Hello! This week I’ve done a lot of literature review for my project and some fun activities! I have mostly been focusing on solidifying my project, gaining background information, and figuring out my urchin gonad protocol. In my previous post, I said I would go into more detail about my project so here it is! My project at OIMB is based on Aaron’s #Kelp2Whales project. Over the past 5 years, kelp forests have been declining due to an increase in purple urchin populations and climate change. In 2013-2014, the main predator of purple urchins, sunflower sea stars, experienced a large die-off event due to sea star wasting disease. With the loss of a main predator, the purple urchin population has been increasing, resulting in the overgrazing of kelp forests, turning them into urchin barrens. These urchin barrens are desolate areas where urchins have eaten all the kelp, resulting in a barren with little to no life. Kelp forests shift from forest to urchin barrens naturally, but due to climate change, the bounce back of the kelp will be delayed longer than usual. This has become a huge issue in Northern/Central California and is spreading to Oregon. The way this connects to whales is because grey whales have been observed hanging out and feeding in the kelp forests along the Oregon coast. This behavior is relatively new and shows that there is a stronger connection between whale ecology and kelp forests than previously thought. Since the urchin barren problem is slowly shifting to Oregon, there needs to be a better understanding of Oregon’s coastal benthic community. I will be collecting video and photographic data of the benthic community of Oregon’s southern kelp forests. Using an underwater camera via SCUBA, we will be filming transects of the benthic community along the coast. Using this video data, I will quantify the percent coverage of kelp to urchins. I also will be collecting urchins to sample their gonads in the lab to calculate their gonad index. The gonad index is a measurement of the urchin's gonads compared to their actual size. It is a measurement of their overall health, reproductive readiness, and food intake. I will then compare the gonad indexes between different habitats to see if they differ from one another. By comparing the gonad index to each habitat we can see which places urchins are more developed and healthy. This will hopefully provide more insight into the kelp forest ecology of Oregon and the ecology of purple urchins. Last Friday Annika and I went in for our training day at the Charleston Marine Life Center. We got a tour of the marine life center and got to prepare the meals for all the animals living there. They have all sorts of local fish, invertebrates, and bigger animals such as skates, a giant pacific octopus, and wolf eels! Flash, the giant pacific octopus was very sleepy that day. Last weekend we had our REU cohort camping trip and an epic morning of tide pooling! We camped at Sunset Bay campground Friday night and enjoyed fried chicken and smores by the fire. The next morning we woke up to a beautiful sunny day and headed to Sunset Bay beach for an extremely low tide. Richard led us through a dense forest trail that led us to an area where we could access the “island” to do tide pooling, where most people can’t. It was honestly the best tide pooling I’ve ever done! So many urchins, anemones, small fish, and sea stars! The island has a tunnel that leads to more tide pooling areas. It was cool to roam around in what would normally be underwater. This Tuesday we went out for another dive to do some transects and collect some urchins for sampling. We dove at the jetty and the OIMB kelp forest. The visibility at the jetty was pretty bad and very dark. As we descended into the depths, most of the sunlight was gone within 10 ft down. Our lights were the only thing allowing us to see down there! It was spooky but also thrilling! I collected a total of 9 urchins. In preparation for this dive, I decided to wear more layers to stay warm, but I forgot that it would make me more buoyant. Since the kelp forest was 5-15ft and couldn’t stay down, so I watched Aaron from the top of the water and did some very fancy snorkeling. The kelp forest was very pretty but surprisingly there were no urchins! It got me wondering why weren't there any urchins in this kelp forest, but plenty at the jetty? Might be something to consider for my project. Along our dive, Aaron picked up some crabs for us to eat for dinner. That night we bought groceries for a crab pasta dinner. Figuring out how to cook the crabs was eventful, thrilling, sad, but successful! The crab was delicious and definitely will happen again on our next dive Next week I plan to be working on my research proposal, dissecting urchins, and analyzing video data. Stay tuned!
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AuthorMy name is Maite Gato-Fuentes. I am a senior marine science major at California State University, Monterey Bay from Seattle Washington. I'm working in Dr. Aaron Galloway's Coastal Trophic Ecology Lab. Archives
August 2021
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