Tag Archives: Charleston

SSNERR: An Easy Sell

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A few years ago, the EMU (common building) at the UO was a complete mess. The halls were impossible to navigate and the space was making it harder for student life to flourish, so our government liaison decided to ask for government funding to build a new one. In addition to writing the proposal and going through all of the necessary steps, she held a meeting with the representatives in the EMU. She gave them only the room number, and every one of them turned up late to the meeting after frantically searching halls that more closely resembled mazes. When they finally made it to the meeting, they were greeted by our liaison and a presentation explaining the benefits of upgrading the EMU, which the officials had just experienced first-hand. Her plan worked, and today myself and thousands of other students happily attend events, lectures, and career fairs in a beautiful building that fosters student participation and interaction.

I’ll never forget when I heard that story, because it completely redefined the words “effective communication” for me. Effective communication isn’t just breaking down complicated terms and concepts so that people can understand them, but actually bringing people to the problem and getting them to connect with it. Knowing they would have meetings there in the future, and seeing what campus members were going through, those representatives had a personal stake in the improvement and maintenance of that building, and I hope to have that same impact at the South Slough National Estuarine Reserve (SSNERR) over the next ten weeks.

By connecting people with the SSNERR and the wonderful ecosystem that it protects, I hope to make people see that we all have a personal stake in protecting the environment. Summer camps, seminars, demonstrations, guided tours, research, and monitoring are just a short list of the many ways in which the staff, interns, and volunteers at SSNERR dedicate their time to showing people the magic of the outdoors and the importance of environmental research and protection.

On my most recent hike with one of my mentors, we reached this beautiful clearing and took a moment to take in the view. She told me, “you can kind of think of it like you’re trying to market the South Slough, and really, it’s such an easy sell.”

An Update from the South Coast

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A lot has happened since my last post. This week alone I have worked on an ODFW lamprey assessment by electrofishing Winchester Creek’s headwaters, participated in a Sea Grant funded eel grass monitoring survey, and seined for juvenile fish with visiting scientists from OSU. Most importantly, I have successfully completed all of my crab sampling in the South Slough Research Reserve. After deploying 160 traps, I processed over 2,100 crabs in just 12 days. Of these only 86 were the invasive green crabs I was targeting.

Though I had wished to collected more data on the species, my mentor and her colleagues were pleased with my results. I found green crabs in locations they have never been found before. My data also indicates the highest abundance of these crabs in the Coos estuary in the last 19 years. I am currently collaborating with a professor from OSU to publish a report on the status of the European Green Crab along Oregon’s Coast. Please enjoy the pictures below taken on my last day of sampling.

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Week Ten: It’s See You Later, Not Goodbye

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And that is all she wrote, folks. My time here in Oregon is up and I have headed back to the Midwest and have started my classes at Purdue. This summer has been a whirlwind of amazing experiences and opportunities that I will never forget. I have had the privelage to learn so much from some stellar biologists.

In my last week I had a perfect blend of desk work and field work. I spent a good chunk of my week consuming massive amounts of coffee and clacking away at my computer trying to put together my end of summer portfolio for Oregon Sea Grant. But I also had the opportunity to go out into the field with Scott one last time to dig up razor clams that would be sent off to be checked for acids that are not safe for human consumption. We check for this regularly in order to keep a close eye on the fishery.

On our way back from the field we passed Adam’s Point where we stopped to look at a dead sea lion that had washed up on shore. I had never been so close to a sea lion before—dead or alive—and I was thrilled to check it out.

Checking out the dead sea lion that washed up at Adam’s Point.

I also had the chance to go seining with Gary one last time; this time in Bandon on the Coquille River. I now understood my fellow Sea Grant Scholar, Catherine’s, complaints regarding the mosquitos. They were so thick you could see them hang in sheets in the air! The diversity and abundance was lower than in Coos Bay but we did catch a huge male Chinook salmon in our seine which more than made up for it!

A large male Chinook salmon we seined up in the Coquille River!

On Thursday I had to say farewell to Scott and all the other employees of the ODFW Charleston. Thank you everyone at the ODFW for making this summer so great! I was sad to leave, everyone in the office was so great to work with that I hated having to end my stay there.

One last day at my desk at the ODFW Charleston. Ahh, the clutter of a biologist!

That evening, a close friend of mine from OIMB, Theresa, and I drove up to Eugene for a short visit and then headed to Portland. I had never been to either city so it was awesome to get a look around. Theresa is a U of O student so I was lucky enough to get a full tour of the campus!

Visiting Hayward Field where they hold the Olympic trials for running events at the University of Oregon in Eugene!

We spent the evening and part of the next day, before my flight, in Portland and of course it was mandatory that we went to Voodoo Doughnuts!  The culture in Portland is unlike anything I have ever seen before. The people there are so quirky and friendly and the architecture could hold my attention for hours.

Pit stop at Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland: donuts to die for!!!!

All too soon, Theresa dropped me to PDX and I had to say my final goodbyes to Oregon, a place I’ve come to think of as home. This summer I fell head over heels in love with this state and I know that I have not seen the last of it. Hopefully, I can attend grad school or even work there someday; it’d be a dream come true!

A few days after I had landed in Indiana, I received an email from Steven Rumrill who is the head shellfish biologist for Oregon. In this email he stated that the work Scott, Jim, and I had done would be used to settle some debate ongoing with the management of the Pacific heart cockle fishery in Netarts Bay, OR. I was ecstatic to see that work I had done myself being put to use out in the real world. What an opportunity!!

I would just like to say thank you to Sara Kolesar and Eric Dickey and all others involved with this program at Sea Grant! I would not have had this opportunity without you all. Also, thank you to my mentor, Scott Groth, who took time out of his—to say the least—busy summer schedule and for being an excellent and fun advisor. I learned so much from both Sea Grant and Scott this summer which I will carry with me as I finish up my last year, graduate from Purdue, and enter the workforce as a biologist.

The Sea Gant Summer Scholars program is truly one of a kind and if you are looking for a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will leave you with lasting knowledge about the field of biology, look no further than this program, you will not regret a single moment.

And with that, I sign off. Here’s to the most amazing ten weeks ever. Cheers!

See you soon, Oregon!

Week 6: My Personal Oregon Trail

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Yet again, another fantastic week in Oregon! I say Oregon, instead of just Charleston, because this week was full of traveling! As per usual, we are still continuing our work with the annual red rock crab mark-recapture project. This, and working on our pink shrimp fishery project, took up the majority of our Monday. Tuesday through Thursday, however, was a totally unique experience!

Steve Rumrill, the managing shellfish biologist of Newport and former professor at the University of Oregon, had earlier in the month invited me to join him in Astoria to help the Astoria shellfish biologist, Matt Hunter, with his razor clam stock assessment. And so, Tuesday morning I set out on Highway 101 to Astoria. Driving up the 101 was like driving through a postcard: ocean view from the top of cliff faces and lush forests. It was a long drive (eight and a half hours because traffic was terrible!) but it didn’t feel that way one bit because of the beautiful scenery!

Driving Highway 101 is simply a dream.

 

Wednesday and Thursday mornings were dedicated entirely to razor clam surveying. On Wednesday we headed out early—5:30am—to the transect site in Warrenton. The reasoning behind the early times is to ensure we are working as the tide is going out, in order to sample a larger portion of the beach and the razor clam stock.

Surveying razor clams is quite different from surveying cockles. We took an approximately meter sized basket and placed it along different elevations on the beach. We started at elevation zero—which is determined as the elevation in which no razor clams are found—so that we could ensure that we were not missing any clams higher up on the beach. We then moved down the beach, towards the water, in 50 meter increments.

At each elevation the basket is placed and a hydraulic pump is used to liquefy the sand. Razor clams are neutral buoyant and if they are within our sampling area (the basket), once the area liquefies, razor clams will float to the top. We pump water into the area for three minutes per basket, six times per elevation. The baskets, depending on the elevation, are moved either north or south to ensure we are sampling as much of the stock as possible.

An excellent razor clam specimen we retrieved during our stock assessment.
(Note: Clam measures to approximately 110mm.)

The hydraulic aspect of the sampling is quite interesting. A pump is placed in a “crab hole”—an area of pooling water on the beach—and a gasoline powered generator is used to power the pump. A hose sucks up the water from the crab hole and then pushes the water into a separate, longer hose which is attached to a wand at the end. The wand is made of PVC pipe with two openings: one to connect to the hose and one to project the water. This wand is used to liquefy the sand in the basket. The water comes out of the wand at nearly 8 gallons a minute and handling the wand can be tricky to maneuver, not to mention heavy. As with many things involving field work, there is a definite learning curve for good technique.

Blasting away at the sand, looking for razor clams.

The same process of razor clam surveying was repeated on Thursday at a gracious 6:00a.m. After finishing up with the stock assessment—and a yummy breakfast at Bagels by the Sea—I headed back to Charleston. Luckily, traffic was substantially better this time around and I made it home in just a little over 5 hours. After being up so early and having such a long drive you can bet I was ready for a good night’s sleep!

Friday, Scott and I headed out in the morning to Valino Island to recover cockles that had been marked and placed there in February. We wanted to retrieve as many as possible in order to meaningfully assess the cockles’ growth over time. Fortunately, we managed to find 33; approximately 100 were placed but only 30 are needed for meaningful statistical analysis. The cockles that we found had some cool annuli (growth rings) and crunching the data is going to yield some fascinating results that I will be sure to update you all on!

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A cockle we recovered with some fascinating annuli!

Friday was also the day that Scott decided it’d be a good time to teach me how to back up a boat trailer. If you’ve ever watched somebody experienced in this matter back up a boat trailer you may have been deceived into thinking that it is a simple and easy task. You would be very wrong, as was I. Backing up a boat trailer requires an immense amount of directional multitasking. In order to successfully back up a boat trailer you must keep in mind that the truck and the boat are always going to be pushing and pulling in opposite directions and keeping track of what does what can be very dizzying. The boat docks are always filled with tons of seasoned boaters; no pressure when you have 50 professionals watching you, right? I didn’t do terribly and it’s all about practicing. I wouldn’t call me for all your trailering needs just yet.

It was nice to have some time to relax and catch up on rest this weekend after such a long, busy week. Of course, my idea of relaxation always seems to involve being active. This week my newest experience was slack lining. The concept of a slack line is quite simple: Tie said slack line in between two trees and try to keep your balance. The actuality of slack lining is quite difficult and there is a lot of falling off involved. Let’s just say you will learn how to fall with grace and not on your face. When walking on a slack line it is important to look straight ahead and not at your feet. Doing this, keeping a good center of gravity and a lot of practice and you’ll be a pro in no time; or you at least won’t be falling off as much!

The face of utter concentration.

Sunday was also particularly eventful. A few good friends of mine from OIMB—Theresa and Payton— and I spent the day laying out at Sunset Bay and playing some beach volleyball. In the evening the three of us asked one of the COSEE interns staying at OIMB, Zac, for some skim boarding lessons and he was happy to oblige. Though I had skim boarded before I was by no means an expert on the subject; as you can imagine there isn’t an abundance of surf in Indiana. However, we all picked up on it pretty quickly and had a ton of fun. Definitely a hobby I wish I could take back to Indiana with me, but all the more reason to revisit the coasts!

Skim boarding at Sunset Bay!

After such an exciting week, I’m interested to see where these final following weeks take me. Stay tuned, until next time!

 

Third Week’s The Charm!

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Hello again!

With the holiday weekend over I must say I’m exhausted. I’m not sure where the week went! This past week at the ODFW was all about starting up our annual red rock crab surveys. Monday, Jim and I set eight crab pots off the docks of the small boat basin of Coos Bay. We filled them with leftover fish fillets thrown away by fishermen and boy, did they smell gnarly! We let them soak overnight and have been checking them daily in the mornings.

Past surveys have shown that basin is comprised of mainly Dungeness and red rock crabs. We have been measuring the carapace length and taking weights of whole (no appendages missing) Dungeness crabs. For red rock crabs we have quite the laundry list of tasks to perform and data to collect. Red rock crabs are weighed, carapace length is measured, and we check and account for missing appendages and determine the sex of the crab. We then tag the crab with a t-bar tag that includes an individual identification number that we can use for mark-recapture studies. We also clip the eighth carapace spine on the right-hand side to help compensate for tag loss. If a crab is a recapture we note that as well. Flyers are posted around the boat basin that encourages people to call in recreational recaptured red rock crabs with incentive of a prize. This is done to monitor removal of red rock crabs from the small boat basin. We hope to use this annual project to predict red rock population size and variability over years, as well as to monitor and analyze red rock crab recruitment.

My mentor's sense of humor always keeps me on my toes!

My mentor’s sense of humor always keeps me on my toes!

And let me tell you, if you have never handled a crab you are in for a surprise. Watching my mentor work up crabs made it all seem very easy and effortless, but in reality there is an art to avoiding being pinched. Dungeness crabs will make your extremities sting for a short while, but get your hand caught in the grips of red rock chelae and you are in for a painful crush. However, I am slowly trying to master the art.

This week we also had the day off for the Fourth of July. OIMB held a lovely picnic overlooking the ocean on Cape Arago. The food was amazing: grilled oysters, BBQ tuna, hotdogs, and endless desserts. A few friends and I headed over to South Cove after lunch where we were lucky enough to spy a grey whale swimming fairly close to shore. We also found a washed up juvenile salmon shark with quite the chunk taken out of his left side. In the evening, we hiked down to Pirate’s Cove where we sat up on the rock faces that overlooked Bastendorf Beach and watched the locals set off some impressive fireworks.

Hiking up and down to get to Pirate's Cove: no easy feat!

Hiking up and down to get to Pirate’s Cove: no easy feat!

In addition to the fun of field work and number crunching, I like to try something new each week. This week my friend, Jaron, taught me how to long board. My balance was great but my coordination was what onlookers could call, well, “lacking”. But after a couple hours I was zooming around without falling, a success in my books! It was so much fun and I am definitely going to continue practicing.

Each week here brings so much excitement! Can’t wait to see what this week has in store!

Long boarding for the first time

Long boarding for the first time