IMW hard work

IMW stands for Intense Management of Watersheds. NOAA is collecting data on several watersheds in the area, basically comparing a restored watershed to unaltered. W. Twin, E.Twin and Deep creek are the ones I have been involved with. In the summer NOAA along with help from LEKT electroshock the watersheds and PIT tag coho and trout, they have been doing this for 4 years now and have almost 10,o00 fish tagged.

Today I went along with Ray (LEKT) and Todd (NOAA) to E. Twin River and helped to recover and reset up the antennae that are placed in the water to read the PIT tags. A storm earlier this winter rerouted the river and deposited over 4 feet of gravel, rocks and sand on top of the antennae. Most of the day was spent digging this water soaked substrate. My arm and wrists will never be the same. The sediment is very heavy and the digging was slow going. We managed to get one out and the second one almost out. Two others had been recovered the day before and those were reset back in the river. It is important to me that these antennae get up and going because they also are going to read my PIT tags in the 33 lamprey that Larry and I released in E. Twin this summer. The information I hope will tell us when the lamprey are moving in and out of the river system. I am tired but it is a good tired!

Elwha Nearshore

For the past couple of weeks Daniel and I have been working on our poster that we are going to present at the Puget Sound conference. The poster is based on a paper that Anne Shaffer from WDFW is writing and will be published in Hydrobiologia. We have been going over data and I am finding out how important it is to be meticulous in one's recording in the field as well as entering into a spreadsheet. One mistake can change the outcome of your results which could mean coming to the wrong conclusion. Our prof has been a big help with running the stats and I couldn't do it without him "holding my hand"!

I also have assisted Matt with the Lower Elwha tribe on analyzing data from my first REU project. That project involved collecting benthic, terrestial insects in the estuaries of the Elwha River. We also are looking at stomach contents of juvenile salmonids that we caught in the estuaries. We were wondering what macroinvertebrates are in the estuaries and what do the fish choose to eat? So far the data is pointing to the diet preference of the juvenile salmonids is insects from the dipteria order which are 2 winged insects.