APRIL 2023
Victoria's Blog
Victoria Vinecke, graduate student
1 April 2023
Happy Spring! It is starting to warm up in beautiful Bellingham which means I can soak up some sun while tackling schoolwork! Spring break has wrapped up and the first week of spring quarter is in full swing. Over spring break, I had the opportunity to assist Alex in subsampling seal tissue which is always a fun time! While subsampling I saw a plethora of interesting samples, such as, a harbor seal skin sample with shark bite marks! A photo of the sample will be included at the bottom of the post!
The spring quarter is looking quite busy with a full workload! Even with a busy schedule I successfully blocked out Friday’s to solely work on my project! This quarter I will be presenting at the Northwest Student Chapter of the Society for Marine Mammalogy. I did not have the opportunity to attend a conference let alone present in one during undergrad, so this is quite exciting for me! I am looking forward to meeting people with the same interests as me and talk about marine mammals!
A goal of mine this quarter is to get started on harbor seal photo-ID to become more familiar with the regulars that visit the creek. I believe it is pertinent to my project to familiarize myself with photo-ID so it is easier to process photos that were taken during field sampling!
I am wishful that seals will soon return to the creek which means I can get back out into the field to collect more samples! As of right now I have 9 samples, but I hope to get a lot more in the future so, wish me luck on seal presence in the creek this spring!
Until next time,
Victoria
Harbor seal skin with shark bite wound. Photo by A. Otto.
Madison's Blog
Madison Gard, undergraduate student
1 April 2023
March was a season of closing one chapter and opening the next. The Winter Quarter Wrap-up meeting was a success! We celebrated some huge accomplishments on the Whatcom Creek team, including how we collectively processed 64 photo-cropping folders, 13 observation days of photo identification, and worked ~412.6 hours as a group. It was a lot of fun to congratulate our graduating seniors, Bri, Ben, Avia, and Emily S., with some flowers and by reflecting on fun memories in the lab and field. I even made snickerdoodle cookies as a snack, here's a photo from Fred Meyer's the night before when I was picking up all the supplies:
We opened up spring quarter with the Spring Kick-off Meeting and invited our full new team to get together the Monday before classes began. Alejandro even attended to welcome our new members! We introduced Whatcom Creek’s project leadership, did some get-to-know-you activities, created a community contract, and went over key training information to get everyone familiarized with the project. I’m really looking forward to getting to know everyone during training and field observations next week and throughout this quarter!
My Winter Quarter ended on a high note as I finished with a 4.0 GPA in my classes. I feel very proud of myself for persevering through the rough start that was January and missing a week of classes due to a family emergency. I managed to stay on top of my schoolwork and earn high marks on my final exams, presentations, and reports. It was nice to spend spring break away from my laptop and responsibilities in Cholla Bay, Mexico and Tucson, Arizona with my family. I feel like I was able to recharge and also defrost from the PNW winter months down there in the sun.
As far as progress on my smolt release thesis, I went with Holland to be trained on the Log Pond site access before the break. I had no idea how gorgeous that walking trail is looking out over Bellingham Bay! I have a good idea now for where students should stand to get head count data of harbor seals as well as what equipment they should bring. I will be meeting with Dr. Sobocinski, the statistics icon, to discuss the best observation design for statistical analysis of the data we collect later today. I also have sent out the Release and Hold Harmless Agreement to all student researchers and have asked them to return it to me by next Wednesday. This will get us set-up nicely to begin training everyone on the Smolt observations in the second half of April.
I feel energized and motivated starting off this spring! It is my last quarter as an undergraduate student at WWU, which is wild to think about. I’m very much looking forward to training new students to take over my positions as an Admissions tour guide, Viking Visits manager, marketing assistant for OCE, and MMEL lab manager to leave the offices and projects I love in good hands. It will also be a season of completing and wrapping up the major qPCR manuscript and Honors Smolt Release thesis projects.
Holland's Blog
Holland Conwell, undergraduate student
1 April 2023
I’m excited (and nervous) to say that this is my first blog post from my last quarter at Western! Coming into spring quarter, I have completed every single requirement for my major and minor except for my Honors capstone project. Because of this, I’m taking just the bare-minimum credits this quarter and focusing solely on wrapping up my research projects and presenting for conferences (as well as the Honors college). It feels very strange to not have any typical homework or lectures, but I’m happy to have much more time on my hands now for research!
I have quite a lot to accomplish this quarter, starting with wrapping up my diet analysis project. As of last month, I have a completed draft of my manuscript that just needs a few more edits, and I’m hoping to have another draft out by the end of next week. At the same time, I’m also working on churning out an abstract for my manuscript and the NWSSMM conference in May. Having a manuscript already written is astronomically helpful for drafting materials for upcoming conferences like NWSSMM, which I’ll be doing soon.
This quarter, I’m also analyzing long term data for the log pond project as my Honors capstone work. I’ve already begun the process and made a couple of preliminary graphs, but I’m looking forward to diving deeper into the dataset soon. Speaking of the log pond project, I’m excited to announce that Jasper McCutcheon will be taking over the project when I graduate! This quarter, I’ll be showing him the ropes, and I’m excited to see what he chooses to do with the project. There are so many exciting things going on at once in just the first week of the quarter, and I’m interested to see how things are looking by next month!
Alexandrea's Blog
Alexandra Otto, graduate student
1 April 2023
Hello there!
The month of March along with winter quarter and spring break just all flew by! Since last time, I made a couple more trips to WDFW in Tacoma and hopefully have finished up subsampling from their freezers! Huge thank you to the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network Partners at WDFW and Cascadia Research Collective that have been gracious enough to allow me to subsample from their collections. This project would not be possible without all your help. Thank you!
While this may be the end of one subsampling saga, many others lie ahead with trying to fill in the gaps of my sampling scheme. Samples are exciting though and with samples come extractions next! This spring quarter will be a jammed packed one with more subsampling collections, DNA extractions, helping mix primers for the SNP panel optimization with each GT-Seq run, sending my proposal for approval, diving into bioinformatics, applying for summer funding, and preparing presentations for both class and the upcoming Northwest Student Chapter of the Society for Marine Mammalogy (NWSSMM) conference!
While many things are happening, I can’t believe just a year ago I was accepting the graduate position of my dreams and in a year’s time from now, I will be wrapping up my thesis! These blog posts are always a great outlet to reflect, and I’m grateful for them. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around how time flies in graduate school. It has certainly been a fulfilling and learning experience so far, and I’m trying to soak in each moment of it along the way.
Side tangent: While finishing up some of the last trips to WDFW’s freezers in Tacoma, we finally started making our way through the archive samples and let me tell ya! There are some neat things kept for future scientific use. Holding a shark bite wound in one hand, while a seal eyeball in the other hand is an experience I’ll never forget! I don’t think many people get excited over exploring seal parts in a freezer but the shear anatomy of it all is so cool! It reminded me of my time on the stranding network in California and you can learn so much from one animal! Nowadays with increasing accessibility to molecular tools and advances, it’ll be cool to see what information scientists are able to find out from samples kept and stored for years now!
P.S Sincere thank you to Victoria, Bri, Holland, and Jamie for all the help and interest in subsampling harbor seal tissue! I could not have done it alone and thank you for making the long “field” days so memorable and enjoyable (-: So glad to have been able to show you all a sneak peek into the project! Excited to show some others and undergraduates the next step of this project in extractions soon!
Till next time,
Alexandrea