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.