A few weeks ago I wrote my blog post all about how scientists are people too. In general, what I was trying to highlight was how the people who conduct research and write scientific material have personalities and enjoy relaxing just as much as the next person. It seems poignant this week to revisit that theme. Scientists laugh, cry, eat, sleep, and so on and so forth. We are human, and if there is anything that can be said with absolute certainty about humans, it’s that not a single one of us is perfect. We have setbacks, make mistakes, and experience frustration. In fact, mistakes, setbacks, and frustration could be steps of the scientific method.

It started with SMURFing two weeks ago. If you recall, SMURFing involves collecting juvenile fish in artificial habitats to help understand habitat usage in Oregon’s Marine Reserves. Currently, we have SMURFs in two Reserves, Otter Rock Marine Reserve near Newport (my home base), and Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve near Port Orford (~3 hours south). Every week, we alternate between sampling at Otter Rock and Redfish Rocks. Two weeks ago, it was a Redfish Rocks outing. At Redfish Rocks, we collaborate with a local team of urchin divers, who collect the fish from the SMURFs using their boat, then hand them off to us. All we have to do is drive the 3 hours south to Port Orford, pick up the fish, rinse some gear, and head home. Much easier than taking our own boat all the way down there. Port Orford has really embraced its Marine Reserve, and many citizens have taken advantage of opportunities to partner with scientists to aid research studying it. It’s a great setup where all parties benefit.

Anyways, two weeks ago, I hopped in the car with Maddy (REU) and Neal (fellow Sea Grant Scholar) to head to Port Orford and pick up the fish. Our first task was to drop off a bit of equipment to the urchin divers before they departed so they could repair one of the SMURF moorings. Unfortunately, construction traffic meant we arrived just a few minutes early, and our collaborators had already left the docks. Oh well, minor setback. It just meant we had a few hours to kill while we waited for the SMURFers to return. Port Orford isn’t a bad place to kill a few hours. It’s a beautiful little town on the south coast with a brilliant ocean view. We spent our time snorkeling in a protected cove and feasting at a local diner, then returned to the docks to meet the SMURFers as they returned.

SMURF season is in a bit of a lull right now, as normally occurs in the middle of the summer. If you want to understand why, read the latest blog post I authored for the Oregon Marine Reserves website here, but basically we weren’t expecting many fish. We got zero fish and a huge serving of bad news. Two of our moorings and two other SMURFs had disappeared. This is bad for a couple reasons. Firstly, it meant that we were sampling with just four of our eight SMURFs. Who knows if the other four SMURFs we lost would have had fish in them. Secondly, SMURFs aren’t the most high tech scientific equipment, but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap. Replacing moorings requires new lines, buoys, shackles, flags, anchors, and more, as well as time out on a boat to get them in the water.

Readying new moorings for deployment!

As far as setbacks go, this was a pretty major one for SMURFing. Maddy, Neal, and I had no choice but to retreat to Newport empty-handed; seven hours of driving and all we had to deliver was bad news. I was struck by how well it was received. To be clear, no one was happy to hear our tale, but there was no finger-pointing, despairing, or pity parties. All the scientists heading the project were only focused on fixing the problem. The very next day we were building new moorings, which will be deployed this week. Bad things happen in science, as they do in life. My mentors here in Oregon have obviously experienced adversity in their projects before and have learned how to handle it. For me, it was a great learning experience.

Just a few days later, I had another learning experience. The end of July tide series had some of the lowest low tides of the summer, which made it perfect for intertidal sea star surveys. I’ve basically been put in charge of the sea star surveys which is a responsibility I was eager to shoulder. I’d been planning the July outings for weeks, checking tide tables, rallying volunteers, gathering equipment, and so on. When the time finally came, I was pretty excited to make it happen. I scheduled the first survey for a Sunday morning at 6 AM. I spent Friday and Saturday camping with my fellow Sea Grant Scholars for our mid-summer check-in (awesome experience, I’ll get back to that later), and returned a day early from the trip to do the sea star survey. Unfortunately, while I returned from the camping trip, my office keys did not. I left them in the glove compartment of my friends’ car so that I wouldn’t lose them… brilliant. This realization struck me on the way home and I made some frantic calls to try and borrow keys from other Marine Reserves members, but, being a Saturday night, my last ditch efforts were fruitless. With no way to get into our building to pick up my equipment or the keys to the truck, we had no choice but to cancel Sunday’s survey. I was not a happy camper. Really, I wasn’t a camper at all because I had left my camping trip early to do this survey. All of my hard work and planning undone by a tiny mistake, which had actually been a precautionary measure!

Some super small sea stars!

My intrepid group of volunteers.

Neal getting dirty for some sea star science.

Thankfully, my anger was tempered by my mentor’s experience. “This stuff happens all the time in fieldwork,” she told me on the phone. Mistakes happen. Scientists, including myself, are very much human. The very next day, after collecting my keys, we were out in the field in the early morning, surveying sea stars. It was great. All of my volunteers came through and performed admirably in the intertidal, we found a ton of stars, and rewarded ourselves with a gigantic breakfast afterwards. It was enough to help me forget the frustration of the previous day.

The past few weeks included some setbacks, but they were also some of the best ones of the summer. As mentioned earlier, we spent on weekend camping with the rest of the Oregon Sea Grant scholars. Half of the scholars are housed here in Newport, so I know them pretty well. The other half live on the south coast, so we hadn’t seen them since literally day one at orientation. To be honest, I was a little apprehensive about the trip. What if our two groups didn’t get along? Two days in the woods could feel a lot longer than that. Fortunately though, the other scholars are cool kids. We spent a long time hanging around the campfire, wading in streams, and catching up on the last few months. Overall, an awesome trip, and I’m glad we got to spend some good times with the south coast folks. Hopefully we’ll get to meet up again the next time I head down to Port Orford.

Other highlights of the last two weeks included my second SMURFing outing. My first time out was perfectly calm. This outing was the perfect opposite. High winds meant big waves, and big waves meant a bumpy boat ride. I may have slightly realigned my spine bouncing up and down out on the ocean, but it was a cool experience. Now I can honestly say I’ve experienced the Oregon ocean.

#nofilter

Additionally, just yesterday I got back from camping at Crater Lake National Park! Another Oregon bucket list item, crossed off. The place is absolutely gorgeous. You could stare at those blue waters for hours, completely mesmerized. We circumnavigated the lake by car and stopped off to do a couple of hikes, including one to the peak of the tallest mountain in the park, which has a stellar view of the lake. It was an awesome experience, truly. Finally, I finished off the past two weeks last night by partaking in one truly human experience that unites us all, watching Game of Thrones.

Winter is coming. But for now I’ve got four more weeks of summer at least.

There is a piece of vital information about science I feel I need to share at this point in the summer. Be advised, this may come as a bit of a shock. Scientists are people too. Every single one of us – human beings. If you are a scientist or know a scientist, you should know this. And if you’re reading this now and know me personally, I hope that you at least somewhat recognized this already. However, I accept that it can be easy to completely forget about the human dimension of this increasingly computerized, data-driven behemoth we call science. Last week provided me with ample examples of how we science geeks are just as human as anybody else.

It began with the 4^th of July last Tuesday. While the laws of nature may never take a day off, the people studying them certainly do. I spent the day at the beach with a couple other Sea Grant scholars and a handful of the REUs here at Hatfield Marine Science Center. Let me take a moment to say that every one of my fellow interns is incredibly bright. Each intern is collaborating with other scientists, conducting high level research on topics that range from oyster antibiotics to deep-sea volcanoes. I’ve had some great conversations over the past few weeks and learned a ton, because I’m living in close quarters with a group of geniuses. However, our collective genius is probably not always fully apparent. For example, we spent a significant portion of beach time trying to push one another out of a small circle in the sand while playing the classic Independence Day game “Beach Sumo”. Hey, even geniuses need to blow off some steam. We grilled out, played some more conventional 4^th of July games (e.g. beach volleyball), and watched the local fireworks just like any other collection of human beings might on America’s birthday. And the next day, it was right back to work in the lab and/or office.

Actually, for me, I wasn’t in the lab or office the next day. Instead I spent the day on a work road trip. Scientists take road trips too. Remember SMURFing? Well we took this road trip down to pick up the fish collected in SMURFs by our collaborators in Port Orford. I travelled with Will, a Ph.D. student at Oregon State studying juvenile rockfish, and Madeline, an REU student working with Will for the summer. The drive to Port Orford is a long one and we filled it with naps, swapping stories, and jamming to mid-90s grunge music. Once we arrived, though, it was all science again. We were somewhat disappointed to have driven four hours to pick up only five fish, but that’s all that had been collected from the SMURFs that morning. As the old saying goes, science is as science does. Rather than turn tail and retreat to Newport immediately though, we chose to take matters into our own hands. The three of us donned our wetsuits and hiked down some 300+ steps at a former coast guard station to reach a beautiful protected cove where we snorkeled for about an hour, collecting fish with nets. Fieldwork is awesome. When the sheer cold of Oregon’s waters finally overpowered the warmth we felt from the beauty of our surroundings (and, more importantly, our wetsuits) we loaded up in the car and drove back to Newport in high spirits. A few days later Will, Maddy, and I went snorkeling for juveniles again, this time in Newport. Conditions were much more difficult. I don’t want to shame Maddy and myself with exact numbers, but the number of fish captured collectively by the two of us was borderline pathetic. In contrast, Will raked in 20 fish all by himself. If I hadn’t personally witnessed him eating a gigantic burrito an hour later, I might believe that perhaps he actually is a fish-catching robot, rather than human.

I spent the most of the rest of my week working on writing up posts for the Marine Reserves website. Not to brag or anything, but the ODFW Marine Reserves Program has a fantastic website. If you have any interest in Oregon’s oceans, marine conservation, or just have a spare 10 minutes I encourage you to check it out at http://oregonmarinereserves.com/. There’s some great information and photos on there about the reserves and the hard work we do here to monitor them. Over the course of the summer I’ll be writing several posts for the news section on the homepage, covering topics such as SMURFing, sea star wasting syndrome, and some of the other projects I work with. The first post went up last Friday if you’re interested!

Writing these posts has gotten me thinking about all of the similar scientific material I’ve read either online or in print. All of these public posts and articles are written by real human people whether you believe it or not. And although the writing style is generally one that intentionally emphasizes the information over the author, I think some of the writer’s personality often leaks into the text whether they intend it or not. In my opinion, this is a good thing for communicating with the public. Making scientific information communicable involves expressing it in a way that interests the public. We’re all social creatures (even scientists), so we’re more interested in things that sound like they were written by humans rather than robots. Most people prefer novels over dictionaries, for example. Next time you’re reading something scientific –whether it’s in a newspaper, magazine, online, etc. – take a second and think about the person who wrote it. Can you tell a little bit about them just by reading it? Maybe they’re a distinguished Ph.D. with hundreds of publications. Or maybe they’re a slightly hungry 22-year-old who is two days late on their weekly blogging deadline, kind of like me!

I do have a (somewhat) decent excuse for being a little late with this post. I spent this weekend camping at Mount Hood with the other Hatfield interns, as well as a group of REUs from Corvallis. That’s right, scientists camp too. The trip was originally planned just for the REUs, but the director of Hatfield’s REU program is awesome and permitted myself and a few other non-REUs to tag along. It was spectacular. We hiked a total of about 20 miles in some 48 hours, the highlight being a 12 mile hike that traversed rivers, boulders, meadows, and mini-snow fields, and ended on a ridge overlooking the majestic Mount Hood. All of this was enhanced by the great group of people surrounding me. We joke around, dance in the moonlight, float down freezing cold streams, have snowball fights/duels/ambushes, and so on and so on. We’re all 100% human, but also 100% scientist, and if there’s enough other students out there who are similar to us, our oceans are in good hands for the future.