OCTOBER 2020
Kyra's Blog
Kyra Bankhead, undergraduate student
1 October 2020
Classes are getting started and I am excited to start my responsibilities as project lead. We are going to discuss the nature of science and I am going to introduce a scientific paper on human boat disturbance to dolphins and the threshold of what is acceptable. I find this extremely interesting because it relates heavily to the research I’m doing right now, which should help me find other ways to analyze my data as well as learn more about anthropocentric disturbance on marine mammals.
I am also excited to take biostatistics to analyze my data more efficiently. There are a lot of variables that I still don’t know how to account for. In fact, just recently smoke has taken over the west coast and I am wondering how to incorporate this into my data along with the rest that 2020 has thrown at us.
Comparative Semiahmoo Marina site photos taken 7/7/2020 and 9/13/2020. Photo by Q. Bankhead.
Classes have started and I am trying to manage all my classes on top of working and doing my research. The first couple weeks are going to be hard as I must teach my new students how to do their observations and get supplies for them as well. Hopefully once I get past orientation everything will sort itself out.
Until then,
Kyra Bankhead
Kathleen's Blog
Kathleen McKeegan, graduate student
1 October 2020
Well, this is definitely a bizarre year to start a graduate program! I’m currently holed up in my room, taking classes on my computer and trying to muster up those first-day-of-school jitters, despite being in my PJs from the waist down. However, even with the virtual format and literal distance from my peers, I am incredibly excited to be at WWU working with Alejandro and the Marine Mammal Ecology Lab!
I am originally from Oak Park California, a small town outside of Los Angeles. I went to undergrad at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, where I majored in Biology and minored in Theatre (love me some Shakespeare). Since graduating in 2017, I have worked in the professional field of marine biology and conservation, serving as an AmeriCorps member with NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, a deckhand and educator for the Los Angeles Maritime Institute, and as the Program Director for a small non-profit called Waterfront Education. Most recently, I was the captain of a research boat for the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at UCLA. Although I’ve learned a great deal from my various experiences, I am excited to be conducting research again and expanding my knowledge of the marine ecological field.
For my research project, I am joining the Whatcom Creek seal project studying the foraging behaviors of harbor seals during the fall salmon run. There is some preliminary evidence that the harbor seals may be benefitting from group hunting (maybe even cooperative hunting?), which in turn increases their predation rates on salmon. I am hoping to incorporate drone footage this fall to help bolster our observations. We are also beginning to coordinate with Oceans Institute and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife as they try out a new hazing device meant to mitigate seal predation on hatchery salmon in the creek. Right now, I am trying to nail down my research question as we begin our field season (first observations happening next week!!!). In addition to taking classes and being a TA, I am also writing proposals for grants and funding opportunities, namely the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (wish me luck!). It is only day three of the quarter and my plate is already full! Despite everything being online, I am excited to be here and I’m looking forward to a fun and eventful fall quarter!
Kate's Blog
Kate Clayton, undergraduate student
1 October 2020
Hello! My name is Kate and I am starting my junior year at Western this quarter. I am a biology major with an EEO emphasis, and I am very excited to be working in the marine mammal ecology lab! I started working on the Whatcom creek harbor seal project last year as a lab assistant and am now helping Grace and Kathleen run the lab as an assistant lab manager. I have received very little training (due to COVID) and have no clue as to what I am doing right now so that is a bit stressful. I was hoping to be given a bit of a trial period to ease into this role and all of the responsibilities it entails but with COVID inconveniently arriving as it did, the lab didn’t have time to train a successor to our amazing lab manager from last year, Delaney. So, right now I am assistant lab manager to Grace and Kathleen, and I am hopeful my role will become clearer as time goes on. Until then, I plan to continue to do all I can to help the lab.
In the past few weeks, I have been working with Grace to catch up on photo cropping from 2019 and have been creating training manuals for incoming lab members. In the upcoming weeks I will be helping to train them all on how to do an observation. I am very excited to meet all the eager new members and I am even more excited to get to be working with the seals again!
I brainstormed a bit with Grace this last week about potential ideas for an independent research project and I am planning on studying how the seals’ behavior will change with the upcoming hazing project that will be taking place in Whatcom creek this fall/winter. I have not sorted out all the details yet, but I am thinking I will measure their behavior based on the time it takes them to return to the creek after the hazing ends both long term and short term.
Zoë's Blog
Zoë Lewis, graduate student
1 October 2020
Hello all,
My name is Zoë and this will be my first official quarter as a graduate student at WWU. Although this is my first blog post, I feel like I have been in school for a while already! Between literature review, concept mapping and outlining for my thesis proposal, I’m ready to hit the ground running.
For my thesis, I will be working on a project in collaboration with the Makah tribe in Neah Bay to investigate Harbor Seal and Steller Sea Lion predation of Chinook salmon along the northwest Washington coast during the winter and spring months. To understand Harbor seal and Steller sea lion diet, we will be performing molecular and hard-parts analysis of scat samples collected in the Neah Bay area. Scat is a great, non-invasive way to study the diet of predators, especially since feeding habits are hard to study in marine environments! Scat analysis will allow us to determine the species of salmon consumed by the predators, as well as the general age of fish consumed. We can also use molecular analysis to investigate differences between male and female predators, to see if their diets differ based on sex.
Adrianne Akmajian, the Marine Ecologist for the Makah tribe, and I were hoping that I would be able to visit Neah Bay over the summer. Unfortunately, COVID-19 got in the way of a physical visit. Regardless, Adrianne and her team are getting ready to collect scat samples from haul-out sites of both harbor seals and Steller sea lions. On the WWU side, I am hoping to receive Steller Sea lion scat samples of known sex, so that I can validate our sex-determining methods. I plan to be in lab with Dietmar Schwarz, my other advisor, in the next week or so to practice my molecular skills and get ready for samples to come my way.
Remote classes are new for me, but I’m getting used to the daily zoom meetings. I’m very thankful to be enjoying the sun during the breaks in my schedule, while it lasts!
Grace's Blog
Grace Freeman, graduate student
1 October 2020
Somehow September has come and gone but left behind return to routine. We started classes last week and TAing began as well with labs starting yesterday. I am once again teaching Bio 349 (Human Physiology), but I am in a wildly different position from where I was last year. Despite being entirely remote, I feel much more confident in my abilities with both the material and the technology. The format is hardly ideal for a human-based course, but I’m looking forward to making the best out of it for my students. For my own course work, I’m taking a class in the ESci department called Fisheries Science. It’s technically an undergraduate course, but because there is a small cohort of grad students in the class, the professor has been very proactive about adapting and meeting our needs. Specifically, she plans to offer us each the opportunity to act as a guest lecturer at some point in the quarter to discuss our own research and how it relates to and aspect fisheries science. I’m really excited to have the chance to present my work in a new context and receive feedback from an audience outside of the bio department. Because conferences are still on hold for the time being, I’m looking for any occasion to practice my science communication!
While I spend a lot of time in front of a screen, I have found field observations a welcome break from Zoom. Due to the remote nature of this quarter, my team of 15 students I hired in the spring has been whittled down. That said, several who are not in Bellingham have been enthusiastic about what little remote work I can offer them and have been extremely helpful in making progress during this time of standstill. The students who are in Bellingham began trainings last night with our first observation of the season! At these observations, I meet with small groups of students at the creek to go over the procedure, any changes we’ve made from past years, and the new Covid-related safety protocols. It’s a lot of information and many administrative steps they need to go through each day for Covid clearance, but my students have been total rockstars! I feel fortunate to be surrounded by young scientists who are eager to learn and willing to put in the work. It’s a relief to know that the research doesn’t have to stop because circumstances have changed.
September also brought with it some strange and exciting developments at the stream. The short version is that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is hoping to test a hazing device that would emit a sound to scare the seals off and keep them from preying on hatchery salmon during the run. As you might imagine, this could greatly affect my data on the appearance and behavior of seals within the stream, but it also offers a unique opportunity to study the longer-term effects of hazing devices since we have such a robust database of pre-hazing conditions near the hatchery. I’ve been able to share some of my findings with DFW and their partners, and the team has been extremely open to working with us to affect my field season as little as possible. I’m excited to see how the two projects can work together and what exactly the results will be.
I’m sure I’ll have more to tell on that project next month
Until then,
Grace
Bobbie's Blog
Bobbie Buzzell, graduate student
1 October 2020
Fall quarter is in full swing and summer is over. Reflecting back on the past few months, I’ve really appreciated being able to devote time to my thesis and focusing on the invertebrate identification (thank you to the North Pacific Coast Marine Resource Committee for that!). I spent many hours at the microscope, sorting through the intricate and delicate puzzle pieces of each crab and crayfish. I became very familiar with even the most ambiguous of fragments, from texture to color and even the placement of setae (hair-like protrusions). I learned that even the most minute details could mean the difference between two different genera of crabs. While the identification process could be tedious, it was certainly one of the most enjoyable aspects of my thesis (besides the field work of course). With the identification complete, I have now begun to analyze and look more closely at what was actually found and the potential reasons why.
I don’t want to say the fun part is over, but rather I’m entering the next chapter of my thesis where I can really scrutinize what was found. In my last blog, I talked about how I’ve begun this process and I spent a decent amount of time this last month working in the computer program “R” and playing around with data. Unfortunately, I will only be able to include spring fish results in my thesis, which left me in a little bit of a muddle on how to properly draw conclusions on overall river otter diet. After meeting with my thesis committee last week, it occurred to me that I’m definitely overthinking how I should progress with my results. It’s during these times we must remember Occam’s razor-keep it simple stupid. At this point, I’m moving forward with what I can draw conclusions on, and that is mainly the invertebrate results.
Writing will be the main goal of fall quarter. I’ll be trying to complete a final draft of my thesis introduction and methods and begin my results and discussion sections. Although I feel comfortable at my current stage, I know the next couple months will fly by so it’s of the upmost importance to stay vigilant and at pace with what I’ve accomplished this past year.
Nathan's Blog
Nathan Guilford, graduate student
1 October 2020
This month as I have settled into my new job, I have continued to edit my thesis with my advisors and examine the results of my project. From my data, it appears that directly sequencing scat samples is a reliable method for identifying individual seals, and it should be a robust way to monitor resampling events and prevent false positive resampling events from samples between close relatives. In terms of diet analysis, however, the results are a little more complex. All in all, the sequencing results indicate a wide range of species present in the samples, however, hard parts analyses and metabarcoding studies have shown that usually, only a few prey species are present in a scat sample. I believe that the issue is when binning all the reads to various prey reference genomes, some reads may be from regions with little phylogenetic signal, and therefore, they map to the ‘best-fit’ even if it is not accurate. It would be nice to have a feeding trial in conjunction to this project; however we did not have the time/funds for this, and future work on this aspect would be very interesting. Regardless, it looks like non-invasively collected scat samples should perform well in direct sequencing for individual identification through SNP genotyping, removing the need for any PCR-based methods! I am looking forward to continuing the revision process with my committee this month and I am hoping to defend this Winter!
Jonathan's Blog
Jonathan Blubaugh, graduate student
2 October 2020
September has been a month of just working on my thesis. I haven’t had anything else going on except that and there has been good progress. I am about to send out my second full draft (much improved from the last one) to my committee and hope to have a third version out by the end of October. My goal is to defend in November to meet the deadline for Fall graduation but I’ll have to see how it goes.