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.

Qiet time

Since my last blog it has been a quiet time for as far as REU goes. On a day I couldn't go Olympic National Park employees, Lower Elwha Klallam employees and other volunteers rescued over 5,000 fresh water mussels from the diversion channel that was dewatered. This is more than double the amount of mussels the from the first go around. I am hoping over winter break to get my lamprey data into a spreadsheet so I can do some preliminary analysis to come up with a more viable way to capture adult lamprey. I also am going to contact the NOAA people who monitor the PIT tag readers to see if any of the juvenile lamprey I put a PIT tag into have moved out of the East Twin River.

Another project that is going on down at the Lower Elwha is an elk survey and I have been invited to go along whenever my schedule allows. I initially got involved in REU to work with mammals so I can't wait for winter break because this is the chance I have been waiting for.

Mussel/Fish rescue on the Elwha

Rescue operations for fresh water mussels and fish is still a main priority at the Natural Resource Dept. at the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. This past week along with volunteers, hatchery employees and other REU students I helped to rescued chinook, coho, trout, sculpins and mussels from a section of a diversion channel being dewatered as part of the construction of the new water treatment plant for the City of Port Angeles in preparation for the removal of the dams on the Elwha River.

Mussel rescue

Last week I got to assist Larry Ward of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe with the second leg of rescuing mussels from the Elwha River. The mussels were rescued by Larry and several others from Olympic National Park due to the current construction going on in the Elwha for of the new water treatment plant for the City of Port Angeles. After the mussels were removed from the river they were brought back to the Tribal Hatchery where they were kept in raceways. Last week with help from my fellow REU'er Mel and USGS we dug out the some 6,000 plus mussels from pea gravel in the raceway, counted them, measured some of them and tagged 45 of the mussels with PIT tags. We then brought them to several different sidechannels of the Elwha (below the construction) and released them. It will be interesting to see where and how fast these tagged mussels will move. The PIT tags were super glued to the outside of the shell so hopfully they don't get rubbed off. It was amazing to see how 'happy' the mussels were minutes from being put back into the river. They were sticking out their foot and imbedding into the sediment.

Lamprey's on the Peninsula

I was lucky enough to spend the day with two scientists from California that are working on putting together a Key to Lamprey on the Olympic Peninsula. I took them to Deep Creek, East Twin, West Twin Rivers where Larry and I have had so much luck in finding macrophalmia, the transformed stage of lamprey that are about 5 years old and the size of a pencil. These macrophalmia are leaving the fresh water systems and going out to the ocean where they will be a parasite on a fish for about 2 years (no on is really sure about the time they spend out to sea). Of course we didn't have the success today finding them that we have had in the past couple of weeks. We were able to capture only a small fraction of what we have caught in the previous 2 weeks. We were going off of two main reasons for this: 1) they have moved out to sea and we were too late 2) the stream flows were up because of recent rains, or maybe it is a combination of the two. Because there isn't much known about the movement of these little guys we can't be sure about why we were so unsuccessful. The more time I spend learning about these lamprey the more questions I have.

The other awesome thing that happened today was that we got to experience a thunder and lightning storm out at Deep Creek! Thunder storms are one of the things I miss about the East Coast and this was the first storm I have witnessed this year. It was totally exciting :)

summer REU

I have been really bad and forgot to blog all summer so I am going to give a condensed version of what I did.

Most of my summer was spent trying to capture the elusive Pacific Lamprey! My mentor was Larry Ward from the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and our first order of business was to try to capture as many adult lamprey as we could that were at the Tribe's smolt traps. We are not sure why but the adult spawning lamprey love to hang out under the tarps that are laid down in the streams for the smolt traps. We were successful with only a few getting away. This is impressive considering that we were chasing them in the stream with big nets! With some help from Mary Moser we were able to PIT tag these adults to track their movement within the system. Doing the surgical implantation of these tags out in the field was a major highlight!

Over the course of a few weeks I also got to participate in the fish rescue that was spear headed by Elwha biologist Ray Moses. The fish rescue was just that, we were rescuing all the fish we could including federally listed species from the big pools that were created due to the rerouting of the Elwha River. The rerouting of the river is part of the future Elwha dam removal. The construction that was under way was part of constructing the future Port Angeles water treatment plant. We saved thousands of listed species as well as countless sculpins and fresh water clams. For me this was very rewarding because saving these species is helping to preserve the genetic diversity of critical species like the bull trout for future generations.

not much going on

It's been a while since I blogged but I had the chance to attend a one day conference on Lamprey's and about the project that I am going to be spending bulk of my summer on and the upcoming school year. There are 2 major species of Lamprey's in the Pacific Northwest and with the second half of the day spent on correctly identifying the 2 most abundant species it was a great learning experience. The 2 biologists that ran the conference were from California and they are developing a field guide for Lampreys in the Pacific Northwest. Not a whole lot is known about the lamprey which makes it more exciting to know that I will be part of the project this summer that finds out about the mysterious lamprey.