MAY 2023
Victoria's Blog
Victoria Vinecke, graduate student
1 May 2023
April shows sure does bring May flowers to Bellingham! It is starting to warm up and the cherry blossom trees are in full bloom. Idaho did not have very many cherry blossoms so walking around Western Washington University’s campus seeing all the blossoms is quite breath taking! It has started to warm up and I am looking forward to starting field work again soon! There have been a couple sightings of seals in Whatcom Creek which means my second field season will begin shortly! I am excited to get back into the water and hopefully obtain some good eDNA samples from the water.
This month I will be giving my first presentation talk on my thesis to the first and second year biology graduate students! I am excited to share my project with my peers and receive feedback. Being able to convey scientific information is an important part of being a scientist and practicing scientific communication will help me become more familiar with those skills.
Along with working on my presentation I have also been working on my poster that I plan to present at the Northwest Student Chapter for the Society of Marine Mammalogy (NWSSMM) conference. The conference will be held at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, OR. I am looking forward to presenting a poster regarding my research for the first time! I am hoping to get feedback from experts in the field to strengthen my project. Along with expert feedback I am interested in what my peers within marine mammal community think of my project. I am ecstatic to attend my first conference and meet people within the marine mammal community. I come from a background of terrestrial wildlife genetics, so I am thrilled to meet people in the marine mammal sector of research.
My goals for next month are to hopefully get back into the field to sample, get my thesis proposal approved by my committee, and successfully complete my talk/poster presentations!
Until next time,
Victoria
Holland's Blog
Holland Conwell, undergraduate student
1 May 2023
Despite only having to divide my attention between my research projects and being a UTA, this has been a crazy, busy quarter so far! Deadlines are fast approaching, and I’m working hard to stay on track with my work, especially before my upcoming travels. It’s looking like I’ll be traveling almost every weekend for the next month (California, Oregon for the NWSSMM conference, California again, and then Texas)! May definitely holds lots of flights, excitement, and multiple conferences. In preparation for the NWSSMM conference and Scholars Week, I’ve been working on a poster detailing the last stage of my diet analysis project, providing some closure to the preliminary results and future directions that I presented last year. Now that this project is already in manuscript form, the hardest part of making this poster has actually been deciding how to use the limited space given the vast amounts of figures and topics in my manuscript. I’m excited to finish up this poster soon and hit the road to Newport, Oregon with Vic and Alex!
Amidst ongoing edits to my diet analysis manuscript, I’ve also been making some headway on data analysis for the log pond project! I started by graphically depicting long term seal numbers at the log pond and noticed an extreme dip in numbers in 2016, which corresponds with the 2016 removal of log booms in the log pond. Numbers never reached previous maximums again post 2016, but they were relatively stable until a sharp decline in 2022, which corresponds again to the removal of the last log booms from the log pond in May 2022. I find these trends quite intriguing, and I’ve been working on a statistical analysis that can further help me look at trends in seal numbers from 2007-2023 at the log pond. Based on the statistical methods of a 2021 paper that looked at long term grey and harbor seal numbers in the United Kingdom, I’ve been using Generalized Additive Models to analyze my data. I learned a lot about Generalized Additive Models while building my code, but I ran into a snag when checking for autocorrelation. I detected temporal autocorrelation when running ACF plots, which means that I need to adapt my models to account for this temporal autocorrelation. I addressed this by running autoregressive models (AR1 specifically) that fulfill this function, which fixed my ACF plots and should hopefully be enough to give me the green light to interpret my results. Fingers crossed that I’m able to zip through the rest of data analysis and start working on my capstone presentation soon!
Alexandrea's Blog
Alexandra Otto, graduate student
1 May 2023
Hi again.
Remember that long list of things I rattled off in the last blog post about what’s to come? Well definitely this past month has been a busy one. Thankfully I still have a month to complete the remaining half of that very ambitious list! Graduate school is a little funny in the concept, each quarter you find yourself very busy and you don’t believe it can get busier, yet it does. Busy is not bad though by all means. I’m happy to be busy and making progress in the grand scheme of it all.
I sent my proposal off to my committee with hopes to be hearing back soon! I presented my ~25-minute proposal presentation to two classes. I’m currently practicing my 3-minute presentation now that I hope to give this weekend at NWSSMM. Going from 25 minutes to 3 minutes is a feat in itself! I have continued DNA tissue extractions and hosted some shadowing events for the undergraduates in the MMEL. It was amazing to see over ten students over the course of two-weeks show so much interest and ask great questions during the shadowing events! Next phase is to train a small team and start on fecal samples. The SNP and GT-Seq panel is currently being optimized as we speak through Wild EcoHealth and WDFW. Summer is approaching fast and I still need to collect subsamples to fill in my sampling scheme! At the same time, luckily the genomics analysis course I am taking is helping me grasp a better understanding of the sequencing and bioinformatics world just in time for the summer!
I’ve experienced the ups and downs of funding this past month. As I was awarded course scholarships and a $1,000 travel scholarship to attend three modules in Seattle this summer for the 28th Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics (SISG)! I’ll be able to take three courses over the Fundamentals of Population Genetics, Applications of Population Genetics, and Statistical Genetics, which will all be massively beneficial to my thesis analyses this summer. As in life we take the highs with the lows and unfortunately, I received notice I did not receive the NPRB grant I had applied for back in February. Regardless of the outcome though, the practice of writing and applying was more than worth it. More funding news, I just submitted my summer funding proposal through the department and plan to submit an application to RSP. So, fingers crossed on those applications still left to be decided!
Full transparency, this quarter seems to be hitting the first-year biology graduate student cohort almost as hard as fall quarter did. We have all been grinding every night for weeks now and still have the rest of the quarter to go. Through it all though, we have found the most support in each other, and I couldn’t have asked for a better group of intelligent, goofy colleagues and friends to ride the wild ride of graduate school with!
Madison's Blog
Madison Gard, undergraduate student
1 May 2023
April has been busy for the Whatcom Creek team as we’ve geared up for the smolt season in the creek. Emily, McKenna and I worked together to train all of our new members on photo cropping. With so many hands working on the folders, we’ve been making great progress on finishing up 2021 field observations! Additionally, Kameran and Gaither have been taking the majority of our field teams out for training and observations so far. I wouldn’t be able to coordinate the Whatcom Creek project alone, and I'm so beyond grateful for the awesome managers and research leads we have in Whatcom Creek.
As far as my smolt thesis project - April has been the month of preparation! I did meet with Dr. Sobocinski to discuss the statistics of the project early in the month and come up with a plan for data collection. I also worked with Alejandro to design the datasheets for 5-minute headcount field observations. The Hold and Release Harmless forms have been completed (37 of them!) and were sent to our contact with the City of Bellingham for us to have site access. Yesterday I completed the third field training session to prepare everyone for the smolt observations starting next Monday, 5/8! I have everyone’s availability for the month of May and will create the schedule later today. It feels as though we are pretty much ready to go out to the field and begin collecting data. All that’s left is to create the schedule and complete the observations! I’m so excited to see how it comes together, and very grateful to have the team of MMEL researchers to help me.
Spring quarter classes have been going smoothly. I’m only taking my two capstone courses: Oceanography of the Salish Sea and Teatro del Siglo de Oro. I’ve been enjoying both so far and it's been nice to take a lighter course load in order to focus more on MMEL research and my senior thesis.
I realized over the weekend that I have about 40 days left until graduation. This is slightly terrifying. It’s beginning to feel like a full sprint to the finish line, but I’m ready to dig my heels in and put in the hard work.