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.
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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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