Category Archives: Robert E. Malouf Marine Studies Scholar

Can I get a witness?

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Talk to 25 people about the same event and you will get 25 different observations of the experience. This is intuitive especially if you watch any of the multiple crime dramas on TV. Many eyewitnesses can witness something different despite watching the same scene. Add the element of time and the possible observations grows. Add that the witnesses are a diverse grouping of people with different values and worldviews and the possible number of observations becomes overwhelming.

Over the last three months, I have sat down to chat with 25 people who have been involved in a large-scale research project to anticipate water scarcity in the Willamette Valley over the next 85 years. This subset of participants in Willamette Water 2100 (as the research project is called) is meant to be representative of the multiple viewpoints engaged in this project and includes university principle investigators of natural and social sciences, county commissioners, farmers, and representatives from state and federal agencies like the Oregon Water Resource Department (OWRD), the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA), the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the Forest Service (USFS), among others. The idea is that by talking to multiple witnesses of this project, I can fully characterize the participants and their resulting outcomes after participating. Did each person have a unique experience or did all participants experience the same things? My interviews and analyses will speak to this question and more.

These “chats” followed a semi-structured interview format. This means that I had a list of questions or themes that I wanted to talk about but that I allowed the conversation to go any direction so I could follow up on any interesting points that might deviate from my list of questions. The interviews lasted anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour and a half but most were around an hour long. I asked my interviewees how they had gotten involved in Willamette Water 2100 and why. I asked what they had expected coming in to the project and if their expectations had been met. The interviewees also named challenges and successes that the project had faced and identified ways that the project is useful while suggesting methods to present the results to a wider audience.

After talking to each person, I took the audio-recording and transcribed our conversation to a text file. These text files are my data. Now, how do I analyze files of words? I have been trained to handle data of numbers and categories entered into Excel to generate graphs and summary statistics. That is not the way to handle qualitative data like my conversation documents.

I am just beginning to analyze my words in a process called “coding” which organizes repeating ideas into themes and concepts. For instance, one concept that practically every interviewee mentioned was that participating in this research benefitted them through learning. What was learned may differ among individuals or between groups of individuals, but they are all unified under that concept of learning. Reading and re-reading, and grouping and re-grouping are the next steps for me with this data so that I can accurately characterize the long-term participant experience in this research project.

But! That is not the only data with which I will be working. I am also about to launch an online survey to all participants of the process. Where my interviews were targeted based on expertise and experience with the project, my survey will be sent to every person on this project’s list serve. I will ask similar but more specific questions seeking to identify the degree of participation of each individual, their motivations for participating, and their perceptions of the project’s outcomes. The survey will provide me with some numbers to strengthen the conclusions I am making with the words of the interviews. Using multiple measures is a good way to confirm my conclusions.

I am feeling pretty accomplished having completed the interview data collection and transcription by the end of winter term. However, as we are beginning the spring term, I realize that there is still so much more work to do. And, while I would rather continue reflecting on my research process with you, I had better return to organizing the reflections of my subjects on the research process they went through. Unlike the police, however, I am not trying to recreate a crime to identify what happened, so I am going to change metaphors now at the end of this post (and let you see a picture of me when I was four years old). Consider the following picture of a party.

20150413_203158(Photo credit: Pam Ferguson)

Everyone is at the same party, but you might imagine, that different attendees will have different comments to make about the success of the party or how they felt leaving it. I want to know what the common and uncommon perceptions of the party were so that I can throw a better party in the future. While it may be weird to interview and survey your guests after a party, coordinators of scientific engagement processes definitely can do this. And then we hope to develop and invite people to better scientific engagement processes in the future.

On the absence of spines

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Hello Oregon Sea Grant Community– I’m Keats Conley, a 2014-2015 Robert E. Malouf Marine Studies Scholar. The blog below shares some recent reflections on my work with appendicularians.

 

April 2014: Here, in a small tourist town on the south coast of France, I am hunched over a dissecting microscope, wire-tipped dissecting probe in hand. The wire is finer than dental floss. I am using it to break my ancestors’ spines.

 I use the term “spine” loosely.

Appendicularians are a “Urochordate”, one of the three subphyla of the phylum Chordata, along with Vertebrata and Cephalochordata. Cephalochordata is a rather obscure group of small, soft, fish-like creatures called lancelets. Vertebrata includes true fish, hagfish, humans and Labradoodles alike. Urochordates are therefore a sister group to us vertebrates. We are much more closely related to appendicularians than we are to, say, the bivalve oysters we so enjoy shucking and shooting. A great deal of research has compared mammalian and Urochordata genomes to provide information on, among other things, the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate immune system, the eye lens, and the central nervous system.

Appendicularians look like a millimeter-sized translucent tadpole. Under the microscope, they appear equal parts alien and human embryo. They have a football-shaped head (the “trunk”) and a tail, which writhes wildly. I break their spines so that they will hold still long enough for me to take a photograph, which I can later use to measure their size.

The term “appendicularian” refers to the appendices of the animal, their houses. As described in a scientific paper: “The house is secreted as a rudiment by the oikoplastic epithelium, a specialized single-layered organ that covers the trunk of the animal.” In other words, they grow their house from their head. The “house” is a spherical or ellipsoidal structure made of mucus. It is secreted, and then the animal bangs its head up and down to inflate the house with water. The animal then swims inside and sits in the house, with the house roof tucked under its appendicularian “chin.” The house is made of rectangular mucus filaments that function like a spider web.[1] Structurally, its architecture is kaleidoscopically intricate, but its function is straightforward: to capture and concentrate prey particles, such as bacteria and small algae, from the surrounding seawater. The house concentrates prey up to a thousand times that of the surrounding seawater, and then the appendicularian sucks up its thick prey soup as if through a straw.

As I alternate between spine- and camera-snapping, I don’t need to follow any particular protocol. (I do try and move swiftly). In my home lab back in Oregon, a fellow Ph.D. student one building distant works with two-inch zebrafish (Danio rerio) and must adhere to procedures outlined by the University of Oregon’s Animal Care Services, the organization “responsible for administering all activities related to the care and use of animals.” An animal, in this case, is implicitly considered equivalent to a vertebrate. And as we know, although appendicularians coexist with zebrafish in the kingdom Animalia, the two occupy separate subphyla within the phylum Chordata. When I called Animal Care Services to inquire whether any particular care procedure must be followed for research on appendicularians, I was reassured that, no, Animal Care Services oversees supervision of only live vertebrates, as well as some charismatic, seemingly intelligent invertebrate mollusks, such as octopuses. But, I protested, appendicularians are a sister-group to vertebrates. A sister-group. Just the same, I am free to do what I wish with my small, sister house-builders.

The summer after my spring of spine-breaking, I served as a teaching assistant for a marine invertebrate zoology class at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. In a lecture on the difference between “anadromous” and “catadromous”, the professor showed a photo of the rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss. In small font, the caption read: “Vertebrates are just invertebrates that happen to have backbones.”

Appendicularians don’t have a spine. They have a notochord. A notochord is a flexible, thin-walled tube, found in the embryos of all chordates. Notochords were advantageous to primitive fish-ancestors because they provided a rigid structure for muscle attachment, yet were flexible enough to allow more movement than, for example, a hard chitinous exoskeleton. In humans, the notochord of the developing embryo is a precursor that will eventually become the central nervous system, including the spinal cord and vertebrae. But in appendicularians, the notochord just stays as a notochord. They have a simple, spineless tail. And a head that builds houses.

 

References:

Spada, F., Steen, H., Troedsson, C., Kallesøe, T., Spriet, E., Mann, M., & Thompson, E. M. (2001). Molecular patterning of the oikoplastic epithelium of the larvacean tunicate Oikopleura dioica. Journal of Biological Chemistry,276(23), 20624-20632.

 

Footnotes:

[1] The next time you look at a spider web, notice that it is made up entirely of rectangles. This is because a rectangle is the shape that catches the most bugs with the minimum amount of web material. After all, spider silk is energetically costly to produce. Appendicularians employ this same strategy of catching prey using rectangular-mesh nets, except their thread is mucus rather than silk.

Silent Seas and Shifting Winds

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Hello Oregon Sea Grant Community!

Before I even get started with my whirlwind update of field work, conferences and dramatic life changes I first want to apologize.  It has been far longer than I ever expected since my last post.  While I certainly can’t fix my prolonged absence… I can at least begin to explain what’s kept me so far away from my computer since my last post this spring.

First- Conference update!

Thanks in large part to the Malouf Fellowship I was able to attend a marine mammal conference this May in Bellingham, WA.  I’m a member of the Society for Marine Mammalogy — but wasn’t able to go to the “big girl” international conference in Dundin New Zealand this past year (as a lowly grad student with teaching responsibilities and a tight budget, well the South Pacific just wasn’t in the cards).  What I love about the marine mammal community though, is our ability and desire to collaborate.  International conferences are biennial (every two years) but as students we hold an annual chapter meeting.  The Northwest Student Chapter for the Society of Marine Mammalogy (NSCSMM- check us out on facebook and get involved!) hosts a one day conference every year at one of the Pacific Northwest Universities.  This year Western Washington University had the lucky draw, and the conference organizer was none other than my dear friend and former intern Kat Nikolich.  The marine mammal world is quite small.

The conference, which is organized entirely by students, was spectacular.  It was a priceless opportunity to hear the latest and greatest in marine mammal research, and entirely from the Pacific Northwest.  Further, we had a chance to take a boat ride out of the Western Washington Marine Lab, where we saw heaps of marine life and generally kicked back and got our feet wet.  It was also a great place to make some collaborators.  At the conference I chatted with a number of  students with similar interests in acoustics who I now have plans to work with in the future.  (Phew… people say science is competitive, that must be why they created conferences.  Working together is always easier than racing to the top).  I’m also proud to report that I was elected the new Chapter Representative, and will be working with Pacific Northwest Students for the next few years keeping everyone informed about conferences and opportunities to participate in marine mammal science.

Which leads me to the next exciting conference news. In May, 2015 Oregon State University will be hosting the NWSCSMM Meeting in Newport, OR. We’ll be inviting students from throughout the region (Northern California to Alaska) to present their research (completed or in progress) to friends and colleagues.  You don’t need to present to be involved; undergraduates, high schoolers, or graduate students are encouraged to attend.  This is an excellent chance for students (or anyone) who wants to learn more about the marine mammal field, or perhaps wants some advice on how to break into marine mammal science, to hobnob with some early career researchers.  Feel free to contact me personally if you have questions about attending or presenting, and keep an eye out on this blog and others.  I’ll be sure to circulate the details as they unfold.

But I’m not done yet… I know this post is already growing long… hang in there.

Due again in large part to the Malouf Fellowship that I’m so honored to have received, I was able to travel to Washington D.C. (o.k. Leesburg Virginia) this summer for a weeklong Marine BioAcoustics Summer School (SeaBASS).  I know not everyone gets excited about spending a week learning about marine physics and underwater sound production, but I do!  It was spectacular!  I won’t bore you with all of the details here, except to say that fish do vocalize and it’s amazing, and that physics tells us a lot about ocean ecology.  You can read a more detailed account of the trip on my lab blog here.

In the interest of brevity just a few more points.   I was invited to speak to the American Cetacean Society’s Oregon Chapter this past spring in Newport, OR.  I gave a talk on acoustic communication in cetaceans, with an emphasis on critters we have here on the Oregon Coast- which if you didn’t know includes white sided dolphins, Pacific dolphins, harbor porpoise, sperm whales, humpback whales, and gray whales… among others.  I’ve also since given two other lectures (one on a small cruise ship and one as a master class at the university) on similar topics.  This fall I’ll be teaching two master classes, both of them for universities on the east coast, with a little help from the internet :)

Lastly, I want to pass along some exciting, but bittersweet news.  My PhD project has changed.  I know.  It’s a little strange for me.  When I started my PhD I began working on what I believed (and continue to believe) is an extremely valuable marine mammal monitoring project here on the Oregon Coast.  Over the part year I’ve been able to recruit a series of talented and committed students and volunteers to act as marine mammal observers looking for whales, dolphin, and porpoise from the R/V Elakha.  In my previous posts I told you a little about what we’d been seeing on the water, and this spring we deployed our first round of hydrophones and started listening as well- very exciting.

But, somewhere along the lines something happened.  My phone rang. Funding had come available studying the impact of noise on humpback whales in Glacier Bay National Park, and the Park biologist wanted to know if I was able to shift my dissertation focus to Alaska.  Prior to working on cetaceans here in Oregon I lived and studied humpback whales in Southeast Alaska.  After completing my M.S.at OSU my focus shifted locally to the Oregon Coast, but as you may know funding in science is incredibly tight.  When the opportunity for a fully funded PhD position arose, I wasn’t really in a position to say no.  Given my background in humpback whale acoustics I was a good fit for the project, and although the decision was a tough one (tougher than you might imagine) I opted to accept the offer.

The flip side of the coin? The good news is that I’ve still been working on the Oregon Coast project, and it’s flourishing.  We have a new graduate student in our lab named Courtney Holdman who started as one of our volunteers on the project.  She has since taken over the project for her master’s thesis.  Our volunteers are still going strong, and the program has expanded somewhat.  Two students initially slated to collect data for our marine mammal project are headed out on a 4 day research cruise this September.  Three other students from here in Oregon will be headed into the field with me in Glacier Bay next summer.  So while I’ll be looking at noise impacts up north, I’ll be bringing a little bit of Oregon with me.

I know this has been quite the earful (eyeful?).  Thanks for hanging in there with me on my PhD adventure. It’s been exciting, and I never would have managed it without Oregon Sea Grant (I mean that).  I’ll be sure to stay in touch as things unfold! ~Michelle

Happy summer!

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Hello Sea Grant readers,

It’s been an exciting (and busy) term, both in Corvallis and on the road.  I went to two weeklong conferences in April/May, which were interesting but very different experiences.  The first was the Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS) in Seattle, which was held in conjunction with the Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference (GMREC).  The GMREC/METS conference focused heavily on the mechanical and industrial side of marine renewable energy.  I learned a lot about the history of the marine renewable industry, recent progress in the industry, and well as the major setbacks and obstacles.  The second conference was the Environmental Interactions with Marine Renewables (EIMR) conference, in Stornoway, Scotland.  Scotland was beautiful, and we had unexpectedly great weather for the entire week (!), which was wonderful.  The conference focused on the impacts of marine energy devices on the physical environment, on the wave climate, and on marine organisms and ecosystems.  Although the main focus of the conference was marine biology/ecology, I met several other wave modelers looking at the far-field effects of WEC arrays and tidal turbines.  I was really excited to have the opportunity to discuss goals, methods, and model issues with other researchers with a similar focus, and I came back with a lot of new ideas and new contacts.

Now that I’m back in Corvallis, I’m trying to get myself ready for a summer spent in front of my computer, writing my thesis and a journal article (or two).  I plan to defend my thesis in mid-September.  It’s almost hard to believe I have already been in Corvallis for 2 years! I love Corvallis and I am sad to leave, but I am really excited about the next step.  I was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to do a yearlong study on coastal evolution and coastal hazards in Dakar, Senegal, which I plan to start in October.  With writing and defending my thesis, moving overseas, and starting the Fulbright, I expect the next 6 months to be a whirlwind!

Before any of that, though, we have another important event: the 2014 WORLD CUP.  I am so excited!!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you out cheering on team USA!

Winter update!

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Hello again and happy spring!

In my last post, I talked a bit about my research on the environmental impacts of wave energy converters (WECs).  In this post, I’d like to give you a few updates on how my work is progressing and where it is heading next.

I am interested in how the presence of WEC arrays will change the wave climate at the shoreline.  I use a numerical model called SWAN to determine the changes in the nearshore wave height, wave direction, and wave-induced forces as a result of offshore WEC arrays.  I started with an idealized coastline, with the goal of developing general conclusions on the nearshore effects of WEC arrays that could be used as guidelines in the preliminary design and development of future arrays.  To do this, I simulated changes in the nearshore wave climate on generic planar beaches for a range of wave conditions, array configurations, and array locations.  I am currently applying the same model to two permitted wave energy test sites along the Oregon coast, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC) North Energy Test Site (NETS) and the NNMREC South Energy Test Site (SETS) in Newport.  The analyses of the SETS and NETS sites will help determine if the generalized conclusions made in the first part of the study are applicable to sites with more complicated bathymetries (underwater topographies).  Additionally, these analyses will provide relevant, site-specific data that can be used in larger environmental assessments of the NETS and SETS test sites.

Things are coming along nicely, albeit a bit slower than expected.  Numerical modeling is a true test of patience!  Although I expected to move a bit more quickly, I did make a lot of progress this past term, and I was able to submit my first conference paper in January.  The paper was accepted yesterday, which is really exciting.  Additionally, I will be presenting in a few weeks at the Annual Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference (GMREC) and the Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS), a joint week-long conference in Seattle.  This will be a great opportunity to meet and build connections with a range of researchers and professionals in the field, to share my current research and information on other research being conducted at OSU, and to broaden my understanding of current developments in the field of marine energy.  I’m really looking forward to the conference and I’m excited for a week in Seattle!

Overall, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made this year.  I just finished my last class, and I’m really excited to be able to focus exclusively on my research in the upcoming quarter.  There is still a lot that needs to be done!

Thanks for reading, and enjoy spring break!

Thar She Blows!

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Hello Again Sea Grant Readers,

Michelle Fournet checking in with an update about the marine mammals of our Oregon Coast.  In my first blog entry (where I introduced myself as one of the 2013 Malouf Fellowship recipients) I told you a little about the marine mammal survey that I’m conducting along the Oregon Coast. Well I wanted to follow up with a short synopsis of what we’ve seen and who’s been along for the ride.

We’ve been conducting surveys on at least a monthly basis — more when the weather cooperates.  This may seem intermittent, but we had good the good fortune to go out quite a few times during the winter months, allowing us to conduct one of the first ever rigorous marine mammal surveys on our coast during that season. We’re looking for signs of all marine mammals, but I’m particularly interested in odontocete species (dolphins and porpoises).  So far we’ve seen harbor porpoises on nearly every survey, we’ve seen Dall’s porpoise on many of our surveys (including one glorious bow riding event), and we’ve seen at least one species of common dolphin.

I’m interested in these species in particular because they are commonly described as sound sensitive.  Our coastal waters are home to bustling marine industry, the lifeblood of many of our coastal communities.  Vessel traffic, marine research, tourism, sustainable energy development, and more all produce noise.  Sound travels faster and further in the marine environment.  On this one hand this makes sound the ideal sensory modality for marine communication, on the other it also means the ocean is particularly vulnerable to noise pollution.  The input of anthropogenic noise, or man-made noise, may alter the behavior of marine mammal species that rely on sound to navigate, communicate, or forage.

The first step to assessing species resilience (a key tenet in the application of ecosystem based management) is knowing how much these sound sensitive species are currently overlapping with industries that produces noise, and how that overlap is likely to change as we make decisions about how to develop our ocean resources.  All of this research is firmly rooted in the answering the question: who’s there and when?

I’ve been fortunate to expand my research team over the past few months.  We have a number of volunteers from the community of Newport as well as students from OSU staffing the Elakha as she makes her coastal surveys.  In conjunction with a marine bird survey, conducted under the leadership of M.S. student Jess Porquez and her advisor Dr. Rob Suryan of the Hatfield Marine Science Center, we were able to mount a large scale training initiative to get volunteers prepared for their time on the water.

Lastly, in thanks to the Malouf Fellowship, I will be attending the Northwest Student Chapter Meeting for the Society of Marine Mammalogy this coming May.  It will be a great opportunity to present some of the work that I’m pursuing as a grad student, as well as rub elbows with other marine mammoligist students.  Meeting and collaborating with other students in the field is priceless.  We are often facing the same problems, and in collaboration can brainstorm some effective solutions.  Further, it’s always nice to spend a weekend with ocean-minded folk, watch a few whales, and talk shop.

Cheers!

Michelle

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This post has been a long time in the making.  No matter how hard I try to stay on top of things early in the quarter, November and December always end up being a bit of a whirlwind.  I have (finally!) finished the quarter, and I have moved on to regular 40 hour work weeks.  It almost feels like vacation.

This quarter was a particularly busy one.  In addition to my classes, I was presenting my research at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, a weeklong conference in San Francisco that gathers more than 20,000 researchers from a range of fields. The conference very inconveniently occurs during finals week, but it’s an incredible opportunity to interact with fellow scientists and to learn more about the work being conducted in the field.

A bit of background: I am an MS candidate at Oregon State University and one of three Robert E. Malouf scholars for 2014.  I work with Dr. Merrick Haller in the Coastal and Ocean Engineering group on the effects of offshore Wave Energy Converter (WEC) arrays on the nearshore wave field. This research is part of a large and multidisciplinary effort to understand the potential environmental impacts of WEC devices.  The Malouf Fellowship allows me to be more active in the scientific community through conferences such as AGU and the Marine Energy Technology Symposium (METS) (where I will be presenting my research in April 2014) and it has given me insight into other Sea Grant related work being done at a more local level.  I am very grateful for the support of the Oregon Sea Grant and for the opportunity to be part of the Sea Grant community.

More specifically, my research focuses on how the presence of WEC arrays changes the waves at the shoreline, and the potential impacts of these changes on nearshore processes.  WEC devices extract energy from the waves, which results in a low energy area behind the devices, referred to as the WEC shadow.  The extraction of energy results in a reduction in wave height and a change in wave direction in the WEC shadow.  Wave height and direction are important parameters in nearshore processes, and are especially important in the generation of rip currents and longshore currents that drive sediment transport.  Coastal erosion is a serious problem on certain parts of the Oregon coast.  Could the deployment of offshore WEC arrays increase erosion in vulnerable areas? Could it result in the generation of rip currents that pose serious risks for swimmers and beach users?  If so, where?  It is important to understand the potential impacts of WEC arrays in order to choose the best size, design, and location for arrays before they are deployed.

To address these issues, I am using the numerical model SWAN to simulate the changes on the wave field resulting from each individual device.  The past few months I have spent developing a technique for representing the WEC arrays in the model, and then applying this technique on an idealized coastline to make a few general conclusions about the effects of WEC arrays on the nearshore zone.  In the upcoming months, I will be using this same technique to simulate arrays at two permitted wave energy test sites off the coast of Newport, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC) North Energy Test Site (NETS) and the South Energy Test Site (SETS), using high resolution bathymetry and directional wave spectra from a 2011 hindcast.  This will allow us to gain insight into the effects of WEC arrays on a more realistic coastline, and to see how the deployment of a WEC array could potentially affect the nearshore environment and communities in the Newport area.

I am happy with the progress I’ve made in the past few months, and I’m really excited to continue.  At the moment, though, I am very ready to enjoy winter break.  Happy 2014!

A new hat

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A few weeks ago I went to a small luncheon in Corvallis; it was there that I received, as a gift, a new hat.  It’s a blue baseball cap with the words “Oregon Sea Grant” across the front.  As you know, baseball caps are particularly well suited to a number of uses: (1) Baseball playing, (2)  Keeping the sun out of one’s eyes , and (3) Keeping the rain off of one’s face.  Tomorrow when I head out on the ocean my brand new Oregon Sea Grant baseball cap is going to take a beating… and I won’t be playing baseball.

My name is Michelle Fournet.  I’m a PhD student in Oregon State University’s department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and a proud recipient of a 2013 Robert E. Malouf Fellowship.  My lab, the Oregon State Research Collective for Applied Acoustics, or ORCAA for short, uses sound (acoustics) to study marine organisms.  My research in particular is centered around the cetacean species that inhabit Oregon’s near coastal oceans.  The order Cetacea includes whales, dolphins, and porpoise- and we have many of them here in Oregon.  How many exactly? We’re not yet sure.

Part of my PhD research is aimed at identifying what cetacean species regularly use Oregon’ near coastal ocean, and when they seem to be here.  To answer this question I’m taking a two prong approach that, at first glance, sounds a lot simpler than it really is:  I’m going to look for them and I’m going to listen for them.

I’m conducting visual surveys along Oregon’s continental shelf with a team of observers, binoculars, float coats, and cameras.  We’re hopping on board with other labs as they take cruises to collect biological and oceanographic data out of Newport Oregon.  We perch ourselves on the bow of OSU’s R/V Elakha and spot whales, dolphins, and porpoise whenever the vessel is underway- rain or shine, wind and waves, if the boat goes out we try and get on it!  We’re using a line transect sampling protocol and hope to be incorporating photo identification into the project.  Both of these methods allow us to ultimately identify what species are present and to calculate species abundance.  If we are able to sample throughout the year we can also address questions about seasonal and diel variability, ask questions about larger scale processes, and paint a more comprehensive picture of our whale, dolphin, and porpoise communities.

This is only part of the method, however.  While looking from the bow of the boat can be a very effective method for documenting mammals, porpoises and dolphins can be difficult to spot under even the best conditions.  To compliment our visual surveys we have plans to launch multiple hydro-acoustic platforms that will record oceans sounds for analysis.  Cetaceans are highly vocal.  Baleen whale species produce some of the loudest calls on the planet, that may be capable of traveling across ocean basins.  Odontocete species utilize echolocation for navigation and foraging, and produce whistles under various social situations. However, high frequency odontocete calls may only be detected in the range of meters, and low-frequency baleen whale calls may be masked by anthropogenic or ocean noise.  What we have in the wings, is a few technologies that will help us work around these problems to get clear recordings of cetacean vocalizations.

Our hope is that the combination of the two methods will yield sufficient data to form a comprehensive understanding of who is really out there.  Why do we want to know?  Well… I’d love to tell you all about it (and I’m sure I will in my next post!).  But for now, I have a rainy  boat ride to prepare for, and I need to find my hat.

This Is It!

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Well, this is it folks! My year as an Oregon Sea Grant scholar has come to a close. Between my last blog and now, I have made great strides in my work.

First off, the chemostat works beautifully! After many false starts, George is finally functioning as it should, readjusting the pH of the culture vessel by bubbling the media with CO2 gas. The LabVIEW program monitors and regulates everything, and I am going to write a function into it that will allow it to send a warning to my phone when something goes wrong, any time of the day or night (I’m not sure if I should be excited about this…).

Aided by my intrepid undergraduate intern, Maria, I ran an experiment this summer to test the effect that a range of pHs would have on saxitoxin production of A. catenella. I compiled growth data, PAM fluorescence data, ran numerous reactive oxygen species (ROS) assays to determine the level of physiological stress in the dinoflagellates, and ran an intracellular saxitoxin ELISA assay. I plan to do the extracellular ELISA in the very near future.

I am still in the process of data processing, statistical analysis, finishing the other ELISAs, doing back-up lab work, etc. However, I can tell you that my preliminary data processing seems to indicate that my original hypotheses are correct: stress induced by low pH is linked with increased saxitoxin production in A. catenella.

For the actual results – well, you’ll just have to read the papers.

I’ve learned a lot this year, and seen much work come to fruition that may not have been possible without this scholarship. I’m very blessed to have had the opportunity and ability to do this research. If the new Malouf scholars have as much fun as I did this year, they will count themselves lucky to be scientists. :)