July 10, 2019:

The timing of my previous blog post was a bit off sync, but now I’m finally up-to-date and writing in (somewhat) real-time. So much has happened these past few weeks that I honestly don’t know where or how to begin explaining it all. I guess I’ll start off with what I know best: DESSERTS! To keep you updated on my ~food and cooking endeavors~ at the Hatfield dorms with my roommates, I’ll disclose our running tally of baked goods thus far: cherry pie, carrot cake, banana bread, olive rosemary baguettes, strawberry rhubarb cobbler, cinnamon rolls, and banana oat muffins. At this point, the only thing we’re missing (and what I’ve been craving) is a chocolate-chip pizookie (for those who aren’t from Southern California—as I’ve realized it’s a SoCal thing (my roommates had no idea what it was)—a “pizookie” is a pizza cookie. You bake a massive-sized cookie in a skillet and put ice-cream on top: quite certainly my all-time favorite dessert). For the record, we bake everything from scratch (one of my cooking-connoisseur roommates came fully prepared with a separate suitcase packed with spices and baking ingredients, so our pantry’s fully loaded). Preparing these desserts from scratch means that each recipe comes with hours of planning, shopping, prepping, baking, cooling, and best of all: gorging. It also means that for an entire day, the apartment smells of melted butter and cinnamon, seasonal cut berries, fluffy, eggy, dough, and caramelizing brown sugar. Heaven or Hatfield? You tell me.

Autumn’s Olive Rosemary Bread

Autumn’s Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble (so so amazing)

Aside from all the baking, I’ve been incredibly busy in the field. As promised in my previous blog, I’ll elaborate now on my role as a Marine Reserves intern and the root of our efforts—monitoring Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD). First, let me paint a holistic picture of the rocky intertidal: when you think of sea stars, you think of cute, dainty, innocent little tide pool gems, right? Wrong—(well, at least for mussels, barnacles, urchins, snails and other intertidal critters who frantically flee at their sight).  Sea stars are considered the “Great White’s” of the intertidal—they’re the top predator of the intertidal trophic cascade. Since sea stars have such a strong top-down influence, they’re what you call a keystone species—when you remove them from their habitat (as ~80% of the sea stars were wiped out along the Oregon Coast in 2014 from SSWD) the dynamics of an intertidal community dramatically change.

Me with a rare Leather Star that was spotted along one of our sea star survey transects!

With all that said, I’ve spent a majority of my time this past week conducting field surveys with the Marine Reserves team, MARINe, and Bio Blitz—two other data collecting marine science groups. The data we collect from these surveys gives us insight on how the community dynamics have shifted since the devastating loss of sea stars in 2014. Are mussels and other prey proliferating in the absence of sea stars? Are there fluxes in juvenile sea star recruits? Are there new predators dominating the rocky intertidal? These are the questions we seek to answer!

Collecting data and admirin’ the rocky intertidal :)

This past Monday and Tuesday, we were up at 1:30 am cataloguing all the different species of intertidal organisms found at Otter Rock and Cascade Head. Running on 1 hour of sleep and working 8 hours in the field may seem like quite the task, but my sheer love for gumboot chitons, lemon peel nudibranchs, and celebratory group Pig N’ Pancake breakfasts made those early intertidal mornings some of the best so far. On Thursday I switched gears a bit—we took a break from intertidal surveys and worked off the ODFW boat! I helped a graduate student, Megan, collect juvenile rockfish off the coast of Cape Foulweather with SMURFS (Standard Monitoring Units for the Recruitment of Fishes). The SMURFS are large, plastic entanglements that are suspended a few feet below the surface of the water—when a juvenile rockfish swims through it, they hide and take refuge in their new “cozy condominium”. The collected juvenile fish are brought back to the lab for measurements, where the data is then used to create fishing stock projections–these projections are used to aid marine reserve and fishing preservation efforts. At each of the 8 SMURF sites, Megan and I would back-roll off the boat, snorkel to the buoy, swim down to the SMURF, and enclose it with a net. We would then swim the SMURF back to the boat and remove the juvenile fish. SMURF-ing is easily my favorite thing I’ve done so far—give me an excuse to ride a boat and snorkel and I’m here for it.

SMURFING with a SMURF!!

The MARINe and Marine Reserves teams finishing up transects at 5 am–almost done for the day!

As I speak, I’m preparing myself for THE ultimate testament to my love for field work: my first intertidal graveyard shift. It’s exactly what it sounds like—I’ll be in the field from 10pm to 6am. Will keep you posted on this hefty field day (*night) in the next blog–I’m leaving the office now so I can attempt to power-nap and power-chug some coffee!!