ODFW Adventures: IIX

Sometimes, you’ve gotta spend some quality time with the things that aren’t wildly exciting. So this week, now that I’ve accomplished my big task of the determining the herring quota and making the spawning maps, I spent all 5 days, 8 hours each, working on one thing: the annotated bibliography. If you remember, I started on this task several weeks ago. The bibliography consists of citations and annotations of many articles, mostly peer-reviewed journal articles, that will help the Nearshore Team accomplish the task of writing the supplementary document about climate change for the Oregon Nearshore Strategy. That being said, I have now read over 50 articles about climate change related to things as large as all the oceans on our watery planet, to as small as a single species in Newport’s own Yaquina Bay. My knowledge of upwelling, salinity changes, temperature changes, freshwater inputs, and other ocean-related factors has increased ten-fold since I came to Newport and began this specific task. But I will admit, I am now even more confused about wave height changes due to climate change now that I have read several very confusing, mathematical, and technical journal articles about the subject that I didn’t understand. But with all the time I spent on the bibliography this week, I have read the majority of the articles we have gathered (probably about 80 articles total) and I hope to finish reading and documenting the last few articles before I leave, as I have several tasks left to do in the next two weeks as I finish up my internship. For Sea Grant, I will be preparing a presentation and writing a final report about my internship to submit, while for ODFW I will be writing up protocols for all of the processes in the determination of the herring quota, such as how to count the eggs and make the maps. So I will be very busy in my last days here, and I will hopefully leave the office on the 19th with everything checked off on my to-do list!

This week I simply made a lot of omelets because I bought a rather large amount of salmon at Fred Meyer that I ended up eating all week. With all of my delicious salmon and egg combos, I realized that I always make omelets when I have a lot of random stuff in my refrigerator that I need to use, usually including produce and plain yogurt (a great fat-free creamy addition to your omelets!).We also went crabbing two more times this weekend in Waldport, but sadly we only caught one! But I still have hope of catching more delicious dungeness crabs before I head home! Below is a picture of me holding Guapito, our only crab of the weekend.