Spring 2015 - First Week at Hatfield

Week 1: Welcome and Marine Invertebrates 

Saturday April 4, 2015

By Kaitlin Lebon and Issie Corvi 

Last weekend, after much anticipation, the new set of BI 450 students settled into their new homes.  Our first day consisted of a Hatfield crash course, including tours, orientations, and our first official lecture.  With the basics under our belts, we waited eagerly for our field and lab work to begin. 

Boiler Bay

Vanessa, Ari, and David identifying invertebrates at Boiler Bay

                  Despite the tides not being completely in our favor, we were able to venture out into the intertidal zones of Boiler Bay to explore its populations of invertebrates.  The class eagerly delved into the task of collecting specimens to bring back to our lab for further investigation and identification.  A class favorite was a large red chiton, Cryptochiton stelleri, fondly known as the wandering meatloaf because of its size and mottled color. Other species that were found included the purple sea urchin (Stronglyocentrotus purpuratus), the aggregating anemone (Anthopleura elegantissima), and the kelp crab (Pugettia producta). 

Kat looking for Sipunculids in the roots of seagrass at Boiler Bay  

Kaitlin recording her findings at Boiler Bay

Later that evening we gathered in the dining hall to discuss Oregon geology and to become more acquainted with one another.  We also we treated to pie courtesy of our instructor, Sally Hacker. 

Tokatee Klootchman

A purple Pisaster ochraceus at Tokatee Klootchman 

                  Our second field excursion took us out to Tokatee Klootchman, a site just south of Cape Perpetua.  We continued our task of collecting various intertidal invertebrates.  This site was a favorite for many in the class.  As with past BI 450 classes, we quickly discovered and fell in love with the various species of colorful nudibranchs.  We were also pleased to find that there was a significant population of healthy looking sea stars—encouraging news in wake of the sea star wasting sickness that has been prevalent along the Oregon Coast.

In lecture we learned about sponges, anemones, corals, and jellies. 

The population density at Tokatee Klootchman was incredible - countless Mytilus californianus (mussles), Balanus glandula (acorn barnacle), and Pollicipes polymerus (gooseneck barnacle) (among others) occupied the intertidal. 

Mud Flats of Yaquina Bay

                  Thursday morning we ventured our early in the morning to the local mudflats.  With some last minute words of advice from our instructor Sally Hacker, we were knee deep in mud before we knew it.  Some of us were able to navigate the sticky depths of mud better than others, but in the end we were all able to discover various shrimps and worms to bring back with us. 

Later in lecture we were told about the various types of worms, many of which we had collected that day.

The class after collecting on the Yaquina Bay mud flats. 

Cascade Head

                  By Friday, our good fortune with the weather had ran out.  Our hike up to Cascade Head to view coastal headlands and estuaries was a wet one.  The trail on the way up was very slick and muddy.  Upon arriving at the top of the trail, we quickly took a group photo, and clambered back down to the vans to escape the adverse weather.  Although it would have been better to have had more favorable weather, it was still an enjoyable hike.

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