Week 7 ALREADY?!

Monday 05/13: We switched gears this week from field-heavy work to more lecture/lab based work in order to prepare to write our community ecology data reports. We started our Monday off lecture heavy learning about dynamics of marine communities and diversity. Among these lectures we learned that living in an intermittent upwelling area, we get a higher diversity of organisms than other places with persistent upwelling or downwelling.This is because upwelling brings up cold, nutrient rich waters and not being persistent gives the organisms that live in these areas a chance to take advantage of this abundance of food. Too much upwelling and too much downwelling can lead to very low diversity, so it is lucky that we get to study here in the Pacific Northwest where organisms are abundant and diverse! To better prepare us for our writing assignment for this section, our TA Zech went over statistical analysis and figure preparation before we took our last data from our experiment in the lab. After a full day spent in the classroom, we gathered in the lab to take our final data on our predator rate experiment. We counted the amount of eaten prey (mussels) and measured them, measured each predator, and fed the snails, sea stars, and crabs one last time before terminating the experiment and taking the animals back to their habitats in the rocky intertidal. Our special lecture for the day on kelp bed dynamics was unfortunately cancelled so that our lecturer, Sarah Hamilton, could go out on a research dive and do what marine scientists do best! Today we took in a lot of information but our sore limbs thanked us for a break from the field. Now we have the tools to start writing our data reports and use the data we worked so hard to collect!

Last round of data collection for our predation experiment.

Tuesday 05/14:  Today was much appreciated by us students because it was an “independent study” day that our professors so generously scheduled in. We had today to prepare our papers and oral presentations that were due Wednesday and Thursday respectively.  Groups gathered, scattered throughout the library and in various apartments to start hatching out their ideas about the data we collected in the field last week. This wasn’t our first rodeo, however, since this was our third oral presentation and one of many writing assignments. We finalized our presentations and eagerly awaited everyone’s oral reports at 1:00 PM tomorrow.

Wednesday 05/15: Judgement day...the day we presented our research to the class. Although presentations were at 1:00pm, we all woke up early to prepare for the daunting task ahead. Some groups walked to the library to get in some last minute details on their powerpoints, and others practiced their speeches. We entered the classroom, and although we have already done three presentations in this class, those nerves still crept in. For the next two hours were listened to our classmates give compelling hypotheses and observations with some great data analysis. Some presentation topics included sea star reproduction output, mobile predator diversity, and analyzing predation rates. Finally, the nerves were gone and the presentations were over. We went back to our favorite study places and worked diligently on our reports that were due the next day. A few students decided to have a peer review session later that night, which was immensely helpful for revising our papers and making sure they were ready to be graded by our TA Zech. After the session, we snuck in a few hours of studying for our final, and with that, the day had come to a quick end.

 

Everyone did amazing on their presentations; their hard work paid off.

Thursday 05/16: The last day of community ecology was upon us, and these two weeks went by in the blink of an eye. We woke up early to study for our exam at 2:00pm, reviewing Bruce’s lecture slides and going over concepts we learned together. We ate a quick lunch and took our final walk to class as community ecology students. We had two hours to take the exam, and then the rest of the day was devoted to finishing up our reports that were due later that night. However, it was the seventh week of spring term, and we needed a bit of a break. A few students sent out invites for a potluck, and everyone brought a different dish to share. Among the smorgasbord of food was shepards pie, mac and cheese, spaghetti, sweet potato horderves, cookies, apple fritters, chips, cupcakes, and so much more food that we aren’t able to list it all. It was a great way to finish the subject and have some family time with our classmates. The night rolled to an end, the last of the reports were turned in, and we prepared for the projects section that would begin the next day.

Everyone getting ready to take the final!

A nice night with friends, eating too much food.

Friday 05/17: A brand new day and a brand new section! Today we finally started the long awaited independent project section. We started bright and early at 8:30 AM and listened to our instructor, Dr. Sarah Henkel, tell us about what to expect in the upcoming weeks. We received instructions on how to write our project proposals and then we were released to write them in our groups. Teams were scattered across the Hatfield campus working diligently on writing their project proposals which were due at 5 PM this afternoon. Groups also took turns meeting with our three instructors and two TAs for this course to talk about their projects are work out the kinks of their ideas. Once everyone was finally done with their proposals we could finally breathe a sigh of relief as the end of a busy week came to a close and excitement came for next week’s activities.

Week 7: Community Ecology (week 1)

This week was our first week of Community Ecology, taught by a new professor, Dr. Bruce Menge! Community Ecology is (nearly) a 2-week class. The first week involved 4 field trips, about 5 lectures, and 4 guest lectures from graduate students in Bruce's lab. These four field trips made this week a very tiring week; we had to wake up before 6 am every day to catch the early low tide! We traveled to various sites along the coast spanning from Fogarty creek (in the north) to Tokatee Kloochman (in the south). Even though we were extremely tired by the end of the week, we still had a lot of fun learning about community ecology and collecting valuable data. We had to struggle though early mornings, but the week was still not overwhelming because we had plenty of free time to enjoy the beautiful warm weather in Newport (reaching record highs in temperature and being sunny ALL week!!).

Recreational kite flying with Octie the 

Octopus at Nye Beach

Monday:
Monday was our one day this week without a field trip. We had lectures covering the topic of Structure and Biodiversity of Marine Community and a guest lecture from our very own TA Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman, on Environmental stress and the foraging ecology of whelks.

Tuesday:
Tuesday was our first field trip! The entire class went to Boiler Bay, a favorite site of BI 450, to collect data on percent cover of algae and invertebrates, tide pool height, whelk diet, tide pool diversity, and more! For half the class this day was spent quantifying the percentages of plants and animals living in the rock shores (using quadrats), while the other half of the class was split into pairs to measure the other variables. Though the weather at Boiler  Bay was sunny and warm, we could not collect data from the wave-exposed high intertidal due to the tides, so we had to complete the quadrat data for this site on Thursday.

     A quadrat at Boiler Bay, used to measure 

    the percent cover of invertebrates and algae

Wednesday:

This day we visited Strawberry Hill, another favorite site of the BI 450 class, to collect data from the same categories as Boiler Bay. Compared to Boiler Bay, we saw a lot more Pisaster ochraceus, the common sea star. We even saw one sea star that had two arms missing. Bruce thought the cause might have been predation.

Pisaster ochraceus with two missing arms found

at Strawberry Hill in the low, exposed zone

Some of our students had the pleasure of discovering a new animal that they had not encountered before. Though they originally thought that this specimen might be an alga, they learned that it was actually a hydroid, of the genus Aglaophenia. This genus of hydroid is often found associated with small, jumping amphipods.

Above: Aglaophenia sp.

Thursday:

On Thursday, our class split up into two groups (for the first time!), half going to Boiler Bay and the other to Strawberry Hill to collect data on biodiversity of algae and invertebrates. Some students were responsible for collecting information on biodiversity of algae and others of invertebrates. The students spent 20 minutes at each zone (low, middle, high) in the protected and exposed areas of each site. After the field trip, we reconvened for a lecture on Modification of Biotic Effects on Community Structure. In the evening, we listened to another guest lecture from a returning graduate student, Allie Barner, about her research on canopy and understory algae in the rocky intertidal.

Friday:

Friday we all broke up into pairs. In pairs, we were divided into various sites along the coast, from Fogarty Creek to Yaquina Head to Tokatee Kloochman, to sample hundreds of Pisaster orchaceus for the upcoming wasting disease. As some of our students broke into pairs, they had to endure treacherous conditions, some even climbing cliffs that were not accessible to the general public. 

Two students, Rachel Palmer and Ashtyn Isaak, about to scale cliffs in the search for scientific data. Who says that scientists can't be rebels?

This wasting disease is often seen as lesions on the body, missing arms complete with lesions, twisting, and body deflation. 

 Two Pisaster orchaceus observed with various stages of wasting disease. On the left, the sea star is heavily deflated, and on the right, the sea star has a white lesion and a missing arm.

Previous data collections by our professor, Dr. Bruce Menge, and his lab determined that the wasting disease was present on the Oregon coast at a prevalence of about 1%. Our class data has not yet been finalized and/or analyzed, but at this point we have determined that the prevalence of the disease is significantly higher than what the Menge lab had originally observed. Even though Friday's field trips revealed some alarming and dismal information, the class got to have a lot of fun surveying new sites without direct supervision. Some of the class even got to visit the site of Fogarty Creek, where we observed multiple seals, some of which were dead on the rocks.

   Above: Dead seals observed at Fogarty Creek

Overall this week was very enlightening to us on how species interact on a community level. This was easily seen as we analyzed the data from this week. The lectures presented by Dr. Menge have enhanced the knowledge we collected in the field and explained phenomena that we have observed as well as provided us with examples that we could not observe in the field. We all look forward to the second week of Community Ecology with Dr. Bruce Menge and Elizabeth Cerny-Chipman, to learn more in-depth about Community Ecology as we create figures from the data we collected. Many students who do not already have an idea of what they might do for their formal research projects (in the last two weeks of the course) have been brainstorming with the help of this section, and are likely to form a mature research project idea in the next week! We look forward to the intellectual journey ahead of us.

Blog this week by: Celeste Moen (left) and Mackenzie Mason (right)
                               sealifies taken Friday at Fogarty creek