Live from the Field: Field Research Impacts on Society

On May 13th, the Organization for Biological Field Stations and the Center for Environmental Inquiry at Sonoma State University presented Live from the Field: Impacts of Field Research on Society. The event was moderated by Tosha Comendant, Conservation Science Manager with Pepperwood Preserve. Featured researchers came from across the country:

• Phoebe Jekielek, Director of Research, Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership

• Carlos Diaz, Principal Engineer, Sonoma Water

• Thibaut Houette, PhD student in Biomimicry, Integrated Bioscience, University of Akron Field Station

• Lisa Micheli, President and CEO, Pepperwood Preserve

• Elena Stachew, PhD Student in Integrated Bioscience and Biomimicry Fellow, University of Akron Field Station

A recording of the event is now posted. Here is an Instructor's Guide for Live from the Field events, as well as a document with Event Resources that includes publications on the research discussed.

These Live from the Field events are a great opportunity for educators to engage their students with work being done on Field Stations around the world. We invite you to share these opportunities with colleagues. We also encourage you to view recordings of past events, which can be found on TheVirtualField.org.

There were many insightful questions answered during the conversation. Below are the researchers' responses to those that did not get answered live:

Q 1: Partnerships like Pepperwood and Sonoma Water are great! I wonder if there are also any challenges collaborating across organizations.

Lisa Micheli: The challenge is to take the time to understand each agency's mandate and how they relate to each other.

Elena Stachew: I will say in my case, I work across academia and three partner organizations for my PhD - one in government / public sector, one NGO / nonprofit tech accelerator, and one private industry / consulting firm. It is definitely challenging as each organization has different priorities and timelines, but consistent communication across all parties helps and revisiting of the goals / timelines and what makes sense, what is achievable, and what is most impactful to our goal of restoring ecosystems.

Q 2: How can a biologist get more involved in biomimicry research?

Thibaut Houette: It really depends on the knowledge/expertise of the biologist. Biologists are very beneficial for biomimicry research since such research heavily relies on their knowledge and understanding of the studied biological mechanism. A biologist with an idea about a specific biomimicry research topic of interest can reach out to practitioners on the technological side of this topic. Some practitioners are also known as performing biomimicry research and may be more accessible/eager to collaborate on such research.

Elena Stachew: Specifically, a biologist can create a profile on AskNature via The Biomimicry Institute - https://asknature.org/ - and aid in the collections of biological research papers, main strategies, and mechanisms of different organisms. You may find ways to collaborate with other users on the site! Universities to follow of course are our own University of Akron Biomimicry Research and Innovation Center, Georgia Tech's Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and Arizona State University's Biomimicry Center - to name just a few. But don't just look up "biomimicry", also look up "bioinspired", "bio-inspired", or "biomimetic." For example, ASU also has a fascinating Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics. There are a lot of opportunities to obtain a masters, PhD, or just work in research in this topic - it just may not have the name "biomimicry" in the title, or there may not be a specific "biomimicry" program. The research may live in Biology, Geology, Engineering, Architecture, etc. so your advanced degree may come out of a different department. But starting with a biology background and fundamental basis helps greatly to apply to other technical areas - that's the potential of biomimicry! It can be applied in many different areas, even considering political science, organizational dynamics and business, etc.

Q 3: Phoebe, how can managers potentially use your research to inform aquaculture or fisheries management?

Phoebe Jekielek: Great question!! Well, scallop aquaculture is an emerging industry here in Maine that is developing alongside an established, well-managed, and lucrative wild scallop industry. There is a need to understand how these wild and aquaculture populations may interact, how farms may be playing a role of enhancement by increasing larval supply to wild populations, and how the developing scallop aquaculture market may influence existing wild markets. These are all topics we are currently researching ourselves or collaborating with others to address. Specifically, if farms are enhancing larval supply, what does this mean for our rotational management structure for the wild scallop industry... will areas with more farms have larger wild populations that replenish more quickly, can we identify where larvae might go?? These are questions that would be applicable to management.

Q 4: How can a regular member of the public tell if there will be a flood using One Rain?

Lisa Micheli: I believe the water agency will use the One Rain data to inform public flood warnings.

Q 5: Can you give a few specific examples of biomimicry that some of us in the audience may recognize? Products or services that were developed through inspiration by nature?

Thibaut Houette: At the component scale, one of the most famous examples is the Velcro inspired by the burdock plant. The tip of eagles' wing has also served as an inspiration for the design of the tip of airplane wings and the edge of whales' fins for wind turbines. At a building scale, the ventilation system of the Eastgate center in Zimbabwe was directly inspired by the air flow in termite mounds. At the ecosystem scale, urban planners seek to design built environments that mimic and/or provide similar ecosystem services as the natural environment.

Elena Stachew: (1) Humpback whale inspired wind turbine, (2) Plant inspired solar cells, (3) Japanese bullet train nose design, (4) Morpho butterfly wing structure and sensor technology, (5) Underwater vegetation inspired wave energy capture device

Q 6: Can you walk us through in more detail how the tree root structure work could become a citizen science effort?

Thibaut Houette: Pictures of root systems could be taken by anybody around the world with their own imaging device (phone, camera, drone, etc.). The person taking the pictures would follow a quick guide to optimize the quality of the pictures. These pictures could then be uploaded to an online database. Our team would then import such pictures to a photogrammetry software to generate 3D models of the root systems. These models would then be shared with the person who uploaded the pictures. The models will also be analyzed by our team to extract biological root traits. Gathering such root traits with a consistent method from a variety of tree species adapted to a wide range of environments from all around the globe would greatly advance our understanding of root adaptation to different environmental conditions.

Elena Stachew: This is why we are testing different camera types - DSLR camera versus smartphone camera types versus a drone - to see how much and why the quality changes. We are also testing simple marking techniques to enhance the root system in the photos, especially if you are in a very thick forest and the lighting is dim. We aren't expecting citizen scientists to bring their own backlighting or controlled background backdrops like professional photographers! When trees naturally fall from high wind or storms and they fall on their side, the exposed rootwad could be cleaned and imaged, and the final reconstructed 3D model from the images could be used to determine the exact breakage point along the root system, which is important for gaining a better understanding of root biomechanics and failure mechanisms, which ultimately helps foresters better manage forests and plant trees in the right environment. There is a lot of potential with this technique!

Q 7: How has COVID impacted your research?
Thibaut Houette: COVID has delayed some of our research since specific work environments/tools/employees became inaccessible. In-person collaborative work was further delayed since social distancing was necessary. Field work was less affected since it was possible to keep our distances while working in the same environment. Our photogrammetry technique is composed of many steps, so multiple people could perform different steps at the same time.
Phoebe Jekielek: Interestingly, we were just as busy, if not more busy, during the time of COVID. Because most of our work is done in the field, outside, on boats we were able to continue much of our existing research safely. We had limited staff, but we max out at 5 staff in any given year anyway. We were also able to help other organizations without as much flexibility to conduct their research and collect data. The challenges were there, but the nature of our work allows us to keep forging ahead.
Lisa Micheli: COVID prevented us from hosting visiting scholars in 2020 and limited our research to that related to essential functions (ag, fire, water) that could be done by staff working in solitary formats.
Elena Stachew: COVID delayed access to labs on our campus for about 3 months, then social distancing procedures made it so we had to split days in the lab with different folks for a while. So some of the steps of our project took longer due to this limited access. We moved a lot of our computer work to our homes, which took time to get set up as well. Collaboration and communication was delayed as well for a time as people got situated at home and to the new normal. Field work stayed consistent as Thibaut mentioned - we actually conducted all our field work and imaging last summer from May through October during pandemic year 2020.

Q 8: Phoebe you told us about working with fisherman, what other kinds of jobs did you have outside of academia before pursuing your PhD?
Phoebe Jekielek: The long and winding road :) I'm very lucky and have been able to explore many different interests. I have been a divemaster, an outdoor educator in Boston Harbor, a marine science instructor on another island, an aquarist, a lifeguard, a fisheries observer, a harbor master, a research assistant, a communications associate, a marketing director, and a program director. I started pursuing my Masters degree at 29 and my PhD at 39, so I've done a lot in between. The constant connection was the ocean. I can truly say that I use skills I learned in each of these positions every day and am so grateful to have had each one.

Below is the recording of the entire event to the left, and of Phoebe’s segment to the right.

Have you ever sorted a spat bag on Hurricane Island?

Written by Hallie Arno, former aquaculture research intern and current student at College of the Atlantic.

The life cycle of a scallop. Scallops float into the bags as larvae, around 30 days after spawning. They then settle on the blue mesh in the bags to become juveniles. Image from Stewart and Arnold 1994.

Spat bags are the names of the green mesh bags we put in the ocean every fall to collect young scallops, called spat. When scallops are in their larval stage, they are free-floating through the water. When they find a suitable settlement habitat, they settle and metamorphose into the familiar form we know. The spat bags are filled with a rigid blue mesh, which mimics a habitat for larval scallops to land, or settle. They then grow in the bags and can’t escape the outer fine green mesh. 

What the spat bags look like before we put them in the water last fall. We mark the buoy with our phone number in case it gets lost over the winter.

We retrieve the spat bags in the spring, usually in April and May. We just finished retrieving 12 of our spat bags that we deployed in Fall 2020 - we got back 11 of them and are gearing up to start sorting them! With the help of students and visitors we spend the summer counting how many scallops have settled in each bag and the other kinds of organisms we find along with the scallops. This involves sorting out the tiny 0.5-2 centimeter scallops from everything else in the spat bags, such as mussels, nudibranchs, and tunicates, which can be a time-consuming process. Luckily, there are often students and island visitors to help! We then count the number of scallops and record the presence and absence of other species. 

We can use this data to estimate the number of larval scallops in the water column. Since many of the spat bags were in the same place every year, we can compare changes between years. We can also compare between different locations. For example, the Lower Muscle Ridge area has been closed to fishing since 2013 as part of the Midcoast Maine Collaborative Scallop Project, so we might expect to see more spat in that area that is closed than the area that is fished. Learn more about the MMCSP here. The goal of a closure zone is to be a larval source for not only the closed area, but areas open to fishing nearby; a higher population of adult scallops in a small area could provide larvae for a much larger area and benefit both fishing and conservation goals. The Hurricane Island Research Team has been investigating the effect of the Muscle Ridge closure on spat in the area since 2013. 

Here is a graph of the average number of scallops seen per bag annually, in the closure zone, north of the closure zone, and south of the closure zone:

We monitor changes in spat availability in the area from year to year by deploying spat bags inside the closure zone as well as directly north of the closure and directly south of it. This site is about a 45-minute boat ride from Hurricane Island.

Spat bags in Muscle Ridge have been at similar sites inside and outside of the closure every year since 2013, so it is a good place to compare year to year.

The first year of data collection occurred in 2014 and spat was counted from bags that were deployed in 2013, before the area was closed to fishing. This could explain why we see such a low count of spat compared to other years. After the lower Muscle Ridge closed to fishing in 2013, spat abundance increased in both the closure and around it, suggesting that the closure could be contributing to an increased larval supply throughout the entire area. However, after a few years, spat was lower. This could be part of a natural cycle, or there could be other factors at play. Spat can travel 300-600 kilometers over 40-60 days, so spat in the Muscle Ridge area could be influenced by spat beyond Nova Scotia or Cape Cod. Local current patterns could carry spat from Mussel Ridge all over the Gulf of Maine, and spat from other areas could end up settling in this area. 

One way to tell if the scallop population on Muscle Ridge is enhancing the overall larvae supply in the local area would be to have a dive survey to assess the adult population, or plankton tows in the area while scallops are in the larval stage. We are also putting spat bags in other areas, such as around Hurricane Island, to see if these trends are the same throughout other areas of Penobscot Bay. There are many hypotheses as to why scallop spat isn’t increasing over time, and Hurricane is excited to learn more about the scallop populations in the Gulf of Maine! 

Sources:

Batchelder, J. P. 2017. Temporal changes in the larval Placopecten magellanicus population in a small-scale fishery closure area in coastal Maine, USA.

Stewart,   P.L.   and   S.H.   Arnold.   1994.   Environmental requirements of the sea scallop    (Placopecten magellanicus)  in eastern  Canada and its response to human impacts.  Can.  Tech.  Rep. Fish. Aquat.  Sci.2005: 1-36.

The Research Must Go On: Our December Sampling Trip Recap

By Madison Maier, Aquaculture Manager

Parker loaded up with sampling equipment and dive gear!

Last Thursday (December 10th ), Phoebe, Silas, and I finished our 2020 sampling! The data is for our long-term GSI research project, so we will be right back at it in January. But still, it feels like a nice milestone when I frame it this way.

My first stop of my morning was to the office to collect our gear. As I was loading up my trunk, I realized I had a rare opportunity to take advantage of my dry wetsuit. After a summer and fall of having to wiggle into a damp wetsuit for every dive, this felt like quite the treat. I put it on right there in the office, and then layered up on top of it. This sneaky move meant I didn’t have to change into it later, and stayed cozy and bundled up the whole time.

Processing samples at the end of the day in the office basement. By weighing total visercia and comparing it to the weight of the gonad, we can calculate the GSI.

The three of us met up at the trusty Parker at 7am, and started on our way to Stonington. As Phoebe said many times over the course of the day, “These are the winter weather days you wait for!” The conditions were calm and we made it over Marsden and Bobby Brewer’s farm by 8. After grabbing our scallops and a belated ‘Happy Birthday’ to Marsden, we headed over to North Haven for our second and last site of the day.

Phoebe and I got ready to go into the water, as we don’t have the capacity to haul up the long line were the nets hang. We bundled up in wetsuits, hoods, and gloves. While we checked our gear to make sure everything was working correctly, we all went over the dive plan. From start to finish, our dive only lasted 6 minutes. We descended down a surface marker, unzipped our lantern nets 25 feet below the surface, and stuffed our scallops into the extra bags we bought. We had more than a dozen dives at this site, but this was the coldest with the strongest current. However, we were well prepared and everything went off without a hitch!

After surfacing and warming up (I recommend jumping jacks and hats post 44 degree water), we headed back to the mainland. Arriving back to Camden Harbor was like living in a snow globe. The Camden Hills were covered in a light dusting and the snow falling on our boat was just starting to stick. It was a successful day of collecting samples and a worthy last trip of the season for our boat, which will be hauled out next week.

Environmental Data Initiative Fellow 2020: Dennise Valadez

Written by Phoebe Jekielek, Director of Research

It has been a different summer on Hurricane Island, to say the least. “Normally” we would have upwards of 20 seasonal staff and interns making magic happen for our summer students and visitors. This summer our full-time Island staff consist of Madison, Carl, Silas, and Elliott who hold down the research and facilities forts M-F each week. I come and go and spend about 3 days a week on the Island and other staff come and go even more sporadically. Different summer for sure.

BUT, there is another person who joined us this summer as well, mostly in spirit and work ethic since she’s 3,178 miles away from us in LOS ANGELES, CA!! Her name is Dennise Valadez and we were lucky enough to have her join us as our Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) Fellow June through July. She worked with myself and Madison (our Aquaculture Manager) to develop data organization and formatting protocols and plans. As we continue to grow and build our own data sets and develop research partnerships with other institutions, it becomes increasingly more important to manage our data wisely.

From their website, the EDI is an NSF-funded project, actively promoting and enabling curation and re-use of environmental data by helping institutions to archive and publish their environmental data. The data they make available is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). They provide support, training, and resources to help archive and publish high-quality data and metadata and operate a secure data repository, working closely with the LTER Network Communications Office and DataONE to promote data management best practices and stewardship. Each year, they work with institutions, like Hurricane, to find and match them with Fellows for data projects specific to their needs. This year, we were lucky enough to work with Dennise. If your organization is looking to expand or even begin their data management and organization efforts, the EDI and accompanying Fellows are a great way to go. Learn more on their website linked above.

Dennise was unable to join us on Hurricane because of Covid, but we hope we can get her out to Hurricane in the future so she can see it firsthand! We could not be more pleased with the work Dennise completed during her time as our Fellow and we are so thankful that she has the expertise, skills, and amazing attitude that she does. Learn a little bit more about Dennise in an interview with her below and see how she was with us in spirit all summer long J Thank you, Dennise, for your time and all of the work you put into setting us up for our next steps in our data management efforts and for walking us through our first data publication…we can’t wait to see you on Hurricane in person!

●      What is your name, where do you live, and what institution are you affiliated with?

○      My name is Dennise Valadez, I live in Los Angeles and I am affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles

●      Do you have any pets?

○      I have a pug named Sage who is 3 months old and a Bunny named Oreo who is 1 year old.

●      Why did you choose to do an EDI Fellowship and what do you LOVE about data?

○      I am super fortunate and enthusiastic about having the privilege to be an EDI fellowship with Hurricane Isand. This fellowship has been the perfect intersection of Data science and Enviornmental Science as I am passionate about both. I love working with data as I believe data management and organization is so vital in gaining a better understanding of our environment. Data tells a story and I like to be that person that helps organize and tell the story that the data attempts to portray.

●      Why did you choose to work with Hurricane Island for your Fellowship?

○      Hurricane Island has always been a place of great interest to me as Aquaculture is one of the main focuses on the Island. I am passionate about the ocean and have prior experience in Isotope geochemistry in application to paleoclimate reconstruction in sites such as the Southern Oceans, The Amazon river, and the North Pacific. So I love learning more about the wonderful life that thrives in the ocean. Scallops are of great focus on the Island, and I believe so much can be learned from these sea creatures. I am fortunate and happy to be a part of the data management plans we are developing on the Island!

●      Why is it important for organizations like ours to organize and manage their data?

○      I believe every organization can benefit from data management. However,    Environmental orgs are of particular interest to me because it would be very difficult to analyze and learn more about our environment without an effective data management program.

●      If you had to be shipwrecked on a deserted island, but all your human needs—such as food and water—were taken care of, what two items would you want to have with you?

○      I would probably bring my quantum mechanics textbook and dive gear. Quantum mechanics is one of my favorite branches of physics, and so if I am trapped alone on a desert island, I can't think of anything else I would rather do than contemplate things like wave particle duality and quantum entanglement. I am not the most experienced diver but if I had dive gear, I would have the time to practice and explore the oceans around the island. This would be rad!

●      What's next for you in your career?

○      This is a tough question as I have nothing set in stone and even more uncertainties have been imposed given our current pandemic. I have learned so much from this fellowship and hope to work with EDI again sometime in the future! Before the pandemic I was working for the Griffith Observatory, and I hope to get back to science communication sometime in the future (they are currently closed for public safety concerns). I am currently a fellow for the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science and am currently tutoring K-12 students during these unprecedented times. There are so many uncertainties given the pandemic and so finding ways to perform outreach remotely is something my team and I have been working on. I am an incoming graduate school and so I am focusing on outreach as well as preparing for my graduate studies. I am taking my career one step at a time but as long as I am continuously learning and  helping others with science then I am where I want to be.

Larval Lobster Research

Stage III Larval Lobster caught 6/23/20

Blog Post by Carl Huntsberger, Research Assistant

This summer HICSL joined the search for baby lobsters!  In the Gulf of Maine lobsters are more plentiful than ever before supporting the most profitable single species fishery in North America.  However, the ALSI survey, a long-term data series searching coastal nursery grounds for lobsters, has seen a downturn of juvenile lobsters in recent year.  This has sparked more interest in improving our understanding of the dynamics involved in the early life stages of the lobsters.  Research lead by the Wahle lab at the University of Maine has been investigating the dynamics between food sources and the different stages of larval lobsters.  Preliminary work has shown that the numbers of stage I-III larvae lobsters have been increasing with the number of spawning females but the number of lobsters making it to stage IV may be limited by food.

Stage IV Larval Lobster caught 6/23/20

A single female will release 10-100,000 larvae in the early summer.  These larval lobsters live as plankton in the water column for between 3 and 10 weeks.  Initially these lobsters are approximately 8mm long and appear more shrimp-like for the first three molts.  They then transition to look more like adult lobsters with the fourth molt or the post-larvae stage.   These post-larvae are drawn towards light staying near the surface of the water.  This behavior allows us to target this stage by using a neuston net, skimming just below the surface.  We have conducted biweekly sampling with three 30-minute tows just south of Hurricane Island since the end of June and finally saw our first two larval lobsters last week!

Carl conducting the neuston tow

This data collected at our site will be shared with the Maine Department of Marine Resources which will be combined with their data of the neuston tows they’re conducting, enabling a more complete understanding of the larval dynamics.  The big questions being focused on are the timing of larval development, where the larvae are, and identifying any bottlenecks to survival.  

As a final somber note, when I am out conducing these tows I have been seeing and collecting a lot of plastic debris.  This does serve as a good reminder to me to reduce, reuse and recycle and if plastic must be used to make sure it is deposed of safely.