I have spent an awful lot of time hunched over vats of acid washing bottles and syringes this week. Oddly, doing the dishes, whether with soap and water or 10% hydrochloric acid solution, is drudgery. The only excitement to be had was when my right glove began leaking. I expected the worst, but after rinsing with Milli-Q ultrapure water I was unharmed. I had the pleasure of throwing out the scary old gloves and donning a beautiful new pair that I can love and trust for the rest of the summer.

The experiment incubating pure water in plastic containers to look for an increase in the dissolved oxygen occurring as a result of leaching yielded interesting results. The 2 gallon ziplock bag showed quite a large increase in dissolved oxygen level in the ultrapure freshwater over several days. Unfortunately, the ziplock bag containing sterile seawater drained empty at some point during the incubation. The data on the logger from the drained bag showed a similar trend to the other bag, but the plot went wonky when the water started leaking. The five gallon carboys of pure water and sterile seawater showed much lower rates of leaching than the ziplock bags. Hmmm.

The glass BOD bottles are working out nicely. On Wednesday I went to Tillamook and collected water samples at low tide from several points in the bay that represent different mixing zones. I began incubating them on Thursday in BOD bottles. Temperature and light exposure have been difficult to control due to laboratory limitations, but wrapping the bottles in aluminum foil and storing them in a cooler in a dark room has helped keep them at a stable temperature and prevent light from triggering photosynthesis int he phytoplankton.

After 24 hours of incubation, we took oxygen readings and compared them to the oxygen levels in the water in the bay when the samples were taken. We noted significant decreases in oxygen, meaning the microbes were consuming oxygen at a rate that could be easily measured in a single day. This information answered key questions about the required size of bottle and length of incubation required to measure respiration rates in this environment. While biological oxygen demand has been measured in BOD bottles for many years and is a standard practice, measuring estuarine respiration rates in a complex system like Tillamook Bay is not the usual application. Knowing that we can use small samples of water and get results in a couple days is very helpful. If the oxygen decrease in the bottles levels off, it has been suggested that I add glucose to see if the microbes take off again and are carbon limited. Exciting!

Now I just need to prepare more BOD bottles. Back to the acid.

The South Slough–and estuaries in general–are important spawning and nursery grounds for many marine fish species. However, the last time that there was a comprehensive assessment of the fish community in the South Slough was back in 1987. So approximately two years ago, the South Slough received funding to monitor the fish populations again. Once a week almost every month, a set of six sites are sampled at high and low tide. The information on the species and number of fish caught in each sample helps the reserve understand how fish communities in the slough are changing across seasons and years in different parts of the estuary. By combining this species abundance and richness data with water quality data, they can also assess how environmental conditions influence species presence, absence, and abundance. Overall, this project aims to characterize long-term trends in habitat use by fish, and it can additionally help evaluate the effectiveness of past restoration efforts.

This fish monitoring project is the other main part of my internship with South Slough, in addition to the green crab work, and this week was the first fish sampling week scheduled since I started my internship. So starting this Monday, my time this week was almost entirely spent with fish work. The method used for the fish monitoring is called seining. Seining consists of a large net that hangs vertically in the water, with a float line on the top and a weighted line on the bottom. As the net is deployed along the shore, the weighted line drops the net to the bottom of the water and the float line keeps it buoyed on the water surface, creating a large barrier that scoops up all the fish in the seine net area.

To deploy the seine net, we first set a person on shore as the anchor, holding a rope at one end of the net. Then a person on the boat deploys the net from the bow, creating an arc near the shore.

Two people then each hold one end of the net, and haul the net through the water to the shore.

Once the net reaches the shore, everything in the net is funneled to the bag at the bottom of the net. All the fish and crabs in the net are then placed in buckets (with oxygenators).

All of the fish and crabs caught are then identified, and their length and weight are measured.

This week, we caught dozens of different kinds of fish and crabs–Chinook salmon juveniles (both wild and hatchery-released), different kinds of perch and sole, herring, anchovies, pipefish, and more.

It was exciting to learn new field techniques and to become better with fish identification as the week went on. The next week of fish seining will be sometime in August, and I’m excited to do it all again!

In addition to the fun of catching green crabs over the past few weeks, I have also been able to explore some of the sites around Charleston and in central Oregon.

In just a 20 minute drive from the South Slough offices down Cape Arago Highway, there are a series of beautiful spots along the coast. One afternoon a couple weeks ago, Katie and I decided to just start driving and see what we could find.

A view of Sunset Beach (PC: Katie Gregory)

We first hit Bastendorff Beach, a long, sandy strip of beach that always has plenty of open space to have a bonfire or just sit and enjoy the view of the ocean. I’ve seen people surfing and paddleboarding, but I have only managed to get my toes in because the water is freezing so I’m not sure how the surfers manage.

We then got to Sunset Beach, but for some reason the park closes at 9 pm–before the sunset during the summer–so despite the name, I have yet to see the sunset at Sunset Beach. It’s still a gorgeous beach, with sandy shores surrounded by tall rocky cliffs. Simpson Reef is one of the best spots to view pinnipeds on the southern coast. The cliff overlooks large rocky islands right offshore where harbor seals, northern elephant seals, Steller sea lions, and California sea lions congregate. By the time we got there, the fog had started to roll in so we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear a lot of seals! Lastly, we got to Cape Arago State Park, the end of Cape Arago Highway, where we followed a few trails to spots where you could see the extensive rocky outcrops that line the coast. The trail down to the beach was closed due to seal pupping season, but hopefully we’ll be able to make it back later in the summer.

Last weekend, Katie and I decided to head the other direction and explore the sand dunes north of Charleston. We decided to hike the John Dellenback Trail, a 6-mile roundtrip trail that goes through a small forest, across a stretch of sand dunes, and then through a marshy forest to the ocean. Hiking across the dunes, where everywhere you look around you is sand except for a stretch of trees out in the distance, feels like you’re in the Sahara, not southern Oregon. But then you get to the swampy strip of forest, and the long expanse of ocean, and it feels like Oregon again.

More sand dunes, with some people included for scale. (PC: Katie Gregory)

Sand dunes at the John Dellenback Trail. (PC: Katie Gregory)

Last weekend, Katie and I decided to head the other direction and explore the sand dunes north of Charleston. We decided to hike the John Dellenback Trail, a 6-mile roundtrip trail that goes through a small forest, across a stretch of sand dunes, and then through a marshy forest to the ocean. Hiking across the dunes, where everywhere you look around you is sand except for a stretch of trees out in the distance, feels like you’re in the Sahara, not southern Oregon. But then you get to the swampy strip of forest, and the long expanse of ocean, and it feels like Oregon again.

For the 4^th of July, I left the coast behind and visited family vacationing in Bend, located in central Oregon near the Willamette National Forest. The drive from Charleston to Bend was gorgeous, passing through endless forest and past large mountain lakes. We hiked Tumalo Falls, though we didn’t make it through the entire loop because my seven- and eight-year-old cousins were getting tired. We also floated in tubes down the Deschutes River, drank some beer from local breweries, and ate some amazing gelato. It was awesome to be able to see a completely different part of Oregon. It was sunny and hot (over 90 degrees, whoo!), and though I love the southern coast, it was nice to be able to wear shorts, have to put on sunscreen, and swim in the river without wearing waders.

Tubing down the Deschutes:

Tumalo Falls:

I’m looking forward to seeing more of the area (I’m hoping to make it to the northern part of the redwoods and to Crater Lake) over the rest of the summer.

(Also, thanks to Katie for letting me use all your pictures since I never take any!)

highlight of the week: meeting Frank

This week really flew by. I don’t know if it was because of July 4 or because I finally feel established here but it just seemed like everything was a blur. My weekdays have just morphed together to become some depressingly adult blend of waking up early, making myself breakfast and lunch, driving to work, working, working, working, driving home, then doing stuff of which has no real significance because I have to wake up at 7 again the next day (more like 7:20 because of all the ‘snoozes’). I say of no real significance not because it really has no significance but more so because I’m a night owl whose inspiration and work ethic are at its peak at 2am. So considering I am a very nap-loving human being who needs at least 6 hours of rest to not set up shop underneath his office desk like George Costanza, I must go to bed well before I can blossom into the sleep-deprived individual who I was born to be.

Despite this lack of energy and sense of accomplishment outside the workplace, within the workplace I am inspired! On Monday, we didn’t go into the office but got work done at the college’s library instead. There, Miles had Catie and I make a very detailed outline for this summer. The document is extremely thorough and literally covers every day of the internship along with what we plan on doing those days, meetings scheduled, and the amount of hours dedicated to each task. While it was pretty overwhelming to create such a future-oriented plan (I can barely even plan what I’ll be eating for dinner some days) it definitely made things clearer as to what I will be doing this summer and the skills that I’ll be taking away once I head back to San Diego. And I can happily say that I am excited! However, this excitement did not hit immediately but rather built up as the week progressed. Various meetings, daily duties, talks with Miles, and my own observations of the South Coast have not only opened my eyes to the various issues and things that are trying to be accomplished here, but it’s helped me understand where I may be able to fit into it all. I know I’m only an intern but there’s just so much potential for change and progress and it’s just really neat to be a part of it all.

I’ve been thinking of whether I would move here if I had a job lined up for me. I know it’s rash and maybe unrealistic to think I could get a job position out of this but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fantasizing about the future. So with that being said, I’ve been fantasizing! I’ve just been imagining if I could see myself living in such a small place like this. I drive around the town, staring at the stores as they pass by just wondering “Would I be cool with this being my life?” I’m enjoying the work and I think there’s a lot of potential for growth, both in this position and the South Coast community in general, and that’s neat, but it seems scary to think I may one day uproot myself from California. But hey, I figure there’s no point in getting too invested in fantasies so I’m just gonna enjoy these next 7 weeks here and live as if I was living here.

In other news, on Friday, Catie and I went to the beach to take photos of people kayaking. We also got to kayak ourselves which was awesome. It was definitely a surreal experience to just paddle out and gradually hear the voices on the beach drown out. After that we enjoyed an incredible seafood barbecue, adorable dogs, good company, and country music. I went to the Oregon Country Fair in Eugene this weekend. My roommate Brendon and I drove up on Saturday and met up with some of his homies who joined our party. The fair was interesting to say the least. I have never seen so many painted boobs in my life, that’s for sure. That was my first real taste of Eugene and I can confirm, it’s a beautiful town. But as sweet as my weekend was, it was very relieving to finally see the Coos Bay bridge, it was a very home-y sight. 

Last week’s water incubation experiment was useful. The plot of the dissolved oxygen levels over the weekend showed clear declines in all of the samples, but there was some strange “noise” at around the same point in the plots of both of the ziplock bags. There was no way to determine an accurate respiration rate from the data. Additionally, the magnitude of change in the dissolved oxygen was much greater in the ziplock bags than in the carboys. My mentor, Cheryl Brown, found an interesting paper in which similar methods were employed to determine respiration rates, and the researchers found that enough oxygen would leach out of the plastic containers and into the water to confound their results. They carried on using plastic containers for incubations, but incubated additional “blank” containers containing ultra purified water to determine a rate for the oxygen leaching from the plastic so that they could correct for it.

I am currently running several incubations of ultrapure water in carboys and ziplock bags to see if leaching could be the source of the noise in our dissolved oxygen plots. We also went to Tillamook and collected more water samples that are now incubating in glass BOD bottles, glass bottles specifically designed for the purpose of measuring biological oxygen demand through incubation. The oxygen sensor we are using for the bottles is optical like the HOBO loggers, but much smaller and designed to fit into the mouth of the bottles. The sensor does not take a time series of readings, and will be used to take only initial and final readings of dissolved oxygen.

The main purpose of this week’s Tillamook trip was not to collect water for incubation experiments, but as a trial run of the bi-weekly water sampling plan of Tillamook Bay and the tributaries that will take place over the summer. Two teams with boats went out on Friday and collected water samples to measure the carbonate chemistry and nutrients of the bay and the tributaries. I rode along with the team sampling the tributaries. We did a little boating in the lower end of a couple rivers and went out only a short way into the bay before pulling out the boat and driving to all five of the rivers to gather water samples both above and below the agricultural zone. It was a long day, and aside from the pungent smell of dairy cows, or “the smell of ice cream”, I saw juvenile salmon leaping out of the water eating bugs in the morning, green herons and pairs of bald eagles, and even one large juvenile chinook in a pool up the Miami River. We will be doing these sampling trips every two weeks for the rest of the summer and I hope to observe and learn more about the ecology of the Tillamook region as I continue to learn about the science of water.

Collecting water with a Van Dorn sampler.

Nutrient sampling on the boat.

A beautiful morning on the Trask River.