This week started with the monthly water quality samplings the South Slough facilitates as part of it’s estuary biomonitoring mission. This was the second sampling I helped with and I felt like I remembered most of the procedures from last time. We collected three replicates from four sites along the slough and brought them back to the lab for coliform bacteria counts and chlorophyll filtering. The next day I finished up the samples by filtering them for inorganic nutrients, the procedure calls for filtering 400 mL but some samples had so much sediment in them I could only get through 200 mL before it got stuck. This happened more often with the low tide samples than the ones from high tide and it was noticeable just by looking at the color of the filters. IDEXX tray with water sample. The yellow cells mean that it is positive for total coliforms, while the fluorescent cells mean that it is positive for e. coli. On Tuesday I also attended the professional development session where we went over how to organize our posters. This past week I have been writing out the text for my poster and it has been a little trickier than writing my proposal mainly due to the limited space. Finding the most important points to highlight and make it clear for people to understand is another challenge. Along with posters we also went over the public presentations we would be giving on August 3rd from 11-2 pm at the Charleston Marine Life Center. It isn’t really a formal presentation, we are just setting up booths in the marine center that have educational and interactive activities about our research. I had an idea of bringing certain samples of lowland and highland marsh plants and showing people how to identify them. I would then have them match the sample to the correct one in a memory-like game. It isn’t entirely clear but I am looking forward to this sort of practice presentation. Collecting soil samples at Hidden Creek Marsh. Wednesday was a full day out in the slough, we went kayaking to map areas surrounding Daycreek Marsh and other areas further south. In Daycreek Marsh we found some individuals and large patches growing along the edge path. Some of these large patches had tons of sea lavender growing along with the birds beak. I’ve noticed more of the sea lavender have been blooming lately and was able to get some pictures of their flowers. There are still a couple of sites we need to search for birds beak in and I am starting to get soil samples from areas where birds beak is not present. I hope to analyze all of the samples I have so far and map more areas within the next week. Sea Lavender, Limonium californicum, seems to be blooming about now.
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Starting on Tuesday we entered a new site called Valino Island Island. It was just a small patch of land about 20-30 feet away from the main Valino Island. Some large patches of bird’s beak were found here. They were more apparent on the side closest to the main island. This made me think that they most likely spread from the large areas we had seen before on Valino Island. After we returned I prepared myself for presenting my proposal to my mentors at the week’s professional development session. The night before I had just read this paper on how hemiparasites like bird’s beak within salt marshes reduce competitive dominant plants which help promote plant species diversity so I made sure to include that in my paper and presentation. Overall I presented my goals for the project well, I explained how the project set out to find the distribution and habitat characteristics of bird’s beak within the South Slough estuary. I then listed what factors would be observed which include: elevation, soil type, soil salinity, the top three plant species growing with dense patches of bird’s beak, and the top three plant species growing in areas without bird’s beak. There were questions on if I would try to transplant a small sample of bird’s beaks into an area where it had not been seen to grow to see if it was just it’s distribution keeping it from there. This was a good suggestion, but since the plant is listed as endangered uprooting them is not really permitted. I also received helpful comments from mentors on how to analyze data, this is definitely a part of research that I am nervous about doing but I am ready to learn. Valino Island Island: small, full of mosquitoes, and a home for bird's beak! We found a whole skeleton of a pretty large animal on Valino Island Island. I’ve been able to focus more time on my soil samples this week as well. I have finished sieving and drying three more sites this week. By next week I may be almost complete with all the sites that have bird’s beak present and start to compare with sites that do not have the plant. Dried soil samples (left) and samples about to be sieved (right) . Throughout the week I have also been able to help with other projects at South Slough, like retrieving pH and CO2 sensors from the estuary and trapping crabs for Renee’s (my lab partner) predation experiment. On Friday, Renee helped me out with mapping at this site called Barview. I feel as I start to get more data I need to start getting more familiar with programs that can analyze what I have. That will be one of my main goals for next week, I’ll let you know how far I get with it next time. My lab partner, Renee, with her lab set up.
To continue where I left off last week, camping at Cape Argo had so many fun moments that it was hard to decide which ones to write about. First of all, we camped somewhat near this island of sea lions so at night, when everyone was quiet, you could hear their faint barks. Saturday and Sunday morning we went out to explore two tide pool sites. Each had dozens of species to marvel at and learn about. There were plenty of nudibranchs, starfish, and even a Great Pacific octopus hiding beneath this giant rock. It was a great weekend, and when we got back almost everyone immediately went back to editing their proposal as the presentation deadline was quickly approaching. Our Saturday tide pooling site near Cape Argo included plenty of algae and sea creatures. Monday I saw a new site at Metcalf Islands, we first mapped along the trail leading to marsh and either side there were several dense patches. This site probably had the largest patches out of all the sites I have seen so far. It also seemed to have the most patches of sea lavender, Limonium californicum an indicator of bird’s beak, growing within the bird’s beak patches. This showed in the percent cover quadrats I recorded on the trail. I’m curious to see how the species that show up in areas with bird’s beak compared to those without especially in Metcalf Marsh. I took soil samples from both the trail and the small islands, it was difficult to get soil salinity since it looked as if it was composed of mainly sand! One of the quadrats from Indian Point, this plot has both color variants of bird's beak. Finishing up the mapping at Distant Water Fleet. The next day we mapped along Indian Point. There were much smaller patches here compared to Metcalf but in some of them we saw what looked like both color variants of the species, green and purple. The soil samples here looked similar to what I collected at Metcalf but the percent cover quadrats included no sea lavender. After coming back from the field my mentor went over my proposal, which included going over the main tasks that I will be completing over the next five weeks. Once that was sorted I turned it in and headed over to this week's professional development session. Half of the REU students gave a ten minute presentation on what there project involves and what they expect to get from it.
On Friday I gave a tour of the lab to interns coming from Hatfield. I explained what my project was and what I do in order to get data. I was nervous but I knew that it would be a good practice for the presentation I would have to give to my mentors next week. I’ll definitely write how that turns out in the next entry. This week I finally got through analyzing most of the soil samples I have been collecting for the past two weeks. I am not only looking for soil salinity but also performing a grain-size analysis on each sample. This just means I’m looking for what percentage of the soil is composed of gravel, sand, silt, and clay. In order to do this I use four sieves stacked on top of one another, going from largest mesh size on top to smallest. I then run the sample through and collect what remains in each sieve, making sure to categorize based on sieve size. Once I complete this with all of my samples and do the necessary calculations I can start comparing the soil types of each site. I am interested in comparing soil types of the sites with huge patches of bird’s beaks to those that only had a few individuals. I have also been compiling all of the GPS data of bird’s beaks sites onto one map. When I’m not working on those parts of my project I’m most likely editing my proposal, the deadline of July 9th is now less than a week away. My first batch of soil samples, dried and ready to be weighed. This painting of bird’s beak was just hung up in the office this week! As for non-project related activities, on Wednesday my mentor and I went out during low tide to do transects on eelgrass. Populations of native species of eelgrass have been declining throughout the past years and monitoring sites where they are present can help find out what factors are causing this. I also learned how to tell the difference between native and invasive species of seagrass. It was amazing to see what the estuary looked like with almost all of the water receded and to be able to walk across areas I had gone through on a kayak earlier. The low tide made the estuary look almost empty. A 50 meter transect set up for eelgrass monitoring. This week even included seeing more of the coasts beautiful hiking trails. One of the trails I went on with the other REU students led to this secluded bay near Sunset Beach. We had to climb down this old rope but the view alone made it all worthwhile. Tonight we are all heading out to camp at Cape Argo for the weekend, I’ll write about what happens along with more project updates in next weeks blog. The hike was a bit challenging but seeing the bay was worth it, That’s me sitting on some moon looking rocks.
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AuthorI am an incoming third year student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa studying Oceanography. I’m looking forward to learning all I can about the Oregon Coast from this internship! Archives
August 2019
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