My research this summer with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is on the ecological role that oyster aquaculture plays in estuaries. It is commonly accepted that current industrialized agriculture has a huge impact on the environment, and we (a team of my mentor, a lab tech, a Master’s student, and myself) are specifically looking at how the fish and crustaceans utilize these aquaculture beds as habitat. Are they hiding in and around the oyster shells? Are they hunting? Just passing by to get to the more natural eelgrass beds? Or do they completely desert the area? Only data will tell.

Road tripping to Washington

Because our main study topic is aquaculture, and the Yaquina Bay where our Hatfield offices and my summer residences are located does not experience aquaculture, our field work involves taking trips of 3-6 days to other bays that do. This past Friday, while everyone was gearing up for the weekend, our little research team trucked up to Willapa, Washington for my first taste of estuarine field work.

Boating to site on a deceptively calm morning

So far, here’s what it tastes like: wind, salt, and great hotel coffee. The wind blasts in your face while on the boat, giving a nice dose of salty muddy estuary water with it, but to compensate the coffee provided at our hotel has been amazing (and I’m not even a big coffee drinker).

Our days have consisted of getting up at the crack of dawn and boating around the Willapa Bay to deploy and retrieve our many devices that will reveal the secrets of the “fishy” behavior going on below. Our technology ranges from camera rigs fastened with the highly regarded GoPro to sticks with squid piece super-glued to them, such is field work.

12-foot camera rigs at low tide (me for scale)

Same camera rigs at high tide

My favorite parts have been retrieving the minnow traps and counting and measuring the little critters we catch. So far, we have found: the feisty Dungeness crab, the “always looks kind of dead” shiner perch, the slimy gunnel, the abundant stickleback, the English sole that looks like Flats the Flounder from SpongeBob, and my favorite the staghorn sculpin (the namesake of my favorite IPA). The days are long and tiring, but to me zooming around on a boat and tromping through mud all day feels doesn’t really feel like work.

We will continue collecting data for the next few days (stay tuned for Field Work Part 2 next week), and upon return to Hatfield, I will finally have my own data to analyze! As a contribution to my mentor’s work on estuaries, my personal project for the summer will be to compare the collected video and predation data from this trip between two different types of oyster aquaculture (long-line vs. on-bottom).

For the past four years, I have been vegetarian to reduce my environmental impact. Being able to further learn about the impacts of agriculture and contribute to research that will help reduce those impacts has already been an amazing opportunity that I am excited to be a part of, and I look forward to what is still to come.