An eventful week has passed since my last blog post. On the morning of Saturday, July 9th, myself and the other interns found ourselves on the R/V Pluteus, the research boat here at OIMB. The boat ride started a little chaotic, with a near crash in the marina, but it was (relatively) smooth sailing from there on out. The goal of our ride was to dredge the ocean floor to catch invertebrates for our examination, and to bring them back to campus. As excited as I was for this, my body had other plans. I felt a little under the weather on the boat ride out to the sight for dredging but as soon as we had stopped moving, the up and down motion of the boat set in, and my stomach contents wanted out. I had to lay down, even falling asleep at one point, but catastrophe was averted. The overall experience was very cool despite the sickness - seeing the coast of Oregon from the water, helping out on the boat, and holding starfish. I had another, much quicker boat experience this week, as well. I helped Adam, one of the environmental monitoring specialists here with a sonde run, replacing a probe that's used to collect information about the water, such as temperature, salinity, turbidity, pH, and more. No sickness this time, plus I got to learn more about how boats work up close. All around great time. Outside of my experiences with OIMB, I also have started taking Calculus II online, hence the “notes” section of the title. It has admittedly been rough, but hey, I’m here to learn. This week was one of our field work intensive weeks over here for the green crab monitoring program with South Slough (The “coats” part of the title comes in here, as I wear a black rain coat every time we sample - It’s a bit of a stretch, but cut me some slack, three rhymes is cooler than two).We set and collected our traps throughout Coos Bay and South Slough every morning, releasing native species, and taking the green crabs back. It’s cool to see how much quicker Colleen and I have gotten with the process. I’ve grown quite fond of the crabs we catch, as well. This time when we catch the crabs, however, we are no longer immediately euthanizing them by freezing. They’re now being used for my study! In short, the crabs are being put in a tub where they will be subjected to two choices - a trap that has an LED light, and a trap that has no light- to see if they’re attracted to the lights. If they are attracted, studies will be done to figure out which color of LED they are attracted to the most by allowing them to choose between two colors. The experimental apparatus looks quite goofy. Colleen pointed out that it looks like a minion, and I have not been able to unsee it since. I’ll update y’all with some results next week! The crabs will still be euthanized, by the way. Just after the testing. Invasive species, and all.
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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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