One Last Time

Hello Everyone,

I am blogging here as a Doyle Fellow for one last time!  This past week was my last week at the Jackson Estuarine Lab.  It has been an absolute blast this summer and I have learned so much! I started the internship barely knowing a thing about green crabs, and now I feel like an expert on them.  I can tell the difference from the top whether it is a male or female. I am also now very comfortable handling them--I can reach my hand into a crate full of hundreds of angry crabs and pull one out with no problem.  I have skills I learned this summer that I will take with me forever.  Thinking back on my first week, which incorporated the Green Crab Summit, feels like forever ago!  Upon looking back on all the things I did this summer, I found some pictures of my experiences (thanks Gabby!) I will look back on fondly that I wanted to share with you all:

Male crab found at our last crab hunt at Fort Stark-he was feisty!

My favorite crab (she was albino!) that we named Thumbelina--nickname Lina! 

Another big male we found!

In the process of creating the big crates or "crab condos" :) 

All finished with this one!

The unfortunate crab that molted and had its legs pulled off by the others around it but was still alive:(

So, these are some of the pictures of the good times we had this summer! It is bittersweet writing my last blog post, but I know the memories will always last!

~Nicole 

Almost Done :'(

Hi Friends,

It's that time of the year when summer is wrapping up and all the people in school get this sad feeling knowing that soon summer will end and they will have to go back to school again.  I am getting a similar feeling right now.  My Doyle fellowship is coming to a close, and even though I still have a week left, I have that feeling knowing that something great is about to end.  I had the end of the year party for the entire UNH Extension program on Thursday.  It was fun to see everyone again because a few weeks ago we had seen everyone's presentation and got to know how their projects were coming.

On another note, this past week was also fun because a class of college kids around my age came to tour the lab and I happened to be outside while they were doing it, so I was able to talk to them for a little bit about what I had been doing this summer.  There was a big soft shelled crab that had just molted the night before, so I brought him out for them to see.  Soft shelled crabs are good to show people because they are docile and can't even open their claws to try to pinch you (because they are so exhausted from molting).  I brought one out and was instantly met with many people trying to grab him and touch him.  I passed him around and people loved him! They were taking pictures with him and petting him and asking so many questions about him as if he was a cute little puppy.  He was a great specimen and behaved very well!  The kids were well educated about this subject and asked intelligent questions and always seemed very interested.  It was a great crowd to talk to and I enjoyed sharing my story about the summer and the knowledge I had learned!

This was a picture of the molted male right before he became famous for the day!


~Nicole

Crabs, Cruises and Sand Dunes

  Hey guys, I've been busy and haven't updated my blog in a hot minute so here I go...

  Since my last blog post I've been out with Robert (other intern who works with Alyson) collecting green crabs with Gabby's interns Nicole and Mark. Even Peter came out and took some pretty awesome photos of us again (unfortunately I don't have them yet). My fear for crabs has yet to go away but I still tag along for crab hunting and try my best to help out, typically carrying the bucket of crabs and paper work.  So a few days later we ended up giving a presentation for UNH Cooperative Extension about what we've been up to. I haven't gave a presentation in quite some time so of course I was a little nervous, but thankfully it came naturally because I'm talking about something I'm passionate about. If you did want to check it out, you can click here.

  We also went out one early foggy morning to try and do some beach profiling in Hampton. However  fog and looking for the horizon do not go hand in hand. As time went on the fog became thicker and went more inland so eventually we had to give up. I talked about beach profiling in my presentation but if you haven't looked I'll mention it again. It's a technique used to measure the changes in the contour of a beach. We typically use the emery method where we have two rods and line up the rod farther away from the shore with the horizon and line it up with measurement on the rod to capture the change of elevation. The further rod takes the closer rods spot and we repeat the process until we get to the shoreline. It's quite fun and not too hard once you get there hang of it.


Below are some other photos of me beach profiling at one of our sites in Seabrook with some volunteers.
 


   Roberts main focus for his internship if setting up a protocol to monitor the success of rehabilitated areas/paths in sand dunes. So for a couple days we were back in the dunes laying our transects and collecting data at Harbor Side Dunes in Hampton. We laid out 3 transects in each category, path ways, vegetated and rehabilitated. Path way is the common path everyone still takes, vegetated is where it's all natural with minimal human disturbance and rehabilitated is where there use to be a path but was planted over to help restore the dunes. Overall it was pretty neat we saw so many different critters and learned about different plant species.    Below is my new favorite photo I have taken, looks wayyyy cooler on my phone.

   We also recently went on the Great Bay Discovery Cruise thanks to Dari and Julia. It was a super neat and refreshing experience. We started off at the UNH pier in Newcastle, while out at a sea we caught some phytoplankton. Wow I knew there was a lot of phytoplankton but seeing hundreds in just one cup on water blew my mind. We eventually went up the bay and checked the temperatures, salinity, oxygen levels and a ton of different stuff. After that we went to Jackson Lab and Gabby talked about green crabs and just about anything you can think of.  While there I helped her intern with her recent green crab catches from today. Now I can say I've seen boxes with literally hundreds to thousand of crabs 🦀. I can't tell if I'm still intrigued or disgusted because my gosh did they smell bad. Well that wasn't the end of the cruise, we did some otter trawling afterwards and caught the biggest green crab I have ever seen. Probably the size of my face... We caught 2 flounders, so many crabs and different fish. Overall super cool experience and can't wait to do it again one day. Below are some photos I took on the cruise.

 

 

P.S. I don't have weird style when it comes to how I like the structure of my photos. I have yet to fully learn the quirks of this software.

Oysters Galore

Hello everybody,

The past two weeks have been pretty crazy at work! I started helping out with a project for a Master's student which involves baby oysters. The processing started to get pretty complex due to the size of the baby oysters - they're about the size of my pinky nail! Shucking them was not an easy task, nor was blending them to produce a homogenate we could work with! We had to get creative but we were able to produce a protocol that works.

I've also been doing lots of coding with years of plankton and Vibrio spp. data, which has been a great learning experience. Coding is complicated and has a steep learning curve, but I feel that I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Yesterday we went out on the Great Bay again for Surveillance and collected lots of oysters, sediment, water, and plankton. Today I streaked the bacteria that we grew onto ChromAgar plates and tomorrow we will observe the colors of the colonies that grew and move those onto new agar for further isolation so that they can be used for molecular work at the end of this week!

All is well in the land of oysters!
-Audrey

Vegetation Monitoring, bugs and More !

These have been a busy last few weeks! Over this time I have found myself helping out with a kid's summer camp at the Coastal Marine lab doing fish printing, collecting crabs for a fellow Doyle Intern's project, beach monitoring and going on a Great Bay Cruise. Even with all these other events going on, I found time to go out and collect all the necessary vegetation data in the Seabrook Dunes for my project. In addition to monitoring the plant community, my boss Alyson proposed an interesting idea which was to sample the insect population as well. Neither of us are entomologists so this was very new to us both. I researched a number of methods of sampling insect populations and decided upon the pitfall trap method. I won't bore you with the fine details but essentially I chose areas within my plots to bury SOLO cups which would capture any unlucky insect who walked close enough to fall in. I found a wide variety of spiders, flies and other insects that I had no idea lived in the dunes! Overall this summer has been very interesting and informative and I look forward to putting together my final dune monitoring report.

Green Crab Hunt with a Summer Camp

Hi Everyone,

This week was fun because I got to help some kids attending a camp at the New England Aquarium do some stuff with green crabs!  On Wednesday, the camp, which is an environmental/marine based camp, came to the Jackson lab (where I work out of).  I was working outside, sorting a crate of female green crabs. They were supposed to be doing things with oysters on Wednesday but as they walked by, they saw the crabs I was going through, and some of the kids became more interested with the crabs than with the oysters!  I made some friends who decided they didn't want to deal with the oysters and just play with the crabs instead. 

The next day, Gabby, Mark, and I led a green crab hunt with the same camp at Pierce Island! We all split into groups and the friends I had made from the day before were great helpers as we searched for crabs!  All in all, we ended up finding almost 200 green crabs in total and about 20 softies (soft shell crabs)! We ended up giving the soft shelled crabs to the Joinery, a restaurant nearby, and hopefully they end up on the specials menu for the weekend! We shall see!

~Nicole

Changing It Up A Little

Hello!

This week I am blogging about a little change of pace in my work day.  Today, I, along with my boss Gabby, went over to my fellow intern's house (Mark) and learned how to make crates to keep the crabs in once we catch them!  Mark is a part-time lobsterman so he makes crates like these for traps for his lobsters, so he has all the knowledge and power tools to make them efficiently.  We use a wire/mesh type material to cut, bend, and pin together to make a crate that holds 18 or 36 (depending on the size) crabs in it separately at once.  We like to call it "crab condos." :) We put them in this type of housing to monitor them when we think they might be getting close to molting.  It makes it easy for us to quickly check on them and note when anything happens.

So, we spent the entire morning cutting the pieces to fit what and where we needed using this air pressurized wire cutter (quite fun once you get the hang of it).  Then we used this big wire bender to bend the wire to make sides for the crates.  Then we used these industrially strong staples to bend around the different parts of the crates to hold them together.  That was my favorite part...for some reason it was relaxing for me!  I have to admit though, it was hard work and there were lots of sore hands and arms after they were all done!  We celebrated by going to a new restaurant that just opened (in Kittery, ME) by Mark's house.  It was very cute and the food was tasty and one of my favorite parts was that the to-go box they gave me was 100% biodegradable and made from natural fibers!  So, overall it was a good day, and we might end up going back and making more crates if we find we like how they work!

~Nicole

Post-Presentation

Hello again, everybody!

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the other Cooperative Extension interns on my project/internship thus far. I also got to listen to presentations from the other interns and learn about what they've been working on!

I get very nervous giving presentations, so naturally I was anxious. However, it went well and I only got a little bit flustered! The audience seemed interested in my work and asked questions about shucking oysters, blending them into a "smoothie" for processing (see the picture below!), and if swimmers need to be concerned about Vibrio-related illnesses around here.

I've also been doing some research on ways to analyze microbial communities in oysters for a potential upcoming experiment... very exciting! Being a microbiologist, learning about all of the bacteria I can work with as well as ways to analyze them is thrilling!

Until next time!
Audrey