Hello! My name is Maite Gato-Fuentes. I am from Seattle Washington, but I am a senior Marine Science major at California State University, Monterey Bay. I am an AAUS certified scientific diver and an aspiring kelp forest ecologist. My research interests are kelp forest and coral reef ecology, marine mammal biology, and oceanic conservation. Specifically, I am interested in how benthic organisms affect kelp forest ecosystems and what can be done to reduce the spread of urchin barrens. Outside of research, I do lots of recreational scuba diving, surfing, hiking, and drawing/painting. In Monterey, my favorite pastimes are camping/surfing in Big Sur and hiking with my cat Chaka! Here at OIMB, I am working in the Coastal Trophic Ecology Lab with Dr. Aaron Galloway. I will be surveying the benthic community composition of the seafloor using an underwater camera via SCUBA. I will also quantify the abundance of kelp to purple urchins, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, and gather purple urchins from each video survey to sample their gonads. I will go into more detail about my project next week! Getting to OIMB was an adventure! I drove 12 hours from Monterey Bay, CA to Charleston, Oregon. The first night, my roommate Alondra and I walked to Lighthouse beach during sunset and witnessed a beautiful pink sunset with a full rainbow! Throughout the first week, we have been exploring the OIMB campus and the beautiful coastal parks and scenic lookouts. Last Tuesday Annika, Makenzie, and I watched the sunset and saw a pod of orca whales! It was my first time seeing wild orcas so I was very excited. Last Wednesday morning, Aaron and I went out on our first dive! We did two dives within the bay of Charleston to do two check-in dives. These dives are required to make sure that I’m proficient in all my diving skills and that all my dive gear works correctly. Our first dive was in the sandy shallows and our second dive was along a jetty. We saw tons of invertebrates, crabs, rockfish, kelp greenlings, and lingcod on our jetty dive! The star of the dive was seeing an orange ~20 cm sunflower sea star, Pycnopodia helianthoides! These sea stars used to be the main predator to purple urchins but they had a major die-off event in 2014 due to sea star wasting disease. They are considered locally extinct in most places on the outer coast from Washington, Oregon, and California, and are still quite rare throughout their range. It was amazing to see one in the wild and a glimmer of hope for their future. Last Saturday we went out on Pluteus, the OIMB research boat! We were able to trawl the seafloor and got to see some cool critters and lots of crabs! This second week Aaron and I went on another dive to collect some bat starfish and purple urchins for lab use. On our dive, we saw another sunflower sea star! This one was a little smaller than the last one we saw, but it was bright orange and looked very healthy. It’s really uplifting to see that these sunflower stars are slowly coming back. On the left you can see Aaron and I holding up a bat star and purple urchin in our drysuits! On the right is the sunflower sea star we found! I’m really looking forward to next week! I will be solidifying my project, learning more about gonad indexes, and might start collecting data so 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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