Photos from our final day of fieldwork, assisting Jenni in sediment accumulation monitoring across the salt marshes - Photos from our last REU group excursion! Hall Lake: It's the end and it's bittersweet. I can’t wait to head back home but know that once I'm back I’ll be wishing I had more opportunities for fieldwork and research.
We’ve just finished presenting our posters, Every time I look at my poster I feel pride. It's a reminder of the hard work I've put into my research. All of the troubleshooting on ArcMaps, time spent learning to read tide charts and scheduling around the incoming tides, problem-solving safety procedures on the fly, trekking through a lot of mud, falling in love with a species that is also detrimental to our local ecosystems, and finally working through and analyzing all of the data collected, synthesizing it into this one final poster. This summer would not have been such a guiding influence on my future studies and work goals if it weren’t for Shon Schooler, Richard Emlet, Nicole Nakata, Maya Watts, and all of the scientists at South Slough that have invited me out into the field to help with their projects. I will be forever grateful - Thank you. I’m going to pack up, say goodbye to all the other REUS, drive back to my home, partner and cats and relish in all the work I’ve gotten to do this summer.
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Molly Keogh, a postdoc at UO that leads an earth science course visited. She was looking for evidence of the last big subduction quake from 1726 in our marshes. Shon’s property backs right up to the estuary so he invited her to take some core samples from the edge of his yard. Sebastian, Ytxzae, and I tagged along to assist, using the peat borer to collect sediment a meter down in the marsh. We found evidence of the quake at around 85cm deep on our core sample - Molly also pointed out a layer of organic matter that was likely linked to the old timber industry in town. Back in the day, foresters would toss the felled trees into the estuary’s waters and let them drift down into the bay where they’d be brought to a mill or port for shipping. She suspected the layer of organic matter was from all the debris that fell off the logs in the process. This week marked our final set of summer monitoring for the European green crab. Monthly monitoring has been such a big part of my field experience here and it was bitter-sweet that it came to an end. Sebastian and I started setting aside the larger green crabs from our traps, keeping them in the seawater tables and freezing the rest. By the end of the week, we had 5+ gallons worth of hearty green crabs that we took up to Spruce Ranch for an end-of-summer crab boil. I learned how to gut and clean crabs while Ytxzae, with the occasional surprise assistance of Jay, cooked up a big delicious meal on a tiny burner for all of the REU and South Slough interns. Finally, my research project has come to an end with Shon and Sebastian helping me set and collect my final site on Wednesday and Thursday. This project started with the hope of finding distribution trends in sexually mature females and young-of-the-year green crabs for enhanced monitoring and management efforts. My results found some trends of higher catch rates of sexually mature females at the zero-tide line in the lower and mid estuary. I also found that, overall, there is significantly higher catch rates of sexually mature male and females at the zero-tide line of the mid estuary, identifying it as a hot spot for further monitoring and mitigation efforts. Young-of-the-year crab trapping was unsuccessful during the summer but more testing throughout the fall could be done for better results. All in all, my findings showed strong variability, even within traps at the same site and water depth. This variability seems to be common with green crab monitoring and is one of the reasons why distribution modeling continues to be difficult. There was so much more that happened this week, I’ll just add photos to show some of the highlights. What a week! The stress of working in the field and analyzing data for my research poster is real and I don’t see it letting up soon. After squeezing in two weekend days of fieldwork at the tail end of good tides, I started the work week off with an absolute banger. We trekked out to Upper Hidden Creek on Monday to set traps and it was almost comically tough. Upper Hidden Creek requires about ~20 to 30 minutes of carrying heavy equipment across soft mudflats. The key to walking mudflats is being able to disperse your weight, thus preventing you from sinking. Being tall and having large feet (like I am/have) are ideal for this. In fact, I’ve even heard of grad students using boogie boards to slide across deeper mudflats for essentially the same reason. Nicole and Sherlyn, the two amazing humans that helped me set up traps at Upper Hidden Creek, are both more petite than I am and the increased difficulty that came with their size was pretty dramatic. All in all, there were more than a few moments of either losing boots and sinking knee deep for all of us. Even so, Nicole and Sherlyn were both smiling and laughing the entire time. Again, let it be known that they are real troopers and I wouldn't have been able to set up that site without them. By the end of Tuesday, I finished 8 of my study’s 9 surveying sites. Since then, I’ve been at the computer integrating all the data I’ve collected into charts and graphs for my research poster. My statistical skills are rusty so interpreting the data has been a struggle. Shon, Sebastian, Victoria, and Flynn have all given me helping hands, resources, and brainstorming time to me and I’m grateful for all it. Hopefully by next week's blog I’ll have both results to share on here! Despite it being a heavy work week we've all taken time for some special celebrations. Chloe’s 21st birthday was on Tuesday and we took her out to a local waterfront bar for her first drink and some tasty desserts. Friday marked the Invertebrate Costume Ball AKA the ~~Spinless Soiree~~ . I went as my favorite tide pooling invertebrate, the California sea cucumber (Parastichopus californicus). The UO students on campus went all out, bringing some top notch craftsmanship and creativity to the costume runway. After the ball the REUs piled into cars and drove to town to listen to some live music at a bar and take a break from the building pressure of our research posters.
Last weekend was one of the best yet. Elliott drove down from Portland for a visit and I proudly toured him all around campus and showed off everything I’ve been working on. We spent the rest of the weekend camping - a couple of days of cooking meals on the grill, drinking campfire coffee, hanging out down on the beach. I even snuck in some tide pooling. It was bliss. The fieldwork for my personal research project began on Tuesday and oof... it was a learning curve. I did my best to plan everything out ahead of time but when I got into the field - I just hit hiccup after hiccup. Some hiccup examples include figuring out how to harness myself to the shore as a safety measure while I waded out across the mudflats until I was belly-deep in the estuary's water, or how to ensure the crab traps for my high-intertidal zone weren't in the way of pedestrians and vehicles on the shore but still at the right height. I worked so slowly that I ended up racing the incoming tide. Even so, I’m proud that I kept focus and took the time to find reliable solutions. I’m also excited to say that I expect to have some preliminary results by the end of the weekend. On Friday Sebastian and Gavin, a volunteer from the Charleston Marine Life Center, came out to help with trapping. We harvested a good number of green crabs and even caught a few gunnel and sculpin for the aquarium in South Slough’s visitors center. It felt pretty damn good to share what I’ve been working on with them… it was also really nice to have some help carrying the heavier equipment from site to site. Some other highlights from the week included Adam, South Slough’s Monitoring Technician, taking Jay and me out on a nutrient run. Nutrient runs are part of a long-term monitoring project at South Slough that tracks nutrient levels in the estuary’s waters, creating a base reference of data to compare to as we see ecological shifts from climate change. We took the boat out to collect our water samples, starting down at the mouth of the bay and collecting periodically all the way up to the top of the Slough. Jay and I both assisted with the water sampling, learning how to collect clean samples from just above the sediment floor. Being out on the open water and participating in fieldwork that didn't include trekking through mud while carrying nets full of crabs was a much-appreciated break and helped get me re-energized for the next day of trapping. My last highlight was the beachside potluck that South Slough held for their summer interns. The Slough’s interns are diverse in their areas of focus and are spread out in different locations across town so the potluck gave us all a chance to all meet and connect while eating some delicious homecooked food. At one point in the evening, each mentor stood up and spoke a little bit about their interns, giving each of us a nickname that reflected on our time here and a certificate to make the name official. It was really sweet to see how much both the interns and mentors appreciate one another.
It's been a busy week with another busy one to follow. Signing off, Colleen “WOW, What’s that!” Walker Dr. Sylvia Yamada, the expert on European green crabs on the west coast, was the guest speaker at OIMB’s Bioinvasions class on Sunday. Sebastian and I were able to sit in on her lecture and the trapping demonstration that followed. She'd set traps down at the boat basin, a location we had sampled just the week before. Interestingly, both samplings of green crabs (from Sylvia's demonstration and from our monthly monitoring) had these weird gelatinous growths along their claws and walking legs. Shon and Sylvia both mentioned not being sure what the growths were so we set the bumpy crabs aside in our sea-water tables until we could bring them over to Dr. Richard Emlet's lab later on in the week. Richard helped us ID the growths as a Bryozoan in the Alcyonidium genus. Looking at the jelly-like bumps under a microscope, we could see that the growths were actually entire colonies of an invertebrate species that was encasing the crab’s leg. Bryozoans are commonly referred to as moss animals and these gelatinous bumps lived up to the name. When we submerged one of the crab legs in water and watched again under the microscope, the smooth bumps took on a fuzzy, moss-like texture as their tubular bodies re-emerged and began filter feeding. By the end of our time in the lab with Richard, he had pointed out two different species of bryozoa as well as the species of barnacle that had grown on the crab’s carapace, all of them using the hard outer shell as a host site… It was beautiful. I think I’ve gotten the research bug here. When I arrived at OIMB I really wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go into natural resource management or focus more on research but the more time I spend collecting data out the field and working in the labs, the more excited and invested I become in the species I’m studying. Hello Low-low tides, your presence in the bay means we’re back in the field so I love you very much. Fieldwork is my favorite, it's a mix of appreciation, wonder, and constant problem-solving. Aside from maintaining the traps for green crab monitoring while out in the field, I try and sneak in some time to look under rocks, learn the names of new plants, get stuck in the mud and ask questions about tube worms, tidal patterns, the strength of tuna blood for scent dispersal in tidal waters, and so on. I've been working alongside Shon and Sebastian this week, doing our monthly monitoring of the invasive European green crabs (Carcinus maenas) at our regular ten survey sites. The traps we set out caught some native species including Oregon shore crabs (Hemi nudis), Dungeness crab (Metacarcinus magiste), and sculpin, but the majority of our catch was the green crab. Thursday’s catch had the largest (worst) numbers for green crab abundance this year with one of our sampling sites reaching a whopping 92 green crabs in just six nets… that's a lot. The good news is that most of the European green crabs (EGC) we are catching seem to be adults. This means it may be a low year for recruitment (the new population added via reproduction, immigration, or emigration). A low year of recruitment isn't necessarily a sign that the EGC population in Coos Bay is dying out since most of our largest recruitment events are tied to El Nino years, but it is a good sign for our local crab fisheries and eelgrass restoration projects for the moment. Speaking of Eelgrass... On Friday, I assisted in some eelgrass monitoring with Ali Helms and her REU intern, Chloe. There was a big die-off of eelgrass a few years back so restoration efforts have been underway to re-establish the lost beds throughout the bay. Eelgrass is finicky, the loss of rooted eelgrass plants in the sediment means that the feedback loop that results in good sediment for eelgrass seed germination is also gone, making restoration efforts tricky. Because eelgrass is a key habitat plant for juvenile Dungeness crabs, efforts continue, and from what I was able to see, transplanted eelgrass from healthier beds have been showing signs of success!
It’s been a good and busy week. I’ll be spending my Saturday vegging out so I'll be rested for Sunday’s Slough-a-thon! I’m the kayaking leg of a relay team with Shon and Sebastian (Team name: Lean Mean Green (Crab) Team)! Wish us luck! This past Monday was a holiday so I took the three-day weekend to drive up to Portland and spend some time with my partner and 2 cats whom I’ve missed very very much. It was lovely. A weekend full of cooking good food, sleeping in late, and enjoying the warmer weather. I was back at work Tuesday morning where I’ve since been workshopping my research project and preparing everything for the upcoming weeks of good low tides. After a couple brainstorming sessions with Shon (my REU mentor), I’ve refined my original goal. I'm no longer looking at the relationship between European green crab (EGC) abundance and associated habitat (i.e. salinity, water depth, and percent distribution of protective cover, rooted vegetation, and open mudflats across the survey sites). Instead I'll be focusing on distribution trends of the European green crab (EGC) within a single habitat factor (tidal zone depths). In the previous green crab samplings along the 0-foot tide waterline, we’ve noticed higher rates of adult male crabs captured in the traps than any other age group or sex. Some possible factors influencing this could be that females are deterred from entering the Fukui traps after seeing trapped males, or that recruits (first year age group) are too small to be successfully sampled using the Fukui traps. Another factor, and one I’ll be looking into, is whether recruit and female EGC are captured less in our 0-foot lowtide sampling because they inhabit different depths of the intertidal zone than their adult male counterparts. In order to determine if there are significant distibution trends in age and sex of the European green crab along tidal zone depths, I’ll be surveying three distinct tidal regions (subtidal, 0-foot tide, and high intertidal) across 9 sites in Coos Bay. Overall, it was a computer-heavy week with a lot of time spent scouring ArcMap and Google Earth for potential survey sites, planning out sampling methods, reading up on previous studies, etc. All of this screen time made our weekend boat trip with Richard and Newt (OIMB boat Captain) a welcomed brain break. The trip started eventfully with a near collision but once we made it out into the open ocean, it was blissfully calm waters and abosultely gorgeous. The trip was set up to give us experience using a trawling net to collect marine life samples from the sea floor. Trawling is when you drag a hard-mouthed net along the rocky ocean bottom for about 10 to 15 minutes then pull up the net and see what your catch is. It's a pretty destructive method of sampling, ripping up a lot of habitat in order to catch species that tend to stick to the ocean floor like corals, sea stars, nudibranchs (sea slugs), and whelks (predatory sea snails). The ethics of trawling for the experience of trawling seems questionable, but the species we were able to observe were pretty mind-blowing. It was a mixed bag of feelings and I was happy to learn that some of the species we brought back were scooped up by the Charleston Marine Life Center (local educational aquarium) for display. All in all, it was a really good week and I'm excited to get started on my own fieldwork now that I've worked out most of the bugs in my research methodology. The days are flying by, I can't believe it's been a week since we were all camping out at Cape Arago. We spent two nights at the cape with Nicole (Ph.D. student and REU guardian angel) and her partner, Tommy, who kept us well fed all weekend while we hiked around and hung out at the beach. The Oregon coast is an absolute wonder and between seeing a gray whale feeding along the kelp beds offshore and getting to eat copious amounts of s’mores by the fire each night, I was fully blissed out. Since then, Shon, Sebastian, and I have finished our tea-bag decomposition work by kayaking up into South Slough Estuary to access two remote salt marsh sites. At each of these decomposition study sites we surveyed plant species and buried triplicate tea-bag samples into the wet soils. Shon will return in the fall to dig the tea back up, dry, and re-weigh it. Any loss of mass from its original weight is a sign of decomposition and used to monitor carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling within the marsh. We mapped out our kayak route on Google Earth the following day - I’m very proud to say I made it the whole five mile trek up the waterways despite some gnarly head winds. On Wednesday we drove up the coast to setup new green crab sampling sites in the estuaries of both the Umpqua and Siuslaw rivers. These northern sampling sites will be maintained by two local volunteers that I had the pleasure of working/chatting with (One of whom was a retired entomologist/ecologist and the other a retired natural resource manager). I am happy to report that there were no green crabs collected in the traps at the Umpqua site. Siuslaw's traps brought in the BIGGEST green crab we’ve recorded yet. An absolute beaut and brute weighing in at 263.1g. Aside from all of the field excursions, I’ve been working out the details for my personal project. I plan to integrate habitat surveys into each of the 35 anticipated green crab sampling sites this summer. These surveys will be used to determine if abundance of the European green crab, Carcinus maenas, in Coos Bay can be predicted by habitat. And if so, what types of habitat provide the greatest risk of high abundance rates of the invasive species. If I can determine what habitat/s are most associated with high abundance of green crab, we can focus our mitigation efforts to high risk areas as a means of slowing their establishment within the bay. This in hand with Sebastian’s biotoxin testing would also be helpful information to share for recreational crabbing in the area. Hi, Colleen here! I’m a Long Islander now living in Portland where I’m pursuing an AS in Biology at Clackamas Community College. This summer I’m working under the guidance of Dr. Shon Schooler, a lead scientist at the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. My OIMB internship with Shon will focus on both the distribution and potential biotoxin levels of the European green crab (Carcinus maenas), an invasive species in Coos Bay. European Green Crab, Carcinus maenasSebastian, my lab partner, and I started our summer at OIMB a week early to make the most of June’s low tides. It was a quiet first week on campus but great for learning the ins and outs of crab surveying techniques. Surveying sites are dispersed throughout the bay so we hike or drive to a few sites each day while the tide is at its lowest. Once at location, we wade into the mudflats and set 6 Fukui traps baited with tuna innards, leaving them for 24 hours. The focus of these surveys is to better understand the distribution of the invasive green crab in Coos Bay so any native species caught in the survey process (ie. red rock crab, shore crab, Dungeness crab, sculpin) are reintroduced after counting. The green crab isn’t as lucky, their invasive status means we can’t reintroduce them into the wild. Instead, they’re taken back to the lab for further analysis on color, weight, carapace size, sex, and starting this week, biotoxins. One of the hopes for this summer's research is to find out if green crabs are safe to consume as a means of population control and our biotoxin testing will be used in this assessment. Fukui traps set along the water's edge.A lot of week 2 has been spent problem-solving our way through the biotoxin testing using ELISA kits. To date, our attempts have included testing green crab viscera and meat for signs of saxitoxin and domoic acid. There are still kinks to work out but we’re on our way to becoming a toxin testing machine team. **Big shout out to the assistance of Ph.D. candidate Taylor Dodrill for sharing her wisdom on ELISA testing of shellfish along the way** All in all, it’s been a pretty magical experience. Living on OIMB’s campus means I’m never more than a 10-minute drive from an epic tide pool, saltwater marsh, forest, or wetland and I’m always surrounded by wonderful people who are just as excited by all of this as I am. Here is a smattering of photos from experiences that melted my heart and brain - |
AuthorHello! My name is Colleen Walker. I'm a New Yorker now living in Oregon where I am pursuing an AS in Biology at Clackamas Community College. This summer I'll be studying the European green crab alongside Dr. Shon Schooler at the South Slough National Estuary Research Reserve. Archives
August 2022
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