A Summer of Discovery

Posted on December 17, 2018 by abeaudreau

by Willa Johnson

Biking through the Safeway parking lot in the pouring rain, my first week in Juneau, I heard someone yell at me from their truck window. I was outraged; someone was catcalling me. As the truck drove off, I looked down and saw my sodden mitten on the ground. The person who I thought was catcalling me was actually just kindly letting me know I had dropped my mitten. My time in Juneau was full of surprises like this.

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work in the Coastal Fisheries Ecology Lab as a research intern and NOAA Hollings Scholar. I’m from Seattle and currently a senior at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, majoring in biology with a minor in gender studies. After spending the previous summer in the dry 100+ degree Walla Walla heat, I was overjoyed to be living near the ocean in Juneau’s temperate climate.

I spent my days working with MS student Matt Callahan on a study of juvenile sablefish ecology. This meant that I spent a lot of time looking at stomach contents. One of the surprises of my summer was discovering how interesting sorting through fish vomit can be! Sablefish are generalists, meaning they consume a wide variety of prey, so there was always something new and interesting in their stomachs. We found salmon bones, herring, mysid shrimp, shiner perch, and numerous amphipods – small crustaceans that are a favorite food of many fish.

Days at the dissecting scope (left) and on the water (right) can be a mix of monotonous and amazing. Photos by Willa Johnson (left) and Anne Beaudreau (right).

Sablefish are voracious. One day, Matt and I spent the entire morning counting 439 amphipods in the stomach of a single sablefish. As I became better at identifying prey, the work was more exciting. Each time I picked otoliths (ear bones) out of heavily digested fish remains, I would think, “Yes! It is another Pacific herring!” We also used heavy duty blenders to homogenize fish and measure their energy content. This will help us understand what types of prey contribute most to sablefish growth. For my project, I analyzed the differences in diet composition between age-0 and age-1 sablefish. It was cool to experience all the different aspects of the research and to learn what it would be like to go to graduate school.

I also had the opportunity to join Matt, Anne Beaudreau (CFE Lab PI), and Katy Echave (NOAA scientist) in Sitka for a week of fieldwork. This was, by far, the highlight of my summer. Each morning we would wake up, put on many layers of rain gear, and drive our small boat out to Saint John Baptist Bay, a nursery habitat for juvenile sablefish. Except for fishing in small creeks when I was little, I was new to fishing. Sometimes I hooked multiple sablefish at once, sometimes we waited a long time for a bite. I spent many hours sitting on the corner of the boat contemplating what all the little sablefish were doing down there. I even tried talking to them to coax the sablefish into biting. I don’t think they heard me! But even on days when I caught only a few sablefish, there was some interesting bycatch, including a ratfish, a crab, and a quillback rockfish. We were also excited to see brown bears from the boat. Other highlights of the trip included many delicious dinners cooked by Rhea, a recent graduate from the CFE Lab, and picking big bowls of salmon berries on sunny days.

Jesse and Willa went on many hikes to explore Juneau’s varied landscapes.

Thanks to the Hollings Scholarship, I had the opportunity to present my research results at the NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, at the end of the summer. While I was there I went to museums, ran into Elizabeth Warren in a vegan restaurant, and got to see the other Hollings Scholars from all around the U.S. present their fascinating projects. It was a wonderful science nerd convention. However, traveling to humid, metropolitan Silver Spring from Southeast Alaska made me realize that Juneau might be the place for me.

From Pride events to Audubon bird walks to lab potlucks, everyone in Juneau made me feel so welcome. When it wasn’t pouring rain I would bike into work past a rainbow of wildflowers on the side of the road. On the way home I could stop for a walk or a quick jump in the ocean. I spent most of my weekends hiking with friends, including current CFE Lab member, Jesse Gordon. Everywhere in Juneau, there are beautiful views of the mountains, the ocean, glaciers, or all three. Now I’m back at Whitman, halfway through my senior year, and I’m already thinking about how I can find my way back to Alaska.

What a view! Willa is dreaming up ways to get back to Alaska. Photo by Hillary Behrman.

Critters

Posted on November 29, 2017 by abeaudreau

by Nina Lundstrom

Editor’s Note: Nina Lundstrom has been working with us since July 2017 and was a core member of our beach seining team over the summer. She arrived in Alaska already a seasoned seiner, having learned the tools of the trade during her internship in the San Juan Islands, Washington, the summer after graduating with a degree in biology and ecology from Colorado College. In this post, Nina writes about her work with the Kwiaht Center for the Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea and the people and places she got to know. Incidentally, I (Anne) also worked with Kwiaht nearly a decade earlier and helped train volunteers in the delicate art of inducing fish to regurgitate their meals (for science!). I was proud to be there at the start of the wonderful citizen science monitoring program that continues today. Nina’s story perfectly captures the feeling of working in the islands.

♦♦♦

“You have to see this picture I just took of the most gorgeous little earwig, sipping on some Yarro nectar!” My boss, Russel Barsh, had just come pounding down the trail towards me, brandishing his camera and looking nothing short of gleeful. This was undoubtedly the first time in my life anyone had ever used the words gorgeous and earwig sequentially. I stood up, brushing dirt off the knees of my pants, and took the camera, Russel still gazing lovingly at the photo. Through the course of the summer, I would get used to these reverential descriptions of some arguably repulsive creatures. It takes a special kind of person to see the beauty in something like a clam worm: a sickly pink annelid that moves like a cross between a snake and a centipede and can administer a nasty bite to the unsuspecting clam digger, but Russel had a gift for recognizing the nuances and charm in just about every living thing.

I was living and working on Lopez Island off the coast of Washington, and there was no difficulty in recognizing the nuances and charm of the place itself. The island was small, only 15 miles long and 8 miles wide. One main road ran from end to end, appropriately named Center Road. The island was covered in thick forests of douglas fir, some of which were over 500 years old, and each edge of the island looked out on Mount Baker, or the Olympic Mountains, or the Cascades, depending on where you stood. I was a research apprentice for Russel and his partner Madrona Murphy, the directors of a non-profit research organization, Kwiaht. I worked seven days a week, between six and twelve hours a day, split evenly between the field and the lab. My primary project involved fish genetics, but my daily tasks ranged from digging up square meters of frozen muck and determining the species and ages of the clams living in said muck, to monitoring the comings and goings of the bees on wild blackberries. Russel and Madrona had an unparalleled love for their jobs and for the natural world, and I never got the impression that the hours we spent collecting data felt like work to them.

The best days were the “seining days” on Waldron and Lopez islands. Russel, Madrona, several buckets of equipment, and I would load up into a 20 foot boat driven by the designated boatman of the day, my favorite of whom was Tom*. Tom was a middle-aged man who always wore Wrangler jeans tucked into his Wellingtons and cheerfully passed his time on the boat, fishing for lingcod while we worked. He loved to rant about the fishing industry and “the bureaucracy,” and he shared his freshly trapped Dungeness crabs with me. He would motor us to Waldron Island or the south side of Lopez, where we would set up the net, a contraption 120 feet long and six feet deep, with floats on the top and weights on the bottom. The boat would pull one end in an arc through the bay and back to shallow water. There, someone on each end would swim out and grab it and pull it in with the somewhat unwilling help of strangers who had unknowingly picked our research spot on the beach as their relaxation location. The minutes following the pull were nothing short of chaotic, as we held the net in the water and sifted through its occupants. I grew accustomed to blindly plunging my hand into the depths of the submerged net to grab a jellyfish, a crab, or a sculpin that could harm one of the smaller fish or, consequently, my fingers. These predators were casually tossed over our shoulders and swam happily away. Russel and Madrona both possessed an incredible ability to snatch swimming fish out of the water with their bare hands and identify them with a single glance. We counted and released gunnels, sticklebacks, perch, flounder, snake pricklebacks, pipefish, pink salmon and chum salmon, but temporarily kept the king salmon to extract their stomach contents.

*name changed for this story

Beach seining on Lopez Island. Photo by Chris Sergeant.

It was easy to fall in love with king salmon, or Chinooks, as a species. The fish we studied were only about five days out of the river in which they were born, and they were charming and beautiful babies. Their glowing green backs sported cheetah-like black spots, and they swam less with their tails than with their tiny pectoral fins, alternating strokes. Most of them still had their par marks, perfectly spaced oval spots running down their sides, signifying their young age. We cheered for the fish whose stomach contents were full of smaller fish, and gently encouraged the ones who had only eaten an insect or two. I have never seen a pair of people so connected to and invested in fish vomit, but Russel and Madrona’s love for the Chinooks was infectious. Russel cooed to each individual fish, practically cuddling it as he plunged a blunt ended syringe down its throat to collect stomach contents. I was taught to perform “fish CPR” if any began to float, and someone was always closely watching the “recovery bucket” to ensure the well-being of the salmon. We didn’t have a single fatality all summer.

Chinook salmon_photo courtesy of Nina Lundstrom

Performing gastric lavage (left) and taking a small fin clip (right) from a juvenile Chinook salmon. Photos courtesy of Nina Lundstrom.

On one exhausting day, the first pull of the net yielded only smelt, a silvery fish that is a popular food source for island residents. A second net pull brought in herring, their rainbow scales flashing in the sunlight. A third pull seemed pointless and time-consuming on an already long day, but we did it anyway. Much to our surprise, thirty sizeable Chinooks were brought in, and we set up our “lavage station.” As we started our machine-like process of measurement, fin clip, scale collection, gut lavage, and recovery bucket, Russel whispered lovingly to one particularly large fish, “Oh, you are a little fatty aren’t you?” I did my best to disguise my laughter as a coughing fit.

My job was to sift through the stomach contents of each salmon and collect the sand lance, a small needle-nosed fish often eaten by juvenile Chinooks. I then extracted their DNA, amplified it with a set of primers (known gene sequences), and ran it through the genetic sequencer to try to formulate a population structure. It initially sounded like a straightforward process, and I dove in enthusiastically. Eight weeks of viciously whispered profanities followed. The monstrous machine had daily malfunctions, and as soon as things seemed to be running smoothly, some outside factor would throw the data off, forcing me to start over. Twice during the summer, all of the power in the school went out because of ongoing construction, and the whole machine crashed. All of the frozen polymers, buffers, and primers defrosted, became useless, and had to be reordered. While we waited for them to be shipped, I got the pleasant task of sorting through bags of poorly preserved dead fish, some of which had been partially decaying for three years. Oh, how I longed to work on the horrible machine in those days.

Seining on Waldron_photo by Nina Lundstrom

Setting up the beach seine on Waldron Island, a northern neighbor of Lopez Island in the San Juan Archipelago, Washington. Photo by Nina Lundstrom.

Near the end of my time on Lopez, Russel, Madrona, and I went out to the spit to check on some oysters that had been planted there the year before. We were knee deep in mud, cutting into the oyster bags to count the living and the dead. In the span of a year, the bags had become tiny ecosystems, kelp growing on the outsides and critters making their homes among the oyster colonies. Several crabs had crawled through the plastic mesh when they were small, made their homes, and grew too large to ever leave. They showed their appreciation for our rescue mission by vigorously pinching us as we returned them to the ocean. Russel opened one shell to find a spaghetti worm camping out in the enclosed space. Spaghetti worms are small and dark pink, with seemingly endless tentacle feelers that closely resemble angel hair pasta. They are the stuff of Fear Factor, the antithesis of charming. Russel beamed down at the worm. “You wonderful, smart spaghetti worm, how innovative of you to make your home in that shell,” he crooned. I turned back to my oysters, grinning.

Several hours later, hands caked in mud, and feet sunk fully and permanently into the mud, I found another shell housing a spaghetti worm. I released the worm into the water and watched it sink to the bottom and crawl away. “Good little spaghetti worm,” I whispered, in spite of myself.

Nina Lundstrom with sculpin_photo by Doug Duncan

Nina with one of the critters we love in Juneau, Alaska. Photo by Doug Duncan.

From the beltway to the icefield: An East Coaster’s experience in Juneau

Posted on September 25, 2017 by abeaudreau

by Willem Klajbor

What does the ideal summer vacation sound like to you? The image that pops into most people’s heads probably resembles an island resort somewhere, fully stocked with colorful drinks, and white sand as far as the eye can see. The average person probably wouldn’t come close to thinking about wading into the frigid ocean at 4 am, wearing a rain jacket every day, or evading bears on a hike. And the average person definitely wouldn’t want to be working in those conditions!

Let me back up – my name is Will, and I was lucky enough to spend last summer as a research intern in the Coastal Fisheries Ecology Lab. My hometown is in suburban western New York and I’m currently a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, studying Marine and Coastal Management, Economics, and GIS. When I was a sophomore, I received the NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship, which gave me the opportunity to assist with research on any NOAA-funded project between my junior and senior years. The good news for me was that it led to ten weeks in the 49^th state, where rain, cold, and bears are plentiful.

Will models “Juneau business casual.”

Specifically, I was working with Ph.D. candidate Maggie Chan to evaluate subsistence harvesters’ responses to a relatively new set of halibut fishing regulations. There are a lot of different terms for what I was: intern, research assistant, apprentice. But for me, all of that just meant working as a Swiss Army knife for the project – sometimes doing background research, other times managing and organizing our data, and even making maps. This was my first experience doing real research of any kind, so I was nervous going in, but Anne and Maggie made me feel at home right away and always kept me challenged with new tasks.

I also got to do some beach seining with Doug Duncan, another graduate student in the lab. There’s a great blog post about what that’s like here (link), and though there were some very early mornings and some very drowsy afternoons as a result, I was grateful that I had the opportunity to get in the water and do some field work while I was up north.

Sharing a moment with a starry flounder. Photo by Phallon Tullis-Joyce.

I was also lucky enough to be living with a group of other interns from around the country who were in Juneau working on projects at UAF. On top of that, we all grew close to the graduate students we were working with, so there was no shortage of people to show us new things about Juneau. And don’t get me started about Juneau – the city really is a hidden gem. Nearly every minute of my free time in Alaska was spent outside trying to find another hidden bike path or spot another bear. If you’re into leg workouts, I can tell you that I got a chance to hike some of the major day trails around the city, and those were usually enough to put us on our butts for the 12 hours that followed. But the view from the top was always worth it.

Building a fire in the pouring rain is one of the important life skills you learn in Southeast Alaska. Coastal Fisheries Ecology Lab members, pictured from left: Cheryl, Doug, Aiden, Phallon, Madison, Will, and Nina. Photo by Maggie Chan.

My uncle, who’s a commercial fisherman in Homer, Alaska, warned me before I left that a lot of people catch “Alaska Fever” when they visit. And honestly, I really did think he was exaggerating. Now, I’m back in College Park, and it’s often difficult to go more than a couple of hours without daydreaming about the mountains or the whales that liked to hang out just outside the lab. Even though it rained nearly every day I was there (I’m not exaggerating, I could count the sunny days on one hand) and it never really got above 65°F, Juneau really left its mark on me. I really do love it here in Maryland too, but I can’t ignore the symptoms – I went up north and caught the bug, and now I’m stuck with “Alaska Fever.” Check it out for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.

On rare sunny days, Juneau spoils you with amazing views of mountains, glaciers, and the sea. Photo by Dana Flerchinger.