PREFACE: If you are a prospective future applicant or accepted intern reading this and have any questions at all about the program from a past intern’s point of view, please feel free to reach out! My email is [email protected]. If I don’t respond after a few days, just send a follow up. So, this is it. The end of the program is here. There are so many ways I can describe my feelings about this program, but if I had to boil it down to one phrase, it would be “I’m glad I did it”. This summer allowed me to learn so many things - about estuaries, fieldwork, experimental design, the pathways in the sciences, and above all else, about myself. These past 9 weeks (10 if you count my extra week) felt both like a blink of an eye, and like an eternity at the same time. The week started off a little different than the rest. Over the weekend, all of the interns and I went over to the South Slough intern’s house for a crab boil. Since week 8 was an intensive trapping week, Colleen and I put all of the large crabs we caught to the side for eating. We had a team of us euthanizing, cleaning, and preparing crabs. We then tossed a bunch of the crabs (we had too many to eat them all), along with shrimp, sausage, corn, and potatoes in a pot for boiling. The food was fantastic (except the potatoes which unfortunately did not fully cook), and to say the night was interesting would be a vast understatement. Many laughs were had, and the view from the house was awe-inspiring. Being the final week, there wasn't much work to be done outside of Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, Colleen and I went out with Jenni, the Watershed Monitoring Coordinator at South Slough, and a High School intern Alissa for a day of field work. We went out and did some water and sediment level monitoring around the Slough. It was hard work, but Jenni is a machine at pushing through the field in any terrain. Work on Tuesday consisted solely of finishing my poster, as they were due at 3:00 pm for printing. After the finishing touches had been put on, it felt like a weight had been lifted. The program has been completed. From Tuesday to Friday, the rest of my time here was filled with packing, math studying, a trip to the dunes at Hall Lake, and a lot of reading before out poster session. I went into the session a little overly confident, and realized I had to change my approach for explaining everything that I had done. After the first or second time explaining my summer’s work, I got into a nice groove. I am proud of myself, and all of the other interns with all of the hard work that we put in. I’ll miss Oregon, my fellow interns, and all of the wonderful staff at OIMB. Until next time!
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This past week has possibly been my favorite of the summer thus far. The invertebrate ball, this year named the Spineless Soirée, had finally arrived. For the uninitiated, this is a fashion show on OIMB’s campus with everyone dressing up as their favorite invertebrates. Seeing everyone show off how creative (or uncreative) they are was fascinating, with costumes ranging from using shower curtains and feathers to create a sea anemone, to a simple box with the word “jellyfish” written on it worn as a hat. I admittedly fell in the uncreative category, just wearing a pair of lobster-covered socks with my sandals. From the ball, the interns and I went over to Seven Devils Brewery to see Adam, the Environmental Monitoring Specialist at South Slough, play with his band and to celebrate Colleen’s upcoming birthday. It was a lighthearted night after a long and tiring week. On Sunday, all of us interns set up our own tables at the Charleston Marine Life Center to tell the public about the work we’ve done over the summer. Colleen and I set up our table together to inform the public about the invasive European Green Crabs - what damages they’re causing, how to identify them, and what our individual research about them entails. It was a hit! Crabs, and anything to do with Dungeness crabs in particular hits home with the public in the Charleston, Oregon area. Initially nervous, I came to thoroughly enjoy talking to the public about the issues. People really responded, and we were even THANKED for the research we do. That was a validating feeling. The rest of the week was intensive in both the field and office settings. This was one of our monthly week-long trapping escapades for European Green Crab monitoring. This was a pretty run-of-the-mill experience as far as trapping goes, but we actually found a kelp crab at one of our sites, while we helped Colleen with her study. This was the first time they had gotten kelp crab in a trap, according to Shon. On top of that, Colleen and I went out with Shon and Taylor (the PhD student who previously helped me out with biotoxin testing) to join as she collected samples to measure for harmful algal blooms in the estuary. Any chance to get out and Kayak is one that I’ll never turn down. Rounding out the field work was an opportunity to go out and use a Russian peat borer in the swamps by Shon’s property with Dr. Molly Keogh to find banding (color shifting in the mud) in the sediment to demonstrate an earthquake from 1726. Since we are getting down to the wire, this week has been spent finalizing our posters for our final presentation next week. We had our poster critique session, where each of the interns displayed their poster drafts to get critiques and comments from the rest of the interns, Richard, and Maya. Initially dreading this, I thought it was a lot of fun to see the synthesis of everyone's work and to talk about ways to improve. When it's finished, I’ll upload my poster for you all to see.
This past weekend was kicked off with helping Colleen in her personal study. I was not the only volunteer, however, as we were joined by an enthusiastic High Schooler who helps out the CMLC named Gavin. Colleen's study is pretty intensive, placing many traps out - some of which require her to wade out pretty deep in muddy waters. Going out with her allowed me to gain even more respect for her dedication to her study, and the fact that on most days she does it alone. The weather was beautiful, and it was a great time out in the field. This may or may not have been capped off with asking her to stop at a KFC for a spicy chicken sandwich on our way back. We also may or may not have been the first ones in line the minute that it opened at 10:30 am. The rest of the weekend was pretty run-of-the-mill for me, with a lot of math homework, and some time to recharge. In exciting news, the field study portion of my study has both begun and concluded in the past week. Shon joined me to help set up 18 traps, 6 each filled with either tuna, a white LED light, or cat food, in a randomized order at both Coos History Museum (CHM) and Isthmus Slough (IS). The findings were interesting. At CHM, there was a STAGGERING total of green crabs in the tuna traps at 118. This was followed by a substantially less amount in the cat food traps at 19, and again substantially less in the LED traps at 2. Wow. Even before doing any statistical analysis, I could have told you this would be a statistically significant difference. Curious to see if we would see similar results elsewhere, we also set up traps at IS. Here, I hypothesized we would find a greater amount of crabs in the LED traps, though perhaps still not on the level of what was found in the tuna traps. This is because CHM has a large amount of rubble dispersed around where we placed the traps, preventing the light from being able to see from a distance. We did observe this in the field, as well. There was a comparatively high 46 crabs in the tuna traps, as opposed to 16 in the cat food trap, and 14 in the LED trap. Using statistical analysis, we can consider the cat food and LED baits as having similar catch rates at this site, with tuna being better than both of them. It is pretty safe to say that South Slough, unfortunately, cannot switch to either cat food or LED lights. The rest of the week was spent summarizing data, making graphs, and starting my poster. We are getting into the home stretch of our experience out here, with poster drafts and critiques taking place this upcoming week in preparation for our last hurrah in the final week. In other news, Oregon is still gorgeous, as seen in the video taken from the forest behind campus. Next week's blog will be action-packed. Stay tuned! Hey everyone, glad to have you back on my blog for this week. Over this past weekend, a couple of interns and I ventured out to the West Coast Game Park Safari over in Bandon. I was skeptical of going at first, as after doing some research on their website they seemed to be a more for-profit organization than one that is directly tied to conservation and rehabilitation. I went despite this in hopes that it would seem better in person, but was greeted with some visibly distressed animals (chimpanzees, large cats, bears, etc.) in cages that seemed awfully small, although I am not a professional. In hopes of keeping this blog light, I will try and touch on the more positive aspects of the trip. I saw capybaras in person for the first time, and getting to interact with goats, sheep, alpaca, donkeys, and deer up close as they approach you in the petting zoo area was a cool experience. This week was more work focused than anything for me. I continued the trials of my behavioral study, changing its direction in favor of time. I am no longer going to be doing light color comparisons, as we didn’t have overwhelming evidence of the light being attractive to the crabs from the initial trials. Now, I tested each of the three different bait types - LED Lights, Tuna, and Cat Food - in the lab setting using the same experimental design I previously described in order to compare their rate of entry by the crabs. Bait or light was put in one trap, nothing in the other, and the crabs are put in the decision making apparatus for 30 minutes undisturbed, to check which, if any, trap they went into after the time period. From this testing, the crabs went into the tuna trap the most, the LED light trap the second most, and the cat food trap the least. I will be starting the field study on Monday, August 1st (the day this blog post is released)! It will be interesting to see if these lab results carry over, depending on which bait type catches the most crabs in the field. Outside of work a lot of my free time is dedicated to doing Calculus 2 work in order to make sure I can finish the course in a timely and efficient manner, to graduate on time. On Wednesday, however, we had a South Slough Intern potluck. This was a much needed time away from campus, where we had some great food, and I got to interact with the other South Slough interns I don’t always get to see, and the general South Slough staff. There are so many great people working here, and I’m grateful to have gotten to work beside them. These 6 weeks (7 if you include Colleen's and my extra week) so far have allowed me to learn a lot about myself. One of those things that I’ve learned this week is that burnout is very real, and that it sucks. Thankfully I am able to work outdoors this upcoming week. That’s always fun. Talk to you all next week!
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AuthorHey! I'm Sebastian Velazquez, a Biology (Ecology) student from Spring City, Pennsylvania. I am spending the summer studying invasive European Green Crabs under the guidance of Shon Schooler. Archives
August 2022
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