel content. I tried to be all Mr. Graphic Designer, by using my Word program to design a panel, for which I ended up spending way too much time on, just to have the actual graphic designer tell me all I needed was text content. Here is what the first draft looks like:

1st Draft of my Interpretative Panel

 

Some of the titles will change, as well as the text content. The cool thing about this, that won’t be noticed until the end product is done in November, is that the skeleton on the top right corner will be an actual Steller sea lion rib-cage!

Thursday was a big day. We had a focus group moderator host a focus group for my panel. Seven people sat down and tore it apart, giving me a lot of good feedback and a direction in which to take the panel design. I am very grateful of this event. I almost forgot to mention that the visitor counter in the entrance marked over 2400, which is the largest group of people I have witnessed in the VC so far. I didn’t even get a chance to eat lunch until 3 pm on that day! Later on, we went to Cafe Mundo for open mic, where Betty Mujica, a fellow Sea Grant Scholar, got on stage to play her ukulele for the crowds for the first time ever. Did I mention she rocked it?

Betty and I on stage!

Friday, I had off, and Betty and I drove to a hatchery in Netarts Bay. I spent the morning hanging out in a bar in Netarts bay called Schooners, which I recommend to anybody. Later on that day, we went to the TIllamook cheese factory, a thrift store, where I paid 5 dollars for a pair of really nice rubber boots, and in Depoe bay to look at the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

Saturday… work! I gave an estuary tour to a couple of folks who kept me a bit longer, but they were so interested that I didn’t mind (what an information broker I am growing up to be!). The day went by a bit slow, because I spent the whole day working on my panel content again, which was starting to get redundant, since I felt I had finished on Wednesday, but now I had a lot of notes on how to fix the panel. I am currently about a third done with that!

Today… work! I will try to finish the text content, work on my curriculum design for the kids, and enjoy a Louisiana style fish fry later on tonight!

 

Sitting on the sidelines

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This week has been a pretty mellow week overall. Keeping in line with my experience with Sea Grant, I was recruited to other projects again. My post today will jump around a bit between all the different things I was up to, which is fitting to describe the events of this week.

Sunday I helped out with the Sea Grant booth at Da Vinci Days, a local arts and music festival in Corvallis. Even though it was raining out, I had a lot of fun. Most of my time was spent working with kids teaching them about watersheds. Once upon a time, I worked in childcare for four and a half years. Working with kids is hard, but incredibly rewarding, and working at Da Vinci Days reminded me of that. The best quote I took away from the day was from a young boy, who said this in response to a question regarding how we prevent motor oil from getting into the ocean:

“We could dig a hole in the middle of the ocean, put a plug in it, and when we want the bad stuff to go away, we’ll pull out the plug, let it drain, and have the ocean fill again.”

The most eventful day of my week was Wednesday. That day, I was given the task to write up a proposal outlining all the different options that have been considered for the Workshop I’m planning. The deadline was pressing; I had to turn around the proposal that day. Needless to say, I spent my Wednesday furiously writing to meet the quick turn around that was needed. I actually enjoyed having the quick deadline. Maybe it’s the adrenaline junkie in me that likes the thrill of a challenge that gets my blood pumping.

The rest of this week has been low key. Like I mentioned before, I’ve been recruited to doing impact statements, which have been the main task of my week. I’ve finished most of my projects I was given to complete, so right now I’m sitting and waiting for other projects to develop. While it’s not particularly thrilling, I’m actually really enjoying not being under perpetual work stress. My senior year of college was unbelievably busy where I was constantly under pressure of deadlines, working myself to the bone. Having work days that are mellow and don’t force me to run at 100 mph 24/7 is actually really refreshing.

Other breaking news of this week: the incredibly annoying, man-eating wasp that has been bothering me in the office all week has been slayed! Earlier today I let out a yelp and ran out of the office because the wasp was buzzing around my head. Rick, a Sea Grant staff member in the office, came over and killed it with a magazine. Whew! Crisis evaded.

And that is the news from Planet AnnaRose. Stay swell and remember to eat your vegetables.

Reflections to Date

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Hello everyone!

Sorry that this is late! I am lucky if I am able to sit in front of a computer for any length of time, so I have been working on it every chance I get.  Since my time here is more than halfway over, I will fill you in on some of my reflections on my internship to date, but first a summary of the previous week.  Monday and Tuesday of last week was spent preparing for our field work.  This was the project that I was in charge of, so I had to make sure that everything ran smoothly.  As you know, this project is to test whether or not there is some sort of microbial processes going on during the night that I are not going on during the day.  We received some interesting results with “dark” (white PVC) chambers versus “light” (clear acrylic) chambers in previous tests, so we incorporated both into our experiment.  The way the experiment was set up, was that we went to two locations where we deployed six chambers at each (three dark and three light) in sets of two at three different sites.  We hypothesized that there would be a clear difference between the dark chambers and light chambers during the day since we have seen this in preliminary experiments in the past (we expect there to be no photosynthesis occurring in the dark chambers to drawdown nutrients, while there would be in the light). As for the night experiment, since we have seen some drawdown at night in the past with light chambers even though there is no photosynthesis occurring at night, we hypothesized that there may be some microbial activity occurring at night that isn’t occurring during the day.

As far as actually deploying the chambers and running the experiment, I would grade myself a B average which is pretty good for my first time.  Everyone was still getting used to deploying the bladders and some miscommunication between Caitlin and I led us to bring one of the wrong chambers which we had to go back to the lab and exchange.  Overall, running the experiment was a success.  We finished our deployment right as the tide came in.  The next day when we deployed our chambers at the other site, it went much better and faster and we beat the tide even though we were running late.

The most exciting part about doing these experiments is running our samples through the ISUS to get some preliminary results on nitrate values.  The daytime results came out as expected with little to no drawdown in the dark chambers while there was significant drawdown in the light chambers.  The night time results were much more peculiar.  We would expect to see no difference between the dark chambers and light chambers at night as no photosynthesis is occurring due to lack of light, but we still had a significant drawdown in the light (clear) chambers while there was no drawdown in the dark chambers.  How could this be?  Our worry was that something was going on with the clear acrylic chambers themselves that was causing nutrient (particularly nitrate) uptake or something was causing the nitrate values to read lower than they should have.  Since the next day we were preparing to go out and run more experiments during the weekend, I wanted to get to the bottom of this before we pushed ahead just in case something was seriously wrong.  So on Friday, Caitlin and I, ran a mini experiment by adding our artificial sea water to a dark chamber and a light chamber and sealed it at both ends to see if there was a change.  After letting the water sit inside the chambers for a few hours, we took samples and waited anxiously in the lab to run them to see if there was a difference.  If there was a difference, then we knew that there was something wrong with the acrylic chambers all along.  We ran the sample from the dark chamber and the results came out normal as we had expected.  Then we crossed our fingers that the sample from the light chamber would be the same.  But, when we ran that sample we discovered that the nitrate concentration was 8-10µm less (which is a lot less) than the dark chamber.  This is not good news because it potentially means that all of the work and all of the data collected up to this point is virtually useless!  Since we got these results, we decided that it would be unwise to move ahead with our field work for the weekend, so one positive was that I got the weekend off.  Because of these results, it looks like I could have came to the midsummer check-in since all of Friday was just spent preparing for more field work, but of course we didn’t find out about this major issue until about 5:00pm- bummer.  On Sunday afternoon, Caitlin and Jody, ran another little experiment by filling an acrylic chamber with ultra pure water to see if the results reflected a nutrient concentration as they should.  Fortunately, after an hour or two of letting the water incubate in the chamber we got a negative concentration.  Given the circumstances, this is good news because it means that the acrylic chamber is not in fact drawing down our nutrients, but is only causing the ISUS to read a lower nutrient concentration than it should.  This is rather unfortunate though because it means that we cannot use the ISUS to get instant results, so we have to wait a month or two for all of the results to come back from the wet lab at UC Santa Barbara – unless of course those results are compromised too.  Eek!

Unluckily, there is little time to think about what to do next because this week I have been plummeted into helping with another project.  For this project, we will be measuring the nutrient uptake of a sea grass flume at Winant marsh.  In order to do this, we must measure the flow of the water in the channel at one location and take water samples at three locations during four consecutive low tides.  As you probably know, there are two low tides during a period of 24 hours so one sampling period will be during the day and one will be at night.  Each of these sampling periods will be about eight hours long.  Thankfully I was assigned two day shifts instead of any night shifts, so I won’t be sampling during the wee hours of the night, but I do have to be at work at 5:30am tomorrow and Wednesday.  I’ll let you know how it goes in my next blog!

Since I was not able to attend the midsummer check-in, I will inform you of my reflections to date:

  1. First, since I am a rather small person, lugging 20L bladders full of water in and out of the marsh is very difficult for me.  I enjoy being outside doing field work, but some of it is pretty intense.  For my graduate studies, I need to make sure that I find a research project that I enjoy but does not involve something so physically demanding.
  2. I do not like marshes.  They are muddy and full of hidden holes and channels.  Working in them is rather difficult.  I think I’d rather study in the woods, on a mountain, at a lake, or at a stream.
  3. Nature is full of unforeseen and uncontrollable variables.  For the experiment that I have been doing so far, there are so many curve balls that nature has thrown at us, that I think a project like this would drive me crazy if I had to do this long term.  I do enjoy the environment, but I think that I need to find something that I can have a little more control over all the unknowns.  This internship has shown me that I am more interested in focusing on the human interactions with the environment versus dealing with nature itself.

I certainly can in no way say that I am not enjoying my internship.  I love getting up and going to work every day and I think that this experience is pointing me in the right direction and is helping me figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life even if it is not exactly this.

Check out my personal blog: Sara Duncan

Weeks 3 and 4, in which there were many adventures!

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What a crazy two weeks! I almost don’t even remember what happened in week three, so it’s really jogging my memory to revisit those events.

I guess my favorite thing that happened in week three was our visit to Oregon’s capital city, Salem. Josh and I sat in on a meeting at the Oregon State Marine Board, where the topic of boat inspections was discussed by members of the Oregon Invasive Species Council. Basically, a new Oregon law requires mandatory inspection of boats crossing the border into Oregon in order to prevent the spread of invasive species like quagga mussels. Previously, boat inspection was only voluntary, but of course very few people were stopping to have their boat inspected. The next step is to navigate the legislation regarding a police officer’s right to pull over a boat that looks suspiciously infested. In our meeting, no one was really sure whether or not that was legal. In any case, Oregon Invasive Species Council will be working with the Lewis and Clark Environmental Law Clinic to investigate further.

Afterwards, Sam Chan took Jen, Josh and I for a quick visit to the Capital Building, which I had never seen before. It was absolutely gorgeous! Gigantic paintings scaled the walls of the main room and a huge golden state seal glittered on the floor. The Senate met on one side of the building and the House of Representatives met on the other side, with the governor’s office somewhere in-between. The building had a magnificent dome that was topped on the outside by a golden pioneer, representing Oregon’s adventurous spirit. Salem is a beautiful, historically rich city and I would love the chance to spend more time there sometime soon.

Week four was dominated by da Vinci Days planning. Oh, and a four course meal! As part of our PROMISE internship, we have weekly luncheons on Tuesdays, and this one happened to be a four hour session on etiquette and proper behavior in networking situations. The food was absolutely delicious – red pepper bisque, salad, chicken and potatoes with a mushroom and bacon gravy, and cheesecake with fresh berries for dessert. Although we were instructed that it wasn’t about the food, my college student mind was capitalizing on the opportunity to have a fancy meal. Of course, I still learned quite a few etiquette tips. Spoon your soup away from you, butter each bite of bread individually, don’t completely clean your plate, and never set a utensil back on the table when you have used it.

Decked out in our landfill gear

The other event besides da Vinci Days was a really fun field trip to… well… the dump! Believe it or not, it was really interesting. The Coffin Butte Landfill off of Highway 99, north of Corvallis, was used for garbage disposal at least since World War II. Interestingly,the spot is not ideal for a landfill, since it is partially on a hill and it is easier to build landfills in valleys. Too bad they didn’t know that 70 years ago. The landfill is split into a series of cells, each of which holds vast amounts of compacted garbage. To prevent the leaching of chemicals, a thick plastic barrier sits underneath the landfill. So much work goes into preventing pollution and mitigating smell and runoff – it’s incredible to think about how much trash our society produces.

But, on the flip side, we also visiting the composting plant, which was inspiring. They produce mountains of compost that oftentimes end up in garden fertilizers. The process is lengthy, but worthwhile.

While we were there, we collected some invasive plants! They were yellow flag irises, a particularly plentiful aquatic invasive plant that has floating seeds and beautiful yellow flowers. Sam taught us about them and suggested we take them to the da Vinci Days booth, which we did. In this very same trip, we journeyed to Albany, where we searched for access to a lake that harbored some native turtle species. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a way to get to the lake, but we met a very nice lady and her cat.

An invasive species bouquet!

Also, sometime during the week, Tania Siemens, who proved herself to be an invasive plant encyclopedia, enlightened us by taking us on a tour of OSU campus, invasive species style! Our mission was to plan an outdoor activity for high school students for a session called Saturday Academy, which is happening this week. We didn’t expect to find many invasive plants on campus, but to our surprise, there were many of them! Tania guided us around the MU quad, pointing out English ivy, Old Man’s Beard, Tree of Heaven, Queen Anne’s Lace, and many more. My job this week was to make a checklist for an invasive plants scavenger hunt. The goal will be to find the invasive species on campus.

 

After that, it was time for Josh and I to get back to our da Vinci Days planning. We finished our tsunami poster, and we though it looked great… which it did, until it met the elements at da Vinci Days and was sorely defeated by the moist climate. However, most of da Vinci Days was a total success! We talked to lots of people, shared information on invasive species, gave out tons of free things (including awesome color changing pencils), and overall had a great time, despite the rainy Oregon weather. Kathryn Hawes from Hatfield Marine Science Visitor’s Center brought an awesome whale vertebrae and a laptop so that visitors could watch Ursula the octopus on the Octocam. Also, our tunicate in a water bottle and quagga mussel-encrusted shoe were quite popular. It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to the remaining six weeks of the internship!

 

Josh sharing his vast wealth of watershed knowledge with the kids at da Vinci Days

 

Touch Tanks… Guided

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Yes, indeed… Last week was the awesomest so far. Between sandboarding, octopus feeding, kid teaching, estuary touring for people from 17 countries, it was the busiest, funnest week at Hatfield. This week that just past was very relax (much needed). I worked a lot on my projects (curriculum and exhibit), took care of my jellies, and worked in the touch tank for the first time, where I tell kids not to poke sea anemones in the mouth/poop hole, and other things.

I was off on Monday, which was perfect since I was nursing my sandboarding hangover. My body ached from top to bottom… and back to top. So I stayed home and worked on my exhibit’s text content, cooked some Louisiana style red beans and rice, and recycled.

On Tuesday, I worked on my curriculum, with good results. The rest of the day, I worked with my jellytank until 3:30pm, and then, the other interns and I went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium! There, we saw pretty cool critters, like the Atlantic sea nettle (pictured here), sea otters, sharks, and sweet birds.

Wednesday was the day I had my touch tank experience. I discovered the true levels of patience I can have, which was definitely more than I expected. Kids would come and try to pick up animals, poke them, scratch them; and the best part was that the adults were doing the same! But as a good broker of information, I would gently correct them and tell them something cool about the creature they were attempting to break in two.

Thursday, our fellow Sea Granter, Joanne Choi, came from Coos Bay area to stay at Hatfield for the night, so she came on my estuary tour, I showed her around a bit, and then worked on my exhibit. I then had to help our SPOD with the octopus feeding. It seems that Ursula, our resident octopus, likes to try to exit the tank where she lives in. In front of about 80 men, women, and children, Ursula had 4 of her arms out of the tank (most of them wrapped around the SPOD (presenter), and her two eyes (a big no-no). SEA GRANT SCHOLAR TO THE RESCUE! I jumped over most of the children, and unwrapped those suckers by tickling the back of the octopus’ arms. Success…claps…tears… no, but really, everybody started clapping, and I just tipped my Sea Grant hat, as I would if I had hit an excellent golf shot.

Friday, the scholars had their mid-summer check in! Which meant a few things, we had to make a presentation to update our fellow scholars what we were doing in our jobs, we had to eat pizza until there was not a crumb left, and we had to help set-up for DaVinci Days festival, where arts, science and technology are exhibited (and food). It was quite challenging to set up the Sea Grant poster exhibit, but with the help of Eric Dickey… we did it. couldn’t have done it without him (see?? poets ARE very handy.) Later on that night, we checked into the coolest dorm I’ve ever been in, and went out on the town with some friends…

Saturday was DaVinci day for me. We woke up and went eat breakfast for $1.99, then worked at the Sea Grant tent for a couple of hours. We tried some delicious food, took a long nap, and went to see Bobby McFerrin jibble jabble with his band. Unfortunately, I was tired of it before he got to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, so I happily decided to leave the premises and head back to Newport.

Sunday was a regular day of work at the VC, where I did an estuary tour (almost fell on the mudflats). I also dug up an oyster on demand from one of the estuary tour participants. I was proud of my skills. The rest of that day, I worked on my exhibit, which is almost done!

This week, I plan to finish my exhibit, show it to a focus group, get some questions from them, alter the poster, and have something pretty professional by the end of the week.

See y’all later!

 

Sea_Gil’s Blog Pt.5

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This past week was spent doing lots of data mining again. I’m learning more and more about reproduction and larval development for bivalves. It’s nice to gain more knowledge in this area since I only had a brief brush with concepts such as an animal being dioecious or monoecious in Biology 101 freshmen year. 

The one thing that was significantly different about this week was that I was actually able to input data into the PICES database! Certainly a very exciting step for me. The database now says “Data last updated by Margaret” which makes me feel pretty important (even if it only entails me changing certain things in the life history section of certain species I am reading about).

On Friday, we had the mid-summer check in and it was nice seeing some Sea Grant faces I hadn’t seen since I first came to Oregon. It was interesting hearing about everyone’s various projects and the progress they were making. We had some yummy pizza from American Dream Pizza for lunch and then set out to set up the Oregon Sea Grant booth at da Vinci days. Set up proved to be a bit more difficult than expected but then Eric came to the rescue and helped to complete the large display for all the Sea Grant information (check out the Oregon Sea Grant Flickr gallery for some photos).

Saturday was spent volunteering and checking out the various booths at da Vinci days. I have to confess that the food stands were my favorite part (I had some salmon ceasar salad, delicious curly fries, and an elephant ear). Unfortunately, I missed the kinetic sculpture races and I imagine that would have been another favorite of mine. 

Kinetic Sculpture?

I was interested in a question that struck me when I was giving my presentation which was “Why is the deeper water that comes up during upwelling considered more corrosive?”. I asked my mentor and he explained that decomposing material that falls to the deeper waters release CO2 and that there is no new oxygen production happening down there, only respiration. These two factors are the main reason why the water is more acidic down there.

But then something else struck me: Will there continue to be a significant differential between the pH of surface water and deeper water as surface water begins to take in the accumulating atmospheric CO2? If the pHs get closer to one another as time goes by, upwelling might not even be an issue in the future because ocean water will just be generally more acidic no matter where it comes from.

My mentor thought this was a good question so now I am going to be doing some literature research to see if I can gather information on the expected pH changes to ocean water in the future so that I can compare it to the pH of deeper ocean water right now. I’m interested to see what I will find from this search.

Videos |wk.5|

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Reflection:

Last week marks the midpoint of this summer and I am blown away at how fast it is going. I am also curious at how this project is turning out. In my mind, I had originally intended a scheduled progression of video creations throughout the summer. In reality, my progress is much more exponential than linear. Once familiarity with Adobe, ODFW, and ODFW’s network and file storage system was achieved, great things have been happening and will continue to happen.

Great happenings of last week:

I made two highlight videos! It was actually unexpected. My advisor, Mike, had a presentation to give at OIMB Wednesday and asked me Tuesday to edit and add new material to a previously compiled Cape Perpetua hypoxia series highlight video. Erin Cooper, who was actually a Sea Grant Postdoctoral Fellow at ODFW, and is now a PISCO Postdoctoral Fellow at ODFW (until she leaves for her new career in August), helped me pick out the new footage. Erin is kind of like my second advisor. She has been giving me good, solid advice on certain aspects of my project. She’s also a well-seasoned postdoc and provides GREAT advice and recommendations on applying to grad school. (Thank you Erin!) So, getting back to the hypoxia video, with Erin’s help I added new hypoxia footage from 2008 and 2010, edited it, and sent it over to Mike for his presentation. ‘Twas a good feeling.

But that’s not all! Wednesday morning Mike popped another surprise on me. At around 9:00am he called asking for a three-minute Redfish Rocks MR/MPA highlight video he could show in addition to the hypoxia video. He wanted it by 11am. Initially, I was worried…yes, I had been clipping a bunch of good Redfish Rock MR/MPA raw footage, but my clippings didn’t span the entire 64 hours of footage – they only included about 18 hours of it. I wanted a good representation. So I worked with what I had and scanned the other footage for what a somewhat variable representation. Although I didn’t achieve quite the variation I was looking for, the highlight video was completed at around 11am on the dot. My thoughts on it? I think it’s a great start. As I continue my raw clippage I hope to, ultimately, get a more well-rounded representation of Redfish Rocks. In addition to the ultimate representation I will be creating other unique, ‘side’ videos. I’ve already created a video of metridium from Dive 331. The visibility in this dive is pretty low but I wanted to (once again) give an well-rounded representation.

We’re in the process of putting both the Cape Perpetua Hypoxia Series video and the Redfish Rocks Pilot MR/MPA on YouTube. I’ve been running into some kinks with access to ODFW folders so that’s been delaying me. I will be sure to keep everyone informed once they are up. I’ll try to get the metridium video up once I have a good visibility metridium video put together so they can be displayed side by side for comparison.

Our Mid-Summer check-in with Sea Grant was Friday so we gathered in Corvallis to give short presentations on our projects, eat pizza, and help out with da Vinci Days at OSU. It was nice to see everyone and talk in a little more detail about our projects. Unfortuantely, while some of the other interns stayed to explore and help out at the Sea Grant booth for da Vinci Days, I had to head back to Newport to complete my 12 page physics exam. On a good note, I feel like I did pretty well!

This week I will continue my raw footage clipping and highlight video creating. I want to knock out Redfish so I can start Cape Perpetua. Also, no picture in my blog this time…the sand from the dunes of Florence claimed my camera lens. Ergh.

 

 

Betty, the contact hunter

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In the words of the Carpenters, rainy days and Mondays always get me down.  It’s been gloomy for the past couple of days and I’m starting to miss the heat of Louisiana more than ever.  My office overlooks the Yaquina Bay Bridge and on sunny days it’s lovely, but today it just looks bleh.  But the work must go on!

This past week has been plenty of networking (as usual) and getting started on the outline for my final document.  Initially I felt a little overwhelmed by the thought of composing a document to be published for use by anybody, but with a little guidance I feel I’ll be able to get on the right track to finish by August.  I was finally able to schedule all of my Portland and Tillamook contacts for the last week of July, meaning that I’ll be going on a bit of a road trip soon!  Finding contacts at the Port of Seattle has posed the biggest challenge so far, but I hope that I can get that squared away this week so I can hit Washington on my trip as well.  I had a great phone interview with someone at the Port of Portland who spoke to me about how they secure flights with carriers and the challenges Portland has faced in creating and keeping demand for those flights.  It explains why Seattle and Canada tend to do the largest portion of shipping, especially of live commodities, for Oregon seafood producers.  While I’ve never liked talking on the phone, I have become a lot more accustomed to calling people (especially people I don’t know) and being able to have a productive conversation.  I feel like that’s something that will benefit me throughout my career.

On Friday we had our midsummer check-in, which was great.  We got to learn about what all the other interns are doing and had a conversation about jobs and grad school.  I feel confident that I’ll be able to find something to do once I’m done here this summer, especially with all of the great contacts I’ve made so far.  We volunteered at DaVinci Days on Saturday, which was nice because I got to interact with the public and describe the mission of Sea Grant as well as my own project.  I felt encouraged by the interest the booth produced, as well as the people who came by and listened to us talk about all these different aspects of the organization.  On one or two occasions people even told us that we definitely had great careers ahead of us, which of course made me feel even more confident about landing a job!

This week is all about tying up loose ends and figuring out my Seattle contacts.  I’ll be going to Tillamook on Friday to meet with the owner of a large oyster hatchery, as well as my other adviser.  I hope that by then I’ll have a definitely time schedule for the coming week, making my trip a little less nerve wracking.  And here’s hoping the weather gets a little better!!

It’s already been five weeks?!?

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Hello!

I cannot believe that I have already been here for five weeks! Time sure does fly. Last week was a fairly productive week interspersed with some pretty exciting things! For the most part I continued building the website I’m working on – creating custom pictures and adding feature stories to the archive. On Thursday I was able to sit in on the Marine Council meeting! Such a cool experience! While I am a biology major, I haven’t had a lot of experience in the political world – so sitting around a table with a lot of important people discussing policy was a totally new and exciting experience for me! Then, as you all know, we were able to have a midsummer reunion and pizza picnic on Friday. It was great to be able to hear a bit about what everyone is doing – unfortunately I find it hard to keep up with all of the blog posts!

My plan for this week is to begin creating some custom feature stories to be added to the website’s rotating banner. I also hope to create some student feature highlights, and add some static text where necessary. I don’t know whether getting the calendar set up will be a priority this week – I might save that for next week. But depending on what Jenna and I discuss when we meet in the next couple of days, we could be getting that up and running very soon here.

Hope everyone has a great week!