We start our week with a wonderful day trip to Newport, OR to visit the Hatfield Marine Science Center and to explore the Oregon Coast Aquarium. The drive up the coast to Newport was stunning and the weather could not have been better. When we arrived at Hatfield MSC, we walked around their visitor’s center and we were able to watch them feed their giant pacific octopus which was pretty cool. After that, we got a tour of the marine science center and got the inside scoop on some of the NOAA labs there. The tour was very nice, and it was interesting to see such a large and popular marine lab. After our tour, we were allowed to roam the Oregon Coast Aquarium for the rest of the afternoon. Since I hadn’t been to an aquarium in several years, I made sure to hit every exhibit and see all of the mammal shows. We even got a group picture made! On Sunday, we decided to visit the sand dunes that are close to OIMB, so we grabbed some friends and some boogieboards to make it that much more fun. We went to a freshwater lake in the dunes called Hall Lake which was actually warm enough to swim in. Most got sunburnt, but it turned out to be one of the most fun days yet. It was then time to get back to work.
On Monday, we had another day of massive amounts of data collection. We had the pressure, temperature, and detritus experiment all running over the weekend. I spent the morning checking on the larvae in the detritus experiment. I checked to see how many were still alive, how much food they ate, and changed their water all while Kaylee was checking on the ones in the temperature experiment. Later that evening, we rallied the troops that helped us last week and they were generous enough to help us again. I don’t know how late we stayed but I do know we took a break to go watch the sunset. And after that night, we were practically done with the really intensive portion of the pressure and temperature tolerance experiments! The rest of the week I was checking on the detritus experiment to discover that the larvae are eating the detritus and that they can survive quite a while without food as well. Kaylee and I gathered our data together so that we could start analyzing it and to be prepared for a R workshop that Ross, one of the grad students here, was giving on Thursday. The workshop was the first time I had been introduced to R and Rstudio, and it was pretty intense. I have never had any coding experience before, so it was a steep learning curve. I came out of it a little overwhelmed, but I am happy to be able to play around with it now.
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AuthorMy name is Matthew Mullins and I am from Birmingham, AL. I am currently a rising junior studying marine biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. I am working in Dr. Young’s lab and I’m looking forward to exploring the Oregon coast and getting some interesting research experience! Archives
August 2019
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