This week we gave a formal presentation of our results at a poster symposium in the OIMB dining hall. We stood by our posters and engaged with other members of the scientific and local community. For my part I enjoyed the two hours spent presenting my results, and discussing green crabs with other members of the OIMB and Charleston community. Leading up to the presentation this week I refined the fine art of research poster production. I spent a lot of time refining the graphs I posted last week to make them as accessible as possible to a reader. I am still a bit of a poster novice, but learned and thought a lot about how to communicate my ideas clearly to a viewer.
I want to finish this post up by saying thank you. This summer has been a phenomenal period of personal and professional growth for me during which I learned a ton about the research process, and gained confidence that I too could become a researcher. Thank you to the NSF for making this experience possible, to Bree Yednock for providing great guidance in my research this summer, and to Richard Emlet and Maya Watts and all the other OIMB faculty and staff who designed and ran the program this summer.
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This week saw the end of my data collection period. I finally stopped trapping South Slough green crabs. The end of data collection was bittersweet. While I am certainly happy to not get up every morning around 5 am with the low tide, I find myself spending a bit too much time behind a desk for my liking. Thankfully there are a bunch of other research projects going on that I could join in on without having to be responsible for any organization. This Thursday I joined Jenni Schmitt, Chris Claire and high school volunteer Luke for a lamprey survey at Winchester Fork stream in the South Slough. We traipsed through briars and brambles following a small tributary for around three quarters of a mile. Our goal was to track the distribution of two native lamprey species in its inland range. We bushwhacked from pool to pool and used electroshock equipment (below) to temporarily stun young lamprey (called ammocoetes) and count them. It was a good day of fun and a welcome break from a whopping three days without doing my own fieldwork.
My own research has moved by leaps and bounds given my office work time. I determined that green crabs increased in abundance in the South Slough in 2018, especially at sites that are closer to the ocean. I also found that green crabs are more prevalent in years with warm winters by looking back at local crab catches from 2002 to 2018. Finally I found that little relationship exists between how many crabs I catch and the chemical properties of water over the short, 24 hour period of time while traps are in the water. For example I have found that people have catch a similar number of crabs regardless of whether or not the water is more acidic or basic than it normally is. Finding out the relationship between how many crabs I catch and chemical conditions, such as winter water temperatures and pH, is important because it contributes to allowing other researchers to predict how many crabs will reproduce in estuaries in the future. I hope that my findings can inform their predictions and contribute to mitigating the negative impact of these invaders.
Week 7 was a week of reaching out and doing new and exciting things. It began with fish seining in the South Slough. In brief, fish seining involves taking a giant net and pulling it into shore to see what fish are present at a given site. The reason for the trip was to help with an ongoing project on environmental DNA, or eDNA (not that one ever needs a reason to go fish seining - it’s a ton of fun!) Organisms leave behind small amounts of DNA in their environment. The goal of the eDNA project is to be able to identify what species are present at a given site by using these trace amounts of eDNA collected from water and soil. We went fish seining because we want to make sure that eDNA sampling doesn’t miss any species that could be picked up in this old fashioned way and to determine if the eDNA method picks up any species that we aren’t catching in our seine net. I also journeyed this week out to Newport OR to work with green crab guru Sylvia Yamada. Sylvia is working to test how green crabs respond to synthetic food cues and pheromones. When I heard that she was having pheromones shipped she let me know and I drove up to Newport to give her a hand. Sylvia and I were testing how green crabs responded to a cocktail of chemicals that crabs are supposed to sense as food. Our findings seem to indicate that during a given 24 hour sampling period the crabs couldn’t sense the chemicals because of the acidity of the water. This is because several of the compounds that make up the cue were broken up by the low pH of the surrounding seawater and the crabs couldn’t sense them. Top Left - a trap loaded with a synthetic food cue Top Right - a trap with old fashioned tuna Bottom Left - A day’s worth of trapping - the old fashioned tuna was a clear winner Bottom Right - Sylvia’s green crab traps out in a row This week I didn’t just reach out to other researchers, I reached out as well to other members of the public. During my trapping in the South Slough I was accompanied by several high school students from the South Slough Reserve’s summer camp. These rambunctious volunteers assisted not only with my trapping, but helped me hone my communication skills. Hanging with these high schoolers forced me to clarify my language surrounding my project, and to not use the jargon and technical diction that makes understanding science needlessly difficult. I especially enjoyed teaching them the necessary tasks and then turning them loose. I had moments while measuring crabs in the lab when I had nothing to do because the kids took the initiative. I have some great photos from this session and all the credit goes to my fellow intern Makinna, I’ve attached a gallery below and links to some videos for viewing pleasure. Finally outreach for the week concluded later at the Charleston Marine Life Center, where I got the chance to talk to folks both young and old about the European green crab. I went over how to identify it, why it isn’t always green, and where I’ve found it in the Coos Bay estuary. It was another great opportunity to practice communicating complex ideas clearly, and I hope that the viewers got as much out of the event as I did.
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AuthorI’m a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania studying ecology and evolutionary biology. When I’m not doing science I love doing pretty much anything outdoors. I’m an avid backpacker, runner, paddler and rockclimber. Finally I love to read fiction in pretty much any form. Archives
August 2018
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