Welcome back! It seems like each week is so long and full of things to do, but when I sit down to write my blog posts, time has just flown by. Last Saturday we got to visit the Hatfield Marine Science Center and the Newport aquarium. The aquarium was fantastic, and we saw octopus, seal, sea lion, and sea otter feedings. On Sunday a big group of interns and students spent a relaxing day in the dunes at Hall Lake. Somehow it was already Monday once again, and time to go back to work. I visited a couple new sites to trap at, Kentuck Slough and Day Creek. When collection time came on Tuesday, I got to take a group of high school students in the South Slough camp with me. They were a big help counting crabs, and I hope they learned a little something too! With new crabs, I continued to switch out trials for my personal research experiment, which means I have now been able to complete around 40 trials. I am still not quite satisfied, because a low percentage of trials end in a successful predation event. I am planning to try a new method when I switch out trials for next week to see if feeding the red rock crabs will actually promote predation. Currently I have been bringing them in and starving them before beginning a trial, under the presumption that the hungrier they are, the more likely to seek food. But I have observed that some crabs appear to be less aggressive, and therefore may be weak with hunger and unable to predate on the available prey in the containers. It is taking a little longer to collect all the data I need, but that's the usual way with research! At the end of the week, Silvia Yamada came to visit OIMB. Yamada has documented the green crab invasion of Oregon and Washington and was one of the first to begin monitoring the populations, starting the same dataset in 1998 which I am contributing to with my collections this summer. Yamada has written or collaborated on most of the papers I have read about green crabs, and so it was a pretty cool experience to meet her and go in the field with her. She is starting a new experiment with lined shore crabs and snails, which I was able to help set up and will collect data from when Yamada leaves.
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AuthorHi! My name is Renee and I am a rising junior at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. I am a double major, studying Biology and Dance. I am so excited to be a part of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology’s summer REU program and to work with Shon Schooler and the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. Archives
August 2019
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