Monthly Archives: August 2012

Help me out…be curious

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Good estuary tours

As mentioned in previous blog posts, one of the main jobs for the interns at the Visitor Center is giving estuary tours to the public at 11am.  Diana, Nick, Julie, and I trade off giving these tours depending on who wants to do it on a particular day.  It’s not uncommon for one of us to give tours multiple days in a row when the other person is doing the Ocean Quest presentation for that day.   In general, I prefer to do the Ocean Quest presentation because it is very structured and straightforward.   There are very few surprises during the presentation. On the other hand the estuary tours are very unstructured and vary in topic from day to day.  This has its ups and downs and can make them pretty challenging.  In this blog post I am going to outline what a good estuary tour is like.

To start out with, I’ve found the number of people on the tour doesn’t really matter too much.  The level of engagement of the group is what really defines a good estuary tour.  I think this can be said of many things in life (I’m sure any teacher/professor could say the same thing).  I have just come to realization because of these estuary tours.  So step one, get an engaged group.  I usually take my tour through the doors leading to the education wing where I can then introduce myself outside the hustle and bustle of the Visitor Center.  I then usually head to the tank farm outside where I can give some interesting facts about HMSC such as the number of scientists working, the number of federal and state organization, etc.  Today was particularly cool because Dr. John Chapman, HMSCs Invasive Species Specialist, was at the tank farm.  He gave the tour a very cool rundown of what the current situation is with the Japanese dock that washed ashore earlier this year.  Nothing quite gets a group jazzed like a world-class researcher giving you a rundown on what’s going on in the biology world.

I then usually head past the US Fish and Wildlife building to the estuary trail and head to the mudflats.  I like to stop at the transition between the highlands and the salt marsh to explain how some plants have adapted to a salty environment.  There is a very distinct visible line where shrubs and trees stop growing and salty plants begin to grow.  I really like looking at this line and then heading down to eat some of the salt-adapted plants.  I try to get everyone to eat pickleweed which just tastes like salt.  After that little adventure we make our way down to the mudflat where we suck out some shrimp with a slurp-gun.  Nobody enjoys sucking shrimp out more than the kids.  They could do this for hours (I have actually had a family do this for an entire hour).  If the crowd looks up to it I head to the part of the estuary trail that has eroded and explain the different forces at work that cause erosion on an estuary and explain different techniques to mitigate erosion.

Lastly I’ll head to the water storage tank and to the saltwater stream and explain how the tank has more water in it than an Olympic sized swimming pool and the saltwater stream is unique because it’s a saltwater stream.  Then we’ll head back and call it a tour.

As I mentioned earlier what really makes a tour successful in my eyes is when the group is interested and engaged.  The more questions the better.  Everyday I hope that my group will be excited to learn about this stuff because it makes the tour way more enjoyable for me.

 

Week 7: Chaos and Choices

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Monday would mark the first day that we opened the Tsunami wave tank to the public. When I arrived for work on Tuesday it was decided that we would keep the wave tank open to the public on that day as well. The Tsunami tank seemed to draw peoples attention the second that we opened it to the public. The only thing that kids apparently love more that Legos is knocking them over with a powerful wave device. The max parameter that we had calculated for our “Tsunamis” had to be rethought when it was discovered that a patron will use these settings about 99.9% of the time. Once we ran out of Wet Floor signs, it was decided that perhaps we should limit how strong people are allowed to make waves. After being open to the public for only a few hours, we were forced to shut down one of the two sides of the wave tank when a piece of foam backing came undone. Rather than closing the entire exhibit so that we could disassemble the tank, we  decided to simple cut the power on that one side. We also discovered a phenomenon that occurs when you let people build with Legos at the same time as they are allowed to play with the controls; people tend to think it is funny to splash family  members that are obliviously working on their Lego structures. This joke did not seem to get old any time soon either.  We were finally forced to close up the exhibit when half of our Legos had fallen beneath the tank. The “public test” of the tsunami tank proved to be better than I expected and will defiantly be a hot activity when we are finally read to open it permanently.

On a more negative note, we discovered (after 4 weeks) that Lego is apparently back ordered on all of the pieces that we had ordered. As  a result, none of the pieces will arrive before the end of August. Fortunately, I was able to find some of the pieces that we needed from my own private Lego connection.  This week also marks the end of an era in Newport, the Japanese dock that had washed ashore has now been completely broken up and is on its way to a salvage yard. Aurora, our octopus was far more active this week than she has been for a while. We were able to touch her late in the day on Saturday. We also nearly got soaked with a jet of water from the mischievous cephalopod.

Cascade Head

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This week I changed sites from Cape Perpetua to the future marine reserve location at Cascade Head. On Tuesday, Melissa and I drove around area to scout out the best locations to do pressure counts. We figured out that the reserve basically spans the entirety of Lincoln City and around the Salmon River and Cascade Head. This site  isso different from Cape Perpetua, because it is located in one of the most urban areas on the coast rather than in the middle of a forest.

I quickly noticed that giving surveys in this area was much different than Cape Perpetua as well. I started giving surveys in the parking lot of a huge beach in the heart of Lincoln City called “DRiver” and I was disappointed to find that more people refused to take the survey that day than perhaps the entirety of people I asked at Cape Perpetua. I think this crowd was headed straight to the beach and not interested in hanging out in the parking lot. On the bright side, hundreds of people pass through that area in an hour, so I still had no problem finding people to interview. The surveys showed that visitors to Lincoln City tended to include more families, locals, and day-travelers than Cape Perpetua. When I explained this to Melissa, she recognized that there might be some bias in our survey in this area due to the fact that I was only interviewing people coming from a parking lot and would therefore never sample people who had simply walked out to the beach from their rental houses/hotels. This would make the survey more biased towards locals and people on day-trips rather than multi-day visitors. To fix this bias, I started interviewing people on the beach, which actually turned out to be very efficient, because people were stationary, relaxed, and much more willing to take the survey so I could just jump from group to group.

The part of the Cascade Head reserve that is the most contentious is the area of the ocean directly beyond the Salmon River Estuary. Fishermen claim that they travel out beyond the large sandbar that marks the boundary between the estuary and ocean, so therefore a marine reserve in this area would affect them greatly. People at the ODFW are skeptical that they travel to this area often, because the bar is very difficult to navigate. I am helping to answer this question by observing whether or not there are boats beyond the bar at the mouth of the estuary. Also, I ask all fishermen that I at Knight Park (the boat launch area for the estuary) whether they fished in the ocean or stayed in the estuary. I can see that questioning these fishermen has the possibility of being a little tricky, but so far it has gone well!

Intertidal Dredging and Data Analysis

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This week we started the second phase of the Yaquina Bay intertidal population study. If you think way back to the first week I was here in Newport, you might remember that I had to wake up really early to do RAM surveys. We took sediment samples, temperature readings, and counted the visible clam siphon holes at random points in different sand/mud flats in the Bay. Now we are going back to these same locations and dredging them to find out exactly how many clams are at each site.

Intertidal dredging is very similar to the subtidal dredging we have been doing, except we get to dredge this time, not divers. Surprisingly, the system is pretty easy to use and the most difficult part seems to be staying in one place when holding the bag end of the dredge. Because of the air in my drysuit a lot of times I just start floating away. Luckily we can only sample when the water isn’t very high (between 2 and 3 feet) so I can get myself back in the right spot fairly quickly.

To work the intertidal dredge requires 3 people: 1 person mans the dredge and sucks up the sediment/clams, 1 person mans the bag and makes sure that the bag doesn’t get clogged and that sediment/water isn’t going towards the dredge head, and the final person is on the boat manning the motor and sorting samples.

I very quickly learned how to do all 3, but I think it was very helpful that I already has indirect experience from all the subtidal work we have done. I was familiar with the data sheets and how the dredge system as a whole worked, so I only needed to learn the exact method of how to use the dredge in the water – and how to efficiently move around in a bulky dry suit.

Next week is more dredging, and at the end of the week we will prep for yet another week of work in Tillamook  – and you thought I was done! hah!

While not out doing fieldwork (we can only dredge a few hours at a time during low tide), I have started a new data analysis project. This will incorporate the historical data I entered over the last few weeks, and some of the data we have been getting this summer. Hopefully I will be able to incorporate all of this together in a cohesive way so I have something to add to my presentation other than 15 slides of our various projects and methods. But don’t get too excited, it will probably just be comparisons of size frequency and abundance. I also don’t think I will have time to run any statistical analysis so I won’t be able to say whether any of the trends we see are significant or not.

During my free time, I have been attempting to enjoy the decent weather we have been having in Newport by surfing a lot, playing beach volleyball, and watching LOTS of Olympics. I feel like all the students here have really started to get along well, and it is a shame we only have 3 short weeks left before we all must continue our journeys elsewhere. Until next time!

 

THE WORKSHOP

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I finally got my head to stop spinning long enough to write this post, so here it goes.

 

The workshop.

 

The days leading up to and after the workshop have been some of the most exciting and nerve-wracking yet.  I also think that I could not have learned more in such a short amount of time. We’ll start from the beginning of the madness; approximately one week before the event, at this time all parties involved started to get a little anxious, with the pre-workshop groups still working vigorously on straw documents on communications and management protocols, workshop participants started turning to me to inquire about the status of things. This was in addition to the regular logistics emails from everyone from workshop participants to steering committee members, so before I knew it I was inundated with so many conversations and tasks my usual hand-scrawled to-do list couldn’t quite handle the level of organization I needed to get everything done. Half-way through the week things seemed to settle down,  I was as caught up as I could be while waiting on a final agenda, straw documents, and travel reimbursement documents. and, then BOOM, everything I was waiting for and more came in,  including the seemingly innocuous task of creating name tags.

A very important lesson I learned through this process is not to defer any decision to only one cook. I made the task of creating name tags  infinitely more difficult when I didn’t let every cook in the workshop kitchen put in their two cents about name tags. Some (including myself)  believed a stack of blank stick-on tags would be quite sufficient so that information about name, title, affiliation would be correct given the amount of time left to verify and generate name tag information. However, others believed at least the steering committee and organizers should have pretty printed name tags, and once I approved this plan and sent out a list of names, titles and affiliations to be approved by the rest of the steering committee the plan for name tags was forced to change several more times.  Apparently there is a lot of ways to make name tags: in color, with affiliation and title, with affiliation only, with affiliation and the workshop title, in hanging plastic holders, in clip-on tags, on stickys, printed professionally, printed in our office, and so forth. I’m pretty sure each possible combination was considered given the amount of supplies and time at our disposal.  Eventually, we figured out a way to keep everyone happy and also was within our means to produce, and it only took 4 hours to figure out. Next step was to go to the list and make sure (checked and double-checked) that names and affiliations were accurate. Once this was done, I happily accepted to help of my coworker Linda Larsen to type and print name tags. This was actually very fortuitous as other last-minute and off-the radar tasks came in.

The surge of activity continued into Monday morning as I tried to tie up as many loose ends as possible before heading up to Portland for one last meeting before the workshop Tuesday morning. Loaded down with a box of name tags, flip charts, pens, and registration list I eventually made it to Portland. The event probably wasn’t nearly as stressful as I think it was, but I think it seems that way mostly because of the daily nightmare that constituted my travel in and out of downtown Portland and Portland State University’s campus. Of the 3 times I had to get my way downtown each time I had a printed set of directions, once I immediately got off track and ended up lost, another time my directions lead me in an endless circle of one-way streets to nowhere, and Finally the very last time I made it back to he PSU parking garage where I paid exorbitant prices for all-day parking without any trouble.  I think I can attribute much of the stress I felt those days to these hair-pulling adventures. And then there was the actual workshop, after I scrambled to get a registration table in order, name-tags packed away in their holders I actually got to sit back and watch the days unfold.

Because the 90-some participants came from a variety of different backgrounds and familiarity of Aquatic Nuisance Species and Tsunami debris issues, the first part of day 1 was spent giving introductions to the topics and updates from representatives from each state or province involved. States involved included Alaska, Hawai’i, Oregon, Washington, and California and there also a representative from Canada. This piece in particular was pretty interesting, because despite my efforts to keep up-to-date with all the goings-on in the different states, the ultimately is a big difference in the organization and structure of each state’s responding/involved agencies and this translates in a lot of ways in how apparent their efforts are. It was also interesting to think about how the geographic configuration of each state/province’s coasts has a large impact on any response and monitoring protocol agreed on regionally.

The rest of day one consisted of breakout groups, where different groups were assigned different pieces of the straw communications protocol document or the management straw document to discuss and offer suggestions for clarification or improvement. I served as a note-taker for one of these breakout groups and though that too, was a very interesting role where I had to be quick and efficient, but also be able to synthesize along the way so that my notes were coherent and representative of flow the discussion.

After many more talks and summaries of the breakout group discussions, I was pleasantly surprised and refreshed by a very detailed talk from phycologist, Gayle Hansen, who worked on identifying over 20 different algal species from the dock in Newport and a boat in Cape Disappointment. Her talk was very detailed, as she went into many of the different taxonomic tools and methodologies she used to identify species, some she was at first convinced were novel! This talk in particular, was useful to demonstrate the range of professionals present at this meeting, we had representatives from a range of NGOs, tribes, congressional staffers, and state and federal agencies. In the end, I think this truly was one of the major successes of the workshop, to bring all these people across the region together in one room to discuss these issues, but also more simply, to make each other all aware of who and where people are working on these issues, and how to get in contact with them.  Silly for sure, but in my survey of logistics tasks to take care of I never thought about sending the detailed participant list that I have been working on for weeks out to everyone who attended the workshop. After having several people inquiring and request it though, the list went out during the workshop.

In the end, it is just the beginning however, and just as I thought my work here was done, there is still much to be done. Now the pre-workshop groups are post-workshop groups and they and the steering committee will begin re-drafting documents and deliberating over the next steps to implement a viable regional response protocol.  Only more exciting news on the JTMD-AIS front to come!