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.
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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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