Puerto Rico, Day 2

Sunday was a lot of fun.  We started the day early, with breakfast beginning at 7am.  Ick.  By 8:20 we were loaded onto the vans for the one hour drive to the park.  Once there we split into two groups and went on tours of the park.  This is a really cool tree that was at the entrance.

First we headed out to mangrove forests.  On the way our guide showed us some really cool nest things in the trees.  It turns out they were termite mounds.

After driving for about 5-10 minutes we stopped at a little bus stop type area.  There was a wooden path leading off to either side and the guide led us down one way.  This was the mangrove forest, where we saw Black, Red, and Buttonwood mangrove trees.  I don’t have pics of all the trees, just the Buttonwood, but I do have some of the roots.  Mangrove forests are also important nursery habitats for many fish and other animals.  Because they live in such salty environments they have to get rid of the salt somehow.  Black mangroves excrete it out of their leaves and Red mangroves out of nodules on their roots.  Buttonwood mangroves actually don’t need high salinity environments.

Black mangrove roots, used to get oxygen

Black mangrove leaves taste weird

Red mangrove roots

Buttonwood mangrove

Baby fishes

 

After the mangroves we drove around some more.  We got some great views of the island.  This is a beautiful place.  Puerto Rico is actually 100 miles long, which was bigger than I thought.  I was surprised, but I guess I was thinking it was close to Hawaii size, and those islands are tiny.  After a while we stopped at a beach fro 10 minutes or so, just to see.  While there we saw two green iguanas, one in a tree and one on the ground.  The green iguanas are non-native and a pest on the islands.  It was pretty funny because the one on the ground ran in front of us, and we all took pictures.  Then it moved near some bushes and people got a little closer, taking more pictures.  Then all of a sudden it turned around and ran straight at us, then veered off into the trees on the other side of the beach.  A few shrieks were let out when it started coming at us.  Those things are big.  But no harm done.

Every so often he stopped and put his head up like this. Probably some kind of warning.

Brain coral skeleton washed up on the beach

After the beach we once again got into the trolley tour bus thing and headed off to a light house, where we explored for a bit, met up with the other half of the group, and had lunch.  for your enjoyment I shall post more pics of the island before talking about snorkeling.

A manatee skeleton inside

The lighthouse

An anemone in an aquarium inside

Sadly, I have no pictures from snorkeling as I do not own an underwater camera.  But I shall do my best to tell you about it.  We went to this little beach with lots of rocks to snorkel from.  The swim out to the reef that rings a lot of the island was intense.  It was very long and went over lots of seagrass beds.  Sometimes the water got really shallow and you had to almost pull yourself carefully along with your hands because if you kicked your legs you’d wack your knees on coral pieces in the grass.  There were big black urchins with white spines too.  Finally we made it over the seagrass beds to the reef.  It was SO cool!  I love corals, and it was great to see them so close.  There were brown, yellow, and purple corals all over.  Red and black urchins were hiding in the holes and crevices of the reef.  Lots of little wrasses, damselfish and other reef fish were there too.  I even found a scorpionfish!  They are pretty poisonous so we were careful not to touch it but it was so cool to see it chilling out on the coral, just blending in.  When I get the pic from Leah I will post it, because she took one since she has an underwater camera.

So we basically swam around for a while until the program director said we had to go.  There are 70 people in our group so naturally we left late and got back to the hotel late where we showered really fast, or some didn’t shower at all, before heading off to meet the mentors brought in by ASLOMP.

Stay tuned.

Puerto Rico, Day 1

So getting here was an adventure in itself.  My last class on Friday, (Feb 11th) ended at 4pm.  Then I drove the hour and a half to get home to Beaverton, which actually took a little over two hours because traffic was INSANE!  At home it was eat a piece of pizza, transfer some things to my backpack, and head out.  I actually forgot my poster, which I am presenting, in the kitchen, so we had to turn around and go back.  Luckily we were only about a mile from the house when I remembered.

 

Once at the airport I checked in and just zipped through security.  I have never seen the airport so dead.  Yeah, it was evening but it was only 7:30 and I saw about 10 people total.  My first flight was to Seattle.  We left from a weird little terminal that was actually under the main floor, and the plane was teeny tiny.  I think it had room for 30 people.  And it didn’t have jet engines, it had big propellers.  After a nauseating hour ride we got to Seattle, where I left that plane and got right onto another.  That was a 3-4 hour flight to DC.  I managed to sleep a bit but it wasn’t very good sleep.  We got to DC early, making my hour layover there into 1 hour and 40 minutes.  Then I boarded my final flight, thankfully, and headed off to San Juan.

After a relatively uneventful flight we arrived in San Juan at 1pm, local time.  We are four hours ahead of you folks back home on the West Coast.  Happily on my way down to baggage claim I ran into the girl I’m rooming with, who also did an internship at the same place I did this past summer.  We got our bags, met two more people who were going to the conference (it’s easy to tell someone is going to a conference when they are walking around the airport with a poster tube), and took a taxi to the hotel.

Although I felt rather gross after the long flights, since we had time, we decided to go explore Old San Juan.  So a quick change and then a 40 minute wait for the bus and we were there.  We basically spent the next few hours exploring the city.  Lots of street vendors were selling various forms of food, and I was hungry.  It was the coolest thing when we found someone selling baked potatoes and you could put a bunch of stuff on them.  I had broccoli and other mixed veggies, butter, and ground beef on mine.  It was quite delicious.

Here are some of the pictures from the city:

There were flowers on the beach, we think for Valentine's Day

So, there are cats EVERYWHERE in Old San Juan. I mean, everywhere.

I don't know what this is, but it's awesome

El Morro castle

 

The HMS Bounty sitting in the harbor

 

The national frog, peering over a building

After our wanderings we came back, finally showered (woot woot!), registered and had dinner with the other ASLOMP students.  ASLOMP is the ASLO Multicultural Program, and they are the ones who paid for me to come here.  By the way, the conference I am attending is the ASLO conference, and ASLO stands for the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.

 

Peace!

Fish week

Alas, we had to say farewell to our invertebrates.  Now we have a new teacher and we are learning about fish for this week and next Monday and Tuesday.  The first day started out with lecture, as usual.  After lunch though, the real fun began.  Little did we know that the first day would start off with a bang as we got to dissect fishes!  Each pair had a rockfish and a flounder to dissect.  The rockfishes had already been sliced up and had no skin or muscles left, but the flounders were whole.  We started with the rockfish and cut it up, recording everything in our notebooks of course.

We had to cut the lens out of the eye and identify internal organs.  And then the real fun began because we had to cut through the head to find the otoliths.  Otoliths are little bony structures inside the head of the fish, like our ear bones, and they collect calcium carbonate as the fish grows, so you can use them to age the fish.  It took forever for us to find our fish’s otoliths but eventually we managed.  Those were for later.

Next we diced up the flounder.  They were English Sole and even though they didn’t have toxic spines like the rockfish they were a pain in the butt because they were so darn slippery and slimy!  They didn’t want to stay in one place so we could dissect them.  We couldn’t find the otoliths in that fish, but that isn’t surprising because they are very small in small fishes.

The next day started early, at 6:30.  It was supposed to start at 5:30 but unfortunately it seems that you need a special permit to collect vertebrates and our teacher’s is going to come in late.  Sadly this means we can’t even go to the tide pools and the places we went before and do catch and release because our prof would get in trouble.  Which is kind of lame.  We could go as “private citizens” and play with the fish all we want but we can’t go as a marine science class.     *Sigh*  Oh well.  Anyway, the day started at 6:30 and we went down to the beach to test out our beach seine net *wink*.  A seine net has a weighted line on the bottom and floats attached to the top.  The idea is to pull it through the water with the lead line on the sea floor and the floats at the top and herd fishes.

The tallest guy in our class took one end into the water so that it stretched from the shore into the bay.  Then he and the guy on the shore end walked parallel to herd some fishes. Then the guy in the water started to bring his end in, in a sort of loop so the fishes were herded and the net stayed vertical so no fishes could escape.  Eventually the net was pulled onto shore and we collected our little fish and put them in buckets so we could look at them before we released them again.

We caught several different species.  There was a Eulachon (a type of smelt), some greenlings, a little pipefish, some sculpins, and even a little baby Chum salmon.  We also caught a big sculpin, a Staghorn Sculpin.

The next day we didn’t get to go on our field trip, due to the aforementioned permit issues.  We did get another trip to the aquarium, which is always fun.  We drew some more fishes there.  On Friday there was a boat trip around Yaquina Bay but I didn’t go because sea sickness is not fun.  Ah well.

Monday was interesting because we had a little project where we worked with a group and proposed marine reserves along the Oregon coast.  Lots of groups chose places that have already been proposed in reality, and others picked totally new sites.  Our group focused on a particular fish species, the ling cod, as our specific fish of choice to protect, and other groups just did areas.  It was a lot of fun because when we weren’t presenting we all had roles.  Some people were scientists, others were fishermen, or environmentalists, etc.  I was the local community wacko.    It was fun.

Tuesday we had our tests, and that ended the fish section.. Next we do algae.  Let the adventures continue. 

The lab

This is just a short post to show some pictures of the lab and our little tide pools when we had a bunch of inverts.

Mussels and some hydrozoans

A chiton

Pikachu! Aka a sea lemon, which is a nudibranch

Crabs!

More sea lemons

Sun stars!

My anemone

Cascade Head

On Tuesday we finally got to hike to the top of Cascade Head.  This is a 300 mile long basalt floww that was put here 15 million years ago when a volcano erupted near Idaho.  Which is pretty cool.  The trail was muddy, of course, but it wasn’t too bad.  I’ve been on worse.  The weather cooperated as well, which was nice.  I like the stormy weather but hiking in rain and hail is not fun, so I was glad it did neither on us.

A bad angle of what we hiked up to

The trail was wooded for the most part, like much of the hiking in western Oregon. It eventually broke free of the trees when we got up higher.  There is a lot of wind on the side that faces the ocean, so tall trees can’t grow there.  There were a few short shrubs and one or two hardy evergreens in some protected areas, but it wasn’t forested.  Which was fine because it gave awesome views of the ocean and the river valley.  It really was quite a pretty sight.

Yes, that was a very fun day.  I even climbed most of the way to the very top, which was a heck of a lot steeper than the path up to where we stopped had been.  Apparently I need to work on my endurance.    After we took the customary group picture we headed back down to the vans and back to the science center, for showers and food.

Wednesday was our last day of classes, and the day of our presentations.  We all had to, singly or ingroups, present on our favorite invertebrates.  I have too many so my roome and I did Sea Pens, Ptilosarcus gurneyi.  We made little sea pens out of pens and my mom helped me make some of my sea star predators.  We had nudibranch predators as well.  It was very cute.    There was one sea pen and one predator per person.

Other people had other ideas too.  Lots of people had desserts in the shape of their critter.  One group raced their three crab species, one guy did a puppet show, one group did a little skit, etc.  It was a lot of fun, even if it did take almost four hours.

Today was just a free day, a day to study and review.  We have our final tomorrow and monday we start the fish section.  Wish me luck on my tests!

Mud flats and invasive crabs

Ok, so, it’s been a few days, I know.  But I return, to update once more.  On Friday, we went to the mud flats.  the day started out absolutely horrendously.  It was pouring, we had near hurricane force winds, there was some hail.  All in all, it was awesome.    The mission for the day was to collect mud shrimp, and hopefully some ghost shrimp, to put in our little tubs in the lab.  Since the weather was so bad our prof made it optional for us to go out.  I and a few others decided to brave the weather and go hunting the elusive shrimpys.

The Brave Explorers

Naturally as soon as we went out all the bad weather went away.   Sigh.  Ah well, we still had some fun wind gusts to deal with.  Luckily the mud sucked us in so we didn’t fall over!  We used our little probes and shovels to find the shrimp.  We looked for the holes in the sand that would tell us where they were.  The goal was to collect two species, Upogebia pugettensis, the mud shrimp, and Neotrypaea californiensis, the ghost shrimp.  Our hands got pretty muddy and at times the mud tried to suck us in!

Ok, I admit, I did try to find this deep patch of mud but it’s still pretty cool that mud flats are like this.  My leg is buried to the knee!  The mud also tried to claim my waders while i wiggled free, but I managed to prevail.  Mud shrimp weren’t the only things we found on the mud flats either:

Habitat

Yes, that is a giant tire.  At least I didn’t have to haul this one up from the ocean floor!  Woot woot.    Our mission for the day was successful as well, and we caught tons of shrimps of both species.

Monday we had a small field trip as well.  We had a guest speaker, Sylvia Yamada, who is a researcher at OSU.  Se came to talk to us about the European Green Crab and how it’s doing here in Oregon.  It seems it’s hanging on, barely.  After the trip we went to the little Hatfield dock and hauled up the crab traps our TA put there Sunday night.  We actually caught several crabs, including two green crabs (it must be a good year for them).

The roomie

Me with our friend Cancer magister, aka the Dungeness crab

That was fun too, even when we got hailed on.  The rest of the crabs we threw back, except for one a couple that we kept to join with their other invertebrate fellows in our aquarium.  Muahaha. 

Strawberry Hill

Thursday we went to Starwberry Hill to look for more inverts, of course.  Strawberry Hill is at Cape Perpetua (and I want to know why it has that name).  It was a pretty site, and very shallow so we weren’t in quite so much danger of getting attacked by waves. 

Where we were going for collections

We had to climb down and around this big rock outcropping to get to the rock benches (large flat outcroppings of rock) and the tide pools there.  We were also on the lookout for agates, since there are a bunch at tha beach I guess.  This time was pretty similar to the other collecting expedition at Boiler Bay.  The tide pools were bigger here though.  Another girl and I found a pretty cool annelid worm hiding in a mussel clump, and there were anemones everywhere.  We also found some tube worms, which was so cool!

The rocks were dominated by mussels and barnacles; I felt bad walking on them because it felt like I was killing them all. 

We found a couple new species we hadn’t collected yet, like the worm and some barnacles.  A couple boys also found this little tiny nudibranch (Rostanga) living on a sponge and the teacher was excited about that.  One guy accidentally fell into a tide pool.  I didn’t see it but apparently he was walking into it trying to get a little closer to some stuff, and it got really deep all of a sudden.  He literally vanished under the water, and he is over 6 feet tall!  Pretty funny.  He was a good sport about it.

So that was Strawberry Hill.  Also a nice place, especially because waves aren’t as much of an issue!

Boiler Bay

On Wednesday we went to Boiler Bay, again to collect invertebrates.  It’s a pretty cool place, though it was a little interesting because the swells were pretty big.  We basically wandered the tide pools looking for cool things and watched out for waves so we didn’t get knocked over.  It was a fairly hinky path to climb down too, with slippery rocks and mud and decently steep.  Luckily no one slipped.    There were some little tide pools and some that were bigger and deeper.  Apparently one year they actually found an octopus in one of those, but not this time.    Ah well.  We couldn’t get out to the place where they had some experiments set up because the waves were too big, but lots of cool stuff was found in the tide pools anyway.

Bekah with her little collecting cup

It was tons of fun.  I’d like to go back some day just to explore.  I’m sure I will.    We found lots of cool things.  There were several starfish collected as well as some anemones.  Somebody found a giant gumboot chiton which looks like a big red leathery pill bug.  A giant one.  I also found a sea lemon!  It’s an adorable nudibranch that looks kind of like Pikachu.    We had to leave eventually because the tide was coming in again and the swells were getting big.  Since nobody wanted to get soaked we decided it was probably time to leave.    Afterwards we took our treasures back to the lab to separate them out so we can study them later.

The docks and some puffins

Ok all, first adventure.  So on Tuesday we were supposed to hike up to Cascade Head, a big cliff area where you can see for miles around when it’s a good day.  However, due to poor weather we had to cancel as it would have been miserable to go up there is the rain and we didn’t want to get blown off the top by the gusting winds.    Never fear, however, we are planning to go next Tuesday, and in exchange we went to the Newport docks to collect some invertebrates for lab.  This ended up being lots of fun.  We basically wandered the docks checking the edges to see if any interesting critters were hiding, and then we collected what we found to look at in lab later.

The docks

Searching for creepers, crawlers, and swimmers.

Lots of algae was growing there, naturally, but there were also some pretty cool things.  There are hydrozoa, which look like algae but aren’t.  They have little critters called amphipods that live on them too, and it looks really weird when this thing that looks like a plant is waving at you as the amphipods move.  There were also mussles and sponges, and some anemones.  Several people found nudibranchs, which was neat, and one guy even caught a jellyfish!  This is my treasure trove here:

Nothing too exciting but it was fun all the same.  After a break to get warmed up and changed into clean clothes (lying/kneeling on wet docks to catch invertebrates can get your clothes kind of dirty) we headed off to the aquarium.  I can’t remember how long it has been since I’ve been to any aquarium, let alone this one, so it was cool that we got to go and just chill out.  They let us in for free too!  So my roomie and I wandered around and checked out all the awesome invertebrates, and drew some pictures for our lab notebooks.  Then we looked at the rest of the stuff just for fun, including the puffins:

Sea nettle. Very cool.

Mr. crab is trying to do a headstand.

Fun times.

A new adventure begins

Well, a new adventure begins, and the blog is back.  For the next 10 weeks I will be living out at the coast, in Newport, at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, a research station belonging to OSU.  The 10 week class is actually 5 classes broken up into 1-2 weeks per class, and classes are all day.  We’ll have lots of field trips and lab time, so I figured I’d start this thing up again so you all could see the adventures I’ll be having out here.  I’m going to try to put pictures directly into the posts from now on too.

So, to get right on it, here is where I will be living for the next few months:

This is the Visitor's Center at Hatfield

My bedroom. There is another bunkbed on the side of thr room you can't see.

Weirdest bathroom setup ever. That's the toilet in the room in the back, there's the sink, and the shower is behind that blue curtain in a little alcove.

Our study areas.

Little tiny kitchen.

The basic living area

All in all it’s pretty good, especially for the cost of rent.  I have one roommate, which is nice because even though these rooms are meant for four people, it would be really cramped if there were that many here.  Hot water all the time, which is a nice change from Ecuador.    And it’s pretty much going to be fairly comfy out here.  We more or less have free reign of the center with access to the education building, the library, and we can get to the visitor’s center from the ed. building.  The visitor’s center is pretty cool if any of you ever meander this way.  Be sure to stop and see it.  It has lots of cool things like this:

Elephant Sea skeleton

So yeah.  It’s pretty neat.  Anyways, we’ll be having lots of field trips and lab time, like I said, and I’ll post my adventures here.  Enjoy!