End of Week 7

Caught a Lingcod!

With only 3 weeks remaining, projects are starting to go underway. Some examples: Ryan Hannum is investigating hermit crab shell preferences, Tara McDowell and Co. are trying to catch rockfish, and Katlyn Taylor is working with Pisaster. The term is busy as ever as groups try to keep their critters alive and booming for a week of man-handling.

Some Katharina tunicata being used in an experiment.

Ryan's Hermits

In order to make it through the tiresome, study filled days, we got creative with our pastime activities. The headband crew are still hard at work supplying nearly everyone with a homemade hat or headband.  Rock-paper-scissors is always a good way to raise spirits, especially if you're the winner! Kat prepared some vegetables for a delicious salad while Alice baked a delicious blueberry lemon loaf after the test to relax and    provide a distraction before jumping back into projects.

Collecting sea creatures is fun! Trent has become the BI 450 mascot over the course of the term and he poses majestically for the camera in the picture below. What a beauty! Just look at him rock that girdle. 

Trent the Gumboot Chiton

Week 7 - Community Ecology Continued!

It's already Week 7, and oh how time has flown! Sunny weather the past few days has raised spirits among the ranks and decreased jumping off cliffs by 200 percent. No fieldwork this week means we get to buckle down and study our community ecology lectures. (Super fun.)

On Wednesday morning, we gave presentations on the date collected at Boiler Bay and Strawberry Hill from last week. Each group had to analyze different sets of data in order to answer questions their group came up with based on those data sets. For example, the "fearsome foursome" (including Anna, Kevin, Doug, and Jessica) decided to look at the canopy cover across different zones at each location and how it affected the biodiversity of that area. Isn't that great? Some groups found significant results from these data sets, but the consensus was that more sampling is probably needed.

As the treacherous data analyzing days crept by, some of us began our end-of-term projects. We will officially begin these on Friday with a proposal. Tara's group decided to put their fishing skills to the test, but as of yet they remain fish-less. How disappointing for them (insert sad face here). Though it seemed to temporarily drive the team and their cronies to a devastating Fucus war, they eventually recovered with only one casualty.

 

Another Field Trip to Boiler Bay and Strawberry Hill

On Thursday and Friday, we took another trip to Boiler Bay and Strawberry Hill, respectively. This time, we took a biodiversity survey of each site. We searched for and recorded invertebrates and algae presence within each zone (low, mid, high) in different levels of exposure (exposed and protected) for 10-minutes. This field work helped us to construct good estimate of community structure and species interactions in each field.

In Boiler Bay, Kevin gives a thumbs-up as he goes to the next zone, while Kat searches for more species.

Molly looks under kelps and sea grasses to find tiny species hiding beneath them.

Everyone just got exhausted and is lying in the sun after lots of hard work.

In Strawberry Hill, Doug searches for invertebrates hiding in the tidepool of mussel bench.

Katlyn and Allison having a serious discussion on the species that they found

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Week 6 BEGINS!!

After a great weekend of Cinco de Mayo, it is a time to study Marine Ecology!! In this 2-week section, we will study the structure and biodiversity of marine communities, which includes biotic interactions and abiotic effects of environment.

In the first week of this section, we took early-morning trips to Boiler Bay and Strawberry Hill for some fieldwork.

 Anna and Danielle getting splashed by big wave as they work at exposed cite of Boiler Bay

Ryan gives a bold(?) smile showing some satisfaction on his great work of Transect-Quadrat, which gives a measurement of abundance and density of entities such as physical objects and any organisms in the quadrat.

In Strawberry Hill, Carmen and Allison working on Tidepool Diversity and Belt Transects. The tidepool diversity gives a diversity (presence / absence) of any organisms in the tidepool. The belt transects gives the number of large, mobile inverts lying within the defined area with 10 m of length and 2 m of width.

Kevin and Katlyn work intently on predator diets (seastars, in their case), measuring both predator and prey size.

After a lot of hard work in Strawberry Hill, we saw a CUTE baby seal!!

Algae is our lives (for the week)!

We started up our last week of algae learning about the Phaeophytes also known as the brown algae, this contains all the different kelps including the Postelesia palmiformis also known as the cute little sea palm. Later that night we learned more about palmiformis from our guest speaker Karina Nielsen. She informed us on ways that we can avoid overexploitation of different types of economically important seaweeds such as palmiformis. The next two days involved learning about Rhodophyta and getting prepared for our team projects that were to be given Wednesday night. Wednesday morning we had another guest speaker, Leigh Tait who spoke to us about algae and climate change and his research that he is currently doing here at Hatfield. Later that evening we all got together to present our team projects to our fellow class mates. Each team had a different group of algae they were showing to the other groups, each team showed us the variety of algae they had collected and ways to tell them apart from all other algae in the field and in the lab. Thursday we learned about the research Annette did on limpet interaction with seaweed and then had the rest of the day to prepare for our lecture final and lab final the next day. 

Ben at one of the groups algae holding tanks as Molly helps set up the finishing touches of her group presentation in the background. 

Brian diligently examining a microscopic morphological characteristic of the Brown Algae group.  

Karina taking notes of the different Brown Algae we collected last week at Boiler Bay and Seal Rock. 

Green Algae group's beautiful presentation! 

The gang hanging out around the snacks (that Annette so graciously brought us) after algae presentations!