That's all Folk's! -Week 10

This week we got to see the culmination of everyone’s hard work over the past two weeks. The 10th annual BI 450 Research Symposium was held on Friday, and everyone presented their findings for their group research projects. From seastar wasting to beach wrack to the secret lives of nudibranchs, everyone’s projects were creative and revealed interesting results.

Katie E and Joyce looked at the prevalence of sea star wasting in Pisaster ochraceus and interactions with hermit crabs. Their data included some shocking figures showing how fast wasting disease is spreading on the Oregon coast.

Courtney, Ashtyn, and Celeste looked at the differences in taxa diversity and abundance of native and invasive seagrasses Zostera marina and Zostera japonica in Yaquina bay.

Kristi and Kristina looked at algal bleaching in Oregon’s rocky intertidal.

Kelsey and Zach looked at rates of in-situ detritivore-aided and detritivore-excluded decomposition of common beach wrack algal species in South Beach, Oregon.

Katie C. and Mike studied the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and its use of algae as a protective cover and food source.

Raine and Britnee looked at mud shrimp populations and their parasitic isopod Orthione griffensis.

Kenzie, Jake and Rachel studied the effect of temperature and feeding on regenerating anemones Anthopleura elegantissima.

Adam and Eric looked at the substrate preferences, between gravel and sand, of English sole in Yaquina Bay

Larkin and Nikolai investigated the Crangon spp. assemblages in the Yaquina Bay channel and offshore on the shelf as well as spawning patterns in Crangon alaskensis.

For the final presentation Tyler and Jordan looked at whether or not the distance of their preferred food, Ophlitaspongia pennata, had an effect on the distance traveled and sponge choice of the nudibranch Rostanga pulchra.

It’s been a great term on the coast! We hope to see everyone next year, and for those seniors that are graduating, good luck in all of your future endeavors!

And now, we’d like to leave you with one last thing.. in the wise words of Tyler:

“Where do sea slugs put their investments?” 

 "In the nudiBANK!!" 

Week 9: Group Research Projects

This week we all were hard at work on our group research projects. Here is what each group is up to:

Counting Pisaster

Katie E. and Joyce are looking at the prevalence of sea star wasting disease in Ochre Sea Stars (Pisaster ochraceus). They were looking for a link between wasting sea stars and hermit crabs (Pagurus spp.). This idea came from an observation during our sea star wasting surveys in the community ecology section.

Kelsey and Zach are measuring decomposition rates of rack algae. They are looking at 3 different species and are measuring the dry weight after multiple days.

Kristina and Kristi are looking at bleaching in four algae functional groups. They conducted surveys to quantify the amount of bleaching that is happening to each group. In the lab, they are exposing algae samples to light and heat to see how they respond.

Beautiful early morning at Cape Blanco

Measuring cover of bleached Phyllospadix spp.

Larkin and Nickolai are looking at spawning location preferences of shrimp (Crangon spp.) in the Yaquina Bay area.

Rachel, Mackenzie and Jake are testing regeneration rates of aggregating anemones (Anthopleura elegantissima) at different temperatures.

Jake, Mackenzie and Rachel feeding their regrowing anemones

Courtney, Celeste and Ashtyn are looking at the differences in percent cover and biodiversity of a native seagrass (Zostera marina) and an invasive seagrass (Zostera japonica) at different sites in Yaquina Bay.

Katie C. and Mike are testing sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) habitat preference to see if they prefer canopy algal cover or bare rock.

Left: Fake algae cover  Right: Real algae cover

Britnee and Raine are looking at the population numbers of mud shrimp and comparing them to past data. They are also measuring the shrimp's burrowing density as well as the infestation intensity of  parasitic isopods.

Eric and Adam are testing sediment grain size preference for English Sole (Parophrys vetulus). 

How many English Sole can you find? Look closely!

Jordan and Tyler are testing food preferences of the nudibranch Rostanga pulchra.

Nudibranchs and their spongy food

Weighing nudibranchs

Now it's time to analyze data. We look forward to hearing everyone present their findings next Friday!

Week 8: Finishing Community Ecology and the start of Research Projects

Overview

            Week 8 marks the end of Community Ecology and our transition into our final research projects.  This week, we finished processing all of last week’s data and began collating them into our final data reports and presentations.  Monday and Tuesday were spent analyzing the entered data and creating appropriate figures for our Wednesday presentations.  Tuesday’s lecture also marked the final lecture of the course, and Thursday’s final capped our last exam of BI 450.  After a short break Thursday evening, we returned to the classroom early Friday morning for a crash-course in experimental designs and the beginning of our independent research projects.

Monday

            Monday began with free time for groups to start analyzing their data with statistics.  Liz was incredibly helpful and answered question after question on statistical tests, figure preparation, formatting issues, and much more. 

            Later, Bruce gave a lecture on meta-ecosystem ecology and introduced us to the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis: an important model for assessing community recovery after a major disturbance event.  He talked about a study where species diversity was high in barnacle species and Mytilus trossulus after an initial disturbance (after the population had some time to recover) but declined as M. californianus outcompeted the other species for space.  This lead to understanding that intermittent disturbance events in an environment help keep species richness high by reducing competition for space. 

            After lecture, data analysis and presentation preparation continued.

Land snail living the slowlife. We saw lots them this week.

Tuesday

Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint are so very exciting

            Tuesday was very similar to Monday in structure:  data analysis/presentation preparation in the morning, followed by lecture and more data work in the afternoon.  That afternoon, Bruce’s final lecture on species diversity marked the last lecture of BI 450!  Mixed feelings were felt all around.  Urgency was palpable in the afternoon and evening as groups scrambled to finish their presentations.

Wednesday

            Waking up bright and early Wednesday morning (as usual in this course), everyone trudged into the Library Seminar Room for presentations.  As expected, all groups gave fantastic and intriguing presentations!  The early mornings and late nights of the previous week-and-a-half seem to have paid off. 

Presentation from the Pisaster Wasting Survey Group.
Everyone had lots of question after!

            After presentations, we had a quick break before meeting back in the classroom for our final exam review.  Many of us were nervous for the big exam, but Bruce kept the mood both light-hearted and educational.  As he put it: “I’m not scared for the exam.”  Engaging questions were asked, and we all walked away with a better understanding of what material we would be tested on.

Bruce and Liz, asking the important questions

            

That afternoon was filled with the furious tapping of fingers on keyboards as everyone rushed to finish their data reports.  Splitting time between writing a scientific report and studying for an exam was a little stressful, but we all came out the other side breathing.

Thursday:

Thursday we had our final test of the term in Marine Community Ecology with Bruce Menge. Overall I feel like I learned a lot from this class and having someone as experienced as Bruce as a teacher really is a gift. While there was a lot of material that we covered the final exam was open note, which was nice. I think that’s nice as it means we can focus more on understanding the concepts rather than just memorizing terms and scientific studies.

Skeleton shrimp, Caprella sp. top of the picture in the middle. Living on a hydroid.

Friday:

Reuben went over how to properly design a scientific experiment and the statistics involved with analyzing the results. Afterwards each group met with Sally, Sarah, Su, Liz, and Reuben to pitch their project idea. Our project (Rachel, Kenzie, and Jake) is studying the effects of temperature and feeding on the regeneration and survival of Anthopleura elegantissima. They liked our ideas but some of the logistics had to be changed. This is an important aspect of learning about the scientific process. It often takes lots of thinking and rethinking about the project design to come to a final workable design. There’s always a trade-off between the best design and what’s actually feasible with the resources and time available. Friday evening was also the due date for our project proposals, which included an introduction on the topic, materials and methods, expected results and significance.  Proposals are an important part of the process of conducting a scientific experience. If you need funding you need a good proposal.

Foggy Friday morning. 

                                             

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

Week 6: Conservation

Monday, May 5th:

This week was all about Marine Conservation and Policy! We met our instructor Sarah Henkel at 9:00am. This first day we learned about the oceans, climate change, oceanic resources such as tidal and wave energy, and aquaculture. The day consisted of lectures and deciding upon our conservation/policy research topics. 

Tuesday, May 6th:

In lecture, we learned about marine reserves and their ecological importance, and the struggles of regulation within marine reserves. 

Marine Reserves (MR), essentially are preservation lands prohibiting all commercial and recreational uses as well as oceanic development where as Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are regulated commercial and recreational areas but also prohibit oceanic development. 

MRs and MPAs are most commonly adjacent to one another; Cape Perpetua is a fine example. 

A stunning photo of Cape Perpetua's Marine Reserve during some strong winds (from Thursday's field trip).

When the sun began to set, in a large room in the Guin Library, a group of 22 students and their instructor, loudly speculated their ideas of science, policy, and ethics and their connectivity within the life of a scientist. What an eye-opening discussion it was!

Wednesday, May 7th:

This was one of the most exciting days of the week! We had a dock walk with Laura Anderson, owner of Local Ocean Seafoods in business for over a decade now, where she talked to us about fishing and where her fish and crustaceans came from. 

One of the boats she buys fish from, uses glazing as a means of keeping fish "fresh." Glazing flash freezes caught fish, leaving them in the same conditions they were in when first caught for longer preservation time.

Check out this neat tuna fishing boat! Laura pointed out to us certain key features that can help distinguish what type of catch this boat fishes. 

Having a cover for the tuna is essential in reducing diseases by decreasing the beat of the sun, avoiding the rise in temperature of their bodies.

These wooden doors are features found on a pink shrimp boat.

The doors have good buoyancy and help the net to stay open. 

After our lovely dock walk with Laura, we had lunch at Local Ocean Seafoods. Food choices ranged from fish wraps and salmon salads, to crab cakes and Albacore tuna kabobs. 

 Fish and crabs were displayed upon entrance in a case full of ice with the name of the boat from which they were caught. Thumbs up for them!

A plate of fish tacos marinated in a chili-garlic sauce. YUM!

Thursday, May 8th:

We had another exciting field trip to Cape Perpetua and Ten-Mile Creek. 

Paul Engelmeyer, a conservation advocate, discussed his work in MRs and MPAs and his 1000 acre land protection project. He also talked about the watershed councils all around Oregon and the health of the water. Looking at one of his maps, our water systems aren't doing so well.

We then piled back into the warmth of the dry vans and headed to Ten-Mile Creek to meet Chris Lorion, Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, and Jack Sleeper, fish biologist. 

Chris Lorion showed us the neat fish collecting trap that allows him to record data on the fish abundance and diversity in the river. 

This is the fish trap used by ODFW. Fish are directed into the trap and taken out for recording fish dynamics every day.

One of the fish caught on this day was the Pacific lamprey, Entosphenus tridentatus. These adult female lamprey recently laid their eggs. 

We had the opportunity of holding them. Look at that smiling face!

In the open forest, Jack Sleeper talked to us about the importance of fallen trees in the river to steady water flow and for creating a complex habitat for fish. He also noted the seriousness of not having roads impede accessible waterways for fish, such as culverts do. 

This fallen tree is vital for juvenile salmon populations as a means of protection from predators and fast flowing waters. 

Friday, May 9th:

Presentations! One right after the other. Eleven presentations, all concerning different topics about the oceans. Our topics included ocean acidification, arctic ice caps melting, hypoxia, marine mammal containment, coral reefs, artificial reefs, seafood labelling, invasive species, Bluefin tuna migration, and fish hatcheries. Each group had a specific target audience, varying from the general public to policy-makers. Every topic had something interesting to say, capturing our attention. Needless to say, we all learned something new from each issue.

Two students presenting their research on marine mammal containment as if their audience were the general public. Great job ladies!