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.