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.
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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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