ODFW Adventures: VII<\/p>\n
This weekend, instead of just cooking my food, I went out into the wild and caught it myself! Nicole, a fellow intern,\u00a0and I went\u00a0out crabbing on Friday night. Luck struck us as we pulled\u00a0up our nets and to find four worthy male crabs, who we named Nacho,\u00a0Maximus, Philip, and Fatty. We got slightly attached to our new pets, but hunger took over as we boiled them thick with seasoning the following afternoon. Cracking away for nearly two hours, we each ate one crab and cracked another to make crab cakes in the future! Not only was it a delicious meal, but one we both worked hard for!<\/p>\n
In the office, I had a very exciting week. Why, might you ask, was this week so much more exciting than all the other typing and fish-egg counting weeks? Well, I would like\u00a0to inform you all that\u00a0I have OFFICIALLY determined the herring fishery quota in the Yaquina Bay, Newport!!! After starting the maps last week by downloading the points to\u00a0GIS\u00a0I\u00a0made polygons of the areas in\u00a0which spawn was found and then\u00a0recorded their area and converted them to shape files. With the newly determined area and\u00a0estimated percent coverage and rock size recorded on the sample tags for each area location,\u00a0Ali and I\u00a0calculated the density (eggs\/ft squared) and “corrected area” including\u00a0the other factors such as rocks\u00a0(area x percentage x rock are conversion factor) for every area. Using the calculation for the corrected area, we multiplied it by\u00a0the density\u00a0to get the spawn (total eggs in the area), which we then divided by 144 (the approximate number of eggs each adult lays–but remember that only females lay eggs, meaning they lay around 288\u00a0eggs for both them and the male) to get the herring biomass, which we converted to tons. Then\u00a0we calculated 20% of the biomass for the quota, meaning that with 10 minutes of hard work after all of the data was organized, we had our quota! I would categorize this as being in the top 10 moments of my life. I mean really, how many people get to determine the quota of a fishery, even if it is a small one?! So there you go,\u00a0the main\u00a0task of my internship has been accomplished, and it’s smooth sailing from here on out! (Actually not really…but it’s a motivating thought!) With the shapefiles, I created a density map of the spawn in the Yaquina bay,\u00a0making two different maps, one of February and one of March, due to the overlap in area of the\u00a0spawning events. Although it took me\u00a0an entire day to\u00a0make the maps just right, it was one of the best days I’ve had in the office so far, and my final product\u00a0certainly is beautiful!<\/p>\n
Since I was so busy with the herring project, I\u00a0once again did not do a lot for the Nearshore\u00a0Strategy\u00a0Update. I worked\u00a0a\u00a0little bit more\u00a0on the annotated bibliography, but I still have a\u00a0long ways to go on that project. Let’s\u00a0find out how many more journal articles I can read in the remaining three weeks!<\/p>\n
With the time I have left I will also be writing up\u00a0protocols\u00a0for nearly every task of the herring project, as it has become\u00a0a project that is passed around the office in the past few years, and a\u00a0protocol would make it a much smoother process for the next herring\u00a0person. I will be writing up how to make the maps, determine the quota, and likely revising the\u00a0egg counting protocol as well. So hopefully\u00a0whoever gets to do this next year will have an easier time of it!<\/p>\n
What a great week!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ODFW Adventures: VII This weekend, instead of just cooking my food, I went out into the wild and caught it myself! Nicole, a fellow intern,\u00a0and I went\u00a0out crabbing on Friday night. Luck struck us as we pulled\u00a0up our nets and … Continue reading