Category: Uncategorized

Blog by Rachel Kaplan, PhD student, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Figures by Dawn Barlow, PhD Candidate, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Note: Rachel originally wrote this blog entry while at sea on a research cruise in the Northern California Current system in May and June 2021. It was originally published on the GEMM Lab blog at https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/gemmlab.

Hello from the R/V Bell M. Shimada! We are currently sampling at an inshore station on the Heceta Head Line, which begins just south of Newport and heads out 45 nautical miles west into the Pacific Ocean. We’ll spend 10 days total at sea, which have so far been full of great weather, long days of observing, and lots of whales.

Run by NOAA, this Northern California Current (NCC) cruise takes place three times per year. It is fabulously interdisciplinary, with teams concurrently conducting research on phytoplankton, zooplankton, seabirds and more. The GEMM Lab will use the whale survey and the krill and oceanographic data to fuel species distribution models as part of Project OPAL. I’ll be working with this data for my Ph.D. with Dr. Leigh Torres and Dr. Kim Bernard, and it’s great to be getting to know the region, study system and sampling processes.

I’ve been to sea a number of times and always really enjoyed it, but this is my first time as part of a marine mammal survey. The type and timing of this work is so different from the many other types of oceanographic science that take place on a typical research cruise. While everyone else is scurrying around deploying instruments and collecting samples at a “station” (a geographic waypoint in the ocean that is sampled repeatedly over time), we– the marine mammal team– are taking a break because we can only survey when the boat is moving. While everyone else is sleeping or relaxing during a long transit between stations, we’re hard at work up on the flying bridge of the ship, scanning the horizon for animals.

During each “on effort” survey period, Dawn Barlow and I cover separate quadrants of ocean, each manning either the port or starboard side. We continuously scan the horizon for signs of whale blows or bodies, alternating between our eyes and binoculars. During long transits, we work in chunks – forty minutes on effort, and twenty minutes off effort. Staring at the sea all day is surprisingly tiring, and so our breaks often involve “going to the eye spa,” which entails pulling a neck gaiter or hat over your eyes and basking in the darkness.  

Dawn has been joining these NCC cruises for the past four years, and her wealth of knowledge has been a great resource as I learn how to survey and identify marine mammals. Beyond learning the telltale signs of separate species, one of the biggest challenges has been learning how to read the sea better, to judge the difference between a frothy whitecap and a whale blow, or a distant dark wavelet and a dorsal fin. Other times, when conditions are amazing and it feels like we’re surrounded by whales, the trick is to try to predict the positions and trajectory of each whale so we don’t double-count them.

Over the last week, all our scanning has been amply rewarded. We’ve seen pods of dolphins play in our wake, and spotted Dall’s porpoises bounding alongside the ship. Here on the Heceta Line, we’ve seen a diversity of pinnipeds, including Northern fur seals, Stellar sea lions, and California sea lions. We’ve been surprised by several groups of fin whales, farther offshore than expected, and traveled alongside a pod of about 12 orcas for several minutes, which is exactly as magical as it sounds.

Notably, we’ve also seen dozens of humpbacks, including along what Dawn termed “the humpback highway” during our transit offshore of southern Oregon. One humpback put on a huge show just 200 meters from the ship, demonstrating fluke slapping behavior for several minutes. We wanted to be sure that everyone onboard could see the spectacle, so we radioed the news to the bridge, where the officers control the ship. They responded with my new favorite radio call ever: “Roger that, we are currently enamored.”

Species	Number of sightings	Total number observed
California Sea Lion	2	6
Dall’s Porpoise	3	25
Fin Whale	11	18
Humpback Whale	140	218
Killer Whale	3	21
Northern Fur Seal	9	9
Northern Right Whale Dolphin	2	8
Pacific White-sided Dolphin	13	145
Steller Sea Lion	3	3
Unidentified Baleen Whale	104	127
Unidentified Dolphin	6	28
Unidentified Whale	2	2

Even with long days and tired eyes, we are still constantly enamored as well. It has been such a rewarding cruise so far, and it’s hard to think of returning back to “real life” next week. For now, we’re wishing you the same things we’re enjoying – great weather, unlimited coffee, and lots of whales!

by Nicole Coffey, Ph.D. Student in Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences

When I tell people that I study chemistry, often they imagine me standing over bubbling beakers in a lab. However, I study chemistry in the ocean, which means that my approaches need to break from that stereotype. What happens when the work you want to do can’t be done from a land-based lab? What if you have to go out to sea to do get the samples that you need?

Preparing to go to Sea

My advisor (Dr. Rene Boiteau), our collaborators at USC and UCLA, and I are interested in iron transport off the Oregon shelf. Iron is important in the oceans – it plays a role in chemical reactions in the water, and is required for key functions of marine organisms, such as photosynthesis. However, there is not a lot of iron available to critters in the ocean, since iron does not like to be dissolved in seawater and organisms cannot use iron unless it is dissolved. We wanted to investigate how iron moves throughout the ecosystem off the Oregon coast, and how organisms might be using the small amount of iron that is dissolved in the water. We can’t do this work from land – we needed water samples from offshore. So, we set sail on R/V Oceanus at the end of March on a scientific adventure!

Science can be tricky to do on land – and only gets more challenging when you go out to sea. For me, one of the most stressful parts of a research expedition is packing. On land, if you run out of supplies, you may be able to quickly borrow some from a neighboring lab, or buy more and have them delivered within a few days. At sea, if you run out of supplies you can’t get more. Your science has to stop. It’s very important that you pack everything you need (and not a bad idea to bring more than what you think you need, if you have the space to pack it). Packing for this trip involved a lot of spreadsheets and lists developed with my advisor, and triple-checking every box to make sure we had everything we would need out at sea.

We pack far in advance of a cruise to allow us time to figure out if we are missing any supplies. To be as safe as possible for this cruise, everyone going on the ship had to quarantine for two weeks, so we had to be ready to go even earlier. It was a lot of work, but everyone was prepared to board the ship and get set up to do some science at sea the day we reached R/V Oceanus!

Setting up Aboard R/V Oceanus and Science at Sea

Loading a ship with supplies for a successful cruise can be difficult. But we don’t have to carry every piece of equipment up the gangplank by hand. We use a crane to lift all of gear from the dock, assisted by the helpful ship’s crew. Once the gear was onboard, we spent the rest of the day organizing our spaces and setting up our equipment. Having our gear organized, and boxes labelled with their contents, helped this go smoothly! Out on the water, the ship rocks with the waves, meaning anything not held in place may slide around. To avoid an unsafe workspace, all of our gear had to be tied down or screwed into place. I secured the bottles and pump I would use to filter particles from my water samples to a benchtop with bungee cords and ratchet straps while other graduate students built a “bubble” of plastic sheeting to keep their workspace free from dust or potential contaminants. After a hard day’s work, we were all ready to leave port the next morning and get started collecting our samples.

Once we left port and arrived at our first sampling site, we used a piece of equipment called a CTD (which measures conductivity (to help determine salinity), temperature, and depth) to profile the water from the surface to near-bottom. We also measured how much oxygen was in the water. This information helped us to choose what depths we wanted to sample water from. As the CTD returned to the surface, we used a computer to tell bottles attached to the instrument to close, bringing us water from below the surface. Once the CTD was back on board, it was a flurry of action to collect our samples and get to work in the lab! First, we filter our samples to remove particles. Then, we use a technique called solid phase extraction (SPE) to remove salts and concentrate the sample. The samples are analyzed back on land.

In our downtime, we sometimes would go out on deck to take in the sight of water all around us. Sometimes, we had some visitors – over the course of the trip, we saw sea lions, albatross, gray whales, and dolphins! You never know what you’ll see when you’re out on the water (though fantastic sunsets are always a given).

After about a week on board, R/V Oceanus began to have some mechanical problems, and we were forced to return to port. It was disappointing to leave some objectives unfinished, but it was better to be safe rather than risk having worse problems down the line. Though our cruise was cut short, we collected some great samples during our time at sea. We’re all looking forward to analyzing the data to see what we might have found, and for our follow-up trip in July to learn more about iron dynamics on the Oregon shelf.

Follow Nicole on Twitter: @ChemNicoleOcean

See content from this cruise and our upcoming trip with this hashtag on Twitter: #FeTSh2021

by Giancarlo M. Correa, PhD Student in Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry

Have you ever thought about how you got to where you are now academically? In my case, three clear events got me to where I am. I think every outcome is a product of something, and that something might be destiny or it might be perseverance.

Finding an ideal career by chance

When I was in school I loved math, and honestly, I was pretty good at it. I participated in many regional math competitions and I succeeded in some of them. I assumed that studying anything related to engineering after school would be the right path for me, and I left my amazing school life with that thought in mind. In Peru, where I was born and raised, there is a very competitive exam students need to take in order to be admitted into the very few good (and free) public universities, so applicants typically take classes at special centers (popularly called “academies”) after school during some months to be prepared to take that exam. I signed up in a center called Pamer to study for exams allowing me to apply to the industrial engineering program at San Marcos National University, the oldest university in America.

By then, I needed to review math and verbal concepts, but also subjects such as chemistry, biology (which I hated), and physics. So, one sunny Saturday, I made a mistake and I attended a biology class to which I was not assigned. The professor was renowned in Pamer for his way of teaching. And here is when destiny, for the first time, played a role in my academic formation. That Saturday I fell in love with biology in just two hours of class. The way this professor taught biology was extremely engaging and thought-provoking; I never realized how interesting biology was until that moment. I did not need to think twice — I knew at that moment that biology was going to be my future career. A few months later I was admitted to San Marcos National University to study biological sciences, and that was one of the best decisions of my life.

My first opportunity in research

The first months of my undergraduate life were difficult for me, as adapting to university life was not immediate and I needed some time to adjust to working on my own and not having a professor pushing me. I wanted to specialize in molecular biology, which was a popular choice among most students by then, and I was quite good at my molecular biology classes. In the fourth year of study, every student must select a specialization to follow during the last two years, and there were three choices: zoology, botany, and hydrobiology and fisheries. I was unsure which path to take. Most students took zoology or botany since there were more professors and researchers to work with in those disciplines. However, I do not usually follow the herd so I chose hydrobiology and fisheries, beginning my fourth year at the university somewhat unsure about this decision.

A year later, I needed to look for a laboratory or institution in which to get mandatory research experience, and to do an undergraduate thesis. That was a critical moment in my academic life. I asked one of my professors about internship opportunities at the Marine Institute of Peru (IMARPE), and she introduced me to the leader of the Population Dynamics and Stock Assessment Unit, who accepted me to do a research internship for a few months (that was the plan at the beginning, but those months became years). Then came the second crucial moment in my academic life: I started to study the population dynamics of fish populations using statistical and mathematical methods, an amazing field that I am still in love with.

An international jump

I worked for almost five years at IMARPE, gaining invaluable knowledge and experience. During that time, I undertook a master’s program in applied math, I participated in my first research cruise, and I published my first paper. I also participated in international conferences and met great scientists in Peru and abroad, and some of them were the source of inspiration for my next big step: pursuing a doctoral degree abroad.

Applying to American universities is not an easy task for international students; it demands time and money, but I was determined. I researched all the requirements, and soon identified the most important ones: passing the TOELF exam (to prove that I am proficient in English), taking the GRE, finding an academic advisor and getting funding. I passed the TOELF exam with a score that was good enough. Next I took the GRE, and I got an outstanding score in the math section, a not-bad verbal score, and a quite bad score in the written part. However, I struggled to find an academic advisor. I made a list of all the professors that I would have liked to work with, and I emailed them asking for opportunities. Sixty percent did not reply, 20% were not accepting new students at that time, 15% did not have funding sources, and 5% (one professor) invited me for an interview and ended up supporting my application to Oregon State University, although funding was not guaranteed. And here is the third crucial moment in my academic life: I only applied to one university and I was admitted. Was I lucky? Who knows, but this outcome was a consequence of perseverance and I am proud of it. Since fall 2018, I live in a small city in the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis), working with Dr. Lorenzo Ciannelli on projects related to population dynamics of the Pacific cod in the eastern Bering Sea. I have no words to describe how much I have learned during the last years and how beautiful is this area of the world.

What about you?

Have you thought about the crucial moments that brought you to where you are now? Were they products of destiny or perseverance? Identify them and be thankful and proud of them. There is no better or worse place to be, there is only the right one, where you are now. Are you excited about which events will define your academic life? I am, and I have no doubt that I will make the right decision. Enjoy this moment and do not stop persisting to achieve your academic and life goals. Destiny might play an important role at some point, but it will need to be complemented by your perseverance.