huangt3's Journal

This is the last Saturday I'm spending here on the island. I can't believe this quarter went by so fast!

Today was a typical Saturday where I sat down and did my homework. I have a lot work to turn in by next week! At about 12:20 I went down to the dining hall to eat lunch. After lunch a bunch of us went to go tie dye our Friday Harbor T-shirts that Jessica made for us. Aiyanna and I traded shirts so I would tie dye hers and she would do mine. I hope they turn out amazing!

After our tie dying fun, we went to the commons to start working on our assignments again. after about an hour, I went down to the dining hall to get some tea and on my way back I saw three black-tailed deer. There were two fawns and one mama deer. They were adorable! The fawns were just starting to grow their antlers. They stayed up on the grassy area out in front of the dorms for about an hour. They were eating grass and walking around. One of the fawns decided to lay down right under dorm B.

I will miss the deer when I go back to Bellevue. The deer there usually end up as road kill. :( I will definitely miss seeing them walk around, wild and free.

One of our ichthyology assignments was to clear and stain a fish. I chose the sculpin that I drew from our first lab assignment.

I started to clear the fish about 6 weeks ago, it wasn't until last week when I could see the bones in the fish. I started off by soaking the fish in water for about an hour. I then stuck the fish in a solution of hydrogen oxide, tripsin and sodium bromide. I changed the solution every day but the fish still wasn't turning clear enough to the point where I was able to see the bones. After about 4 weeks of trying to clear the fish, I decided to poke some holes into the skin of the sculpin to try to make the process faster. At the end of week 5, I was able to see the bones inside the fish!

After that I placed the fish in some red dye with KOH. Every 5 hours I would change the solution for that until the sculpin itself (the bone part) was dyed. The fins turned out very well, however the rest of the body is still a little purple so I'm hoping the dye will come off! But so far so good!

Night lighting was a fun experience. We basically took the extended light out of the shed on the docks and placed it in the water. There wasn't a lot of visibility, but we could still see pretty far down.

It took about 5 minutes for the sand lance to start appearing. They were adorable! They swam together, getting closer to the light then getting further away. I tried to catch the sand lance with a net, but they were a little tough to get. They're super fast! Some of them weren't as smart and swam right into my net. There were also a lot of shrimp! They were up on the pilings, some green ones, some translucent ones, and the normal striped ones.

After about 10 minutes of that we went to flip the tires. There were so many tiny decorator crabs on there and barnacles. I think during the night is the best time to go out and see what's lurking around in the water. During the day, there isn't as much variability in the organisms.

I wish we could have seen dog sharks or other cooler fish. It was still fun and I'd probably do it again. The luminescence in the water was pretty cool as well!

I woke up at 6:15 AM to go Jackson Beach seining this morning. The reason why we went seining was to hopefully catch some sand lance for Charlie and Nick's research project.

Once we arrived to the beach, we quickly unloaded all the material we needed and carried it to the beach. We uncoiled the net and rope and placed it into the row boat. Nick and Jessica rowed out into the water and started dropping the rope and net. Once the net deployment was completed, we started to pull the ropes in from each side. There were about 10 of us this morning so 5 on each side worked out perfectly. My hands were rubbed raw from tugging the rope in. The mixture of the cold air, cold water, and sand exfoliated my skin.

We seined twice, hoping to catch sand lance, but we didn't get any. We caught 3 sculpins, 2 tubesnouts, 4 spiny lumpsuckers, 2 helmet crabs, 3 northern kelp crabs, 2 pygmy rock crabs, and a nudibranch.

This was the last time the PEF kids were going out to seine for their project. Once we got everything cleaned off, recoiled, and back in the buckets, we carried them back to the car and loaded everything. We made it back to the labs before 9 AM. Just in time for breakfast! Today was was great, although we didn't catch anything, I was still happy to see all the different species of organisms at that time of day!

On November 6th, 2012, the ocean circulation class went with the marine biology class on a plankton towing field trip. Our goals were to collect zooplankton, phytoplankton, and data using the ctc. We observed the pelagic ecosystem.

The ctc data showed us the temperature, salinity, and phosphorescence (chlorophyll). The collect data using the ctc, the ctc was deployed down to 150m in two different locations (North and South of San Juan Channel).

We collected the zooplankton and phytoplankton at three different depths in two different sites. We used plankton net with a bigger mesh size at the deep and medium depth. That mainly collected the zooplankton and phytoplankton. We then used the small mesh sized net and dragged it around the bow of the boat and collected only phytoplankton.

At the surface of the water contained mostly phytoplankton due to the net size and the speed at which the towing was at.

It was a great experience and field trip.

Yesterday we went apple picking on Shaw Island. We left for the ferry at 11 am and got on the ferry at 11:35 am. It took us about 30 minutes to get there. We arrived around 12:20 pm. I learned that the apple orchard is owned by the University of Washington. It took us (20 students) about an hour and a half to pick most of the apples off the trees there. Many of us climbed trees to shake the apples off. We filled the back of the pick up truck to the rim. We had to wait until 4:10 to take the ferry back to Friday Harbor. While we were waiting we played apple baseball. We were pitched apples that were left on the ground and we would hit it as if we were playing baseball. It was so much fun! I'm glad it didn't rain that much.

Today, we will be making cider with the apples that we picked. I hope it's delicious! I originally thought we were just going to juice it, but Michelle told me cider making is a whole different process. It's basically gritty apple juice!

Ichthyology lab last week, we went on the Centennial and otter trawled. We went north and south of the San Juan Channel. The trawl was dragged in the water for about 10 minutes, but I'm not too sure how far it was dragged.

We caught a spotted ratfish, lots and lots of spot prawns, flatfishes, snailfish, walleye pollock, pacific tomcod, a nudibranch, a squid (but we couldn't keep it), seastars, kelp/algae, and poachers.

During the trip on the Centennial, we saw a stellar sea lion, dalls porpoises, and harbor seals!

I've gone bottom trawling before for my FISH 312 class, we caught a bunch of spotted ratfish, flatfishes, saw stellar sea lions, dalls porpoises and harbor seals in the Puget Sound near Ballard Locks. With bottom trawling we dragged up everything and was more destructive, but we got to see a lot of cool things that lived at the bottom.

In lab last week, we had to dissect salmon heads, boil it then glue the bones back together. I haven't started gluing yet, but I know I will have a tough time trying to put the pieces back together. My first thought was that the dissection part should be too hard, but boy was I wrong.

As I started to cut away at the skin, I wasn't aware that there were so much cartilage and tiny bones everywhere. I basically cut a hole through the right side of the skull so I knew I had to be super careful from then on. I successfully removed most of the skin and flesh. The next step was to take out the eye without cutting into any of the bones around it. The only time I've ever taken out an eye was during my rat dissection in the 12th grade. I was able to take out the right eye successfully! So proud of myself!

I boiled what was left of the head for about 4 minutes, then brought it back to my desk and cleaned off the rest of the bones. I organized it by sides so when it was time for me to glue the pieces back, it would be a little easier. I tried the keep the bigger pieces together, but the bones were so fragile. They are now sitting sitting on my desk in the lab waiting for me to glue them back together. I am looking forward to this challenge and I hope I can do it well!

I thought identifying crabs using a dichotomous key would be easy, but I was wrong. The details Lauren and I had to pay attention to was difficult to tell on different species of crabs. The first time we started taking pictures of the crabs we caught for our MERE project, we thought there were only 3 species. We were so focused on using the dichotomous key to figure out which crabs were what we forgot to look at the carapace shape and claw shape and what not

A couple days later, Kevin gave us a crab identification 101 session. We learned that Hemigrapsus nudus has purple spots on the claw, Pugettia gracilis has a pinched carapace, Pugettia richii has spines on the carapace and so much more.

We had a total of 8 different species and we didn't know it! I'm glad we actually got a chance to go through each crab species and see the actual differences rather than going off of the dichotomous key. I am now a professional crab identifier (sort of)!

All in all, the MERE project is going well. I am happy with our process and I am loving all the things I am learning about crabs that I didn't know before!

As part of our MERE project Lauren and I had to prepare crab pots. Our research is on the dentition of crab claws. We need to catch different species of crabs at different ages.

What we did to prepare the pots was that we put 2 drumsticks into each pot, zip tied the sides of the cages in case if the crabs escape and loaded everything up into the Coot.

Kevin then drove us to Brown island where we deployed them to the bottom of the Puget Sound. Once they touched the bottom, we threw in another 2 feet of rope and tied the rest up and threw in the buoy as well. We will check up on them 24 hours later.

We went to check up on the pots the next day and guess what, there were at least 5 Dungeness Crabs in each pot. We were so excited to have caught something! Once we hauled up all the pots, we then headed back to the dock. We wanted to catch another species, so we set the crab pots up and lowered them under the dock hoping to catch some Red Rock Crabs.

I've never gone crabbing before so this was a great experience for me!