Ella- WEEK THREE- trying on new projects

As I grow more accustomed to the Hatfield community, I have started finding ways to get involved in the research projects of the other interns and graduate students. As I mentioned the first week, I was able to collect mud shrimp with Natalie Coleman, fellow COSEE intern, and will be accompanying her again soon for more data collection and GPS tracking experience. 

After a good day’s work mucking about with shrimp. I am second from the right, Natalie is far left.

I have also connected with Mo Bancroft, a grad student studying hypoxia and its effects on juvenile Dungeness crab and English sole. As his lab is just down the hall from ours, a few interns and myself have now made it a routine to stop by at the end of the day to hand feed frozen krill to his young dungees every evening. Mo's lab is set up to expose the  juvenile Dungeness crab and English sole to varying temperatures and dissolved oxygen levels. This includes many fish tanks and small floating cups for the crab.

As it is around supper time, I find it hard to resist sharing a bite of krill.

It is refreshing to be able to experience Mo’s lab, as it gives a tangible picture of the sole which we have so far been seeing only as scientific names or frozen on a Petri dish in the lab. It is also rewarding to see his project, as it parallels Dr. Waldo’s work in that it involves juvenile sole behavior. As mentioned in my previous blog post, one of the focuses of studies done with our data set is the effect of hypoxia on flatfish. This focus resulted in a paper on juvenile flatfish behavior which was co-authored by Dr. Waldo and  Lorenzo Ciannelli, Mo’s adviser for his graduate work at OSU.  

Floating crab cups and a juvenile English Sole
coming to the surface to say hey