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.
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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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