So back to what I've been doing. The first project I got started on was the American Eel Monitoring project and boy was I nervous. I have never dealt with eels and never touched one either but I put my science hat and went for it. It was definitely worth it and super cool. With this project we're right off Newmarket road at the dam, New Hampshire Fish and Game had already established a trap to catch and hold the eels. So a little more about the trap, the eels are able to swim up a wide pvc pipe into a bucket. That's when we come in, volunteers come out every morning Monday through Friday to do a count and measurement. This is where the fun happens, the bucket the eels are captured which sits in another bigger bucket to catch any overflow. So we have to use a small fish net to catch them again, checking both buckets just in case some are hiding in the overflow. Whatever eels we catch we put them in clove water. Yup clove water... clove water acts as an anesthesia for eels. Fun fact, if you get enough on clove on your finger it becomes numb.
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| Eels penciling up in clove water |
You know the the eel is under anesthesia when they 'pencil up' because they become straight as a pencil. Once they pencil up we measure them and put them back in a bucket filled with river water and release them up stream. All data we record, whether they are brown, yellow or glass eels, what staged they are and how long they are, is recorded for NH Fish and Game. What's super interesting about the glass eels is that they come all the way from the Sargasso Sea in the vicinity of Bermuda. In about 20 years they can grow up to 5 feet long and once mature they swim back down to the Sargasso sea to spawn. I would have never thought I could talk about glass eels for a whole hour would become as interested as I currently am. There is so much back story behind glass eels, from the gold rush of glass eels to the million dollar profits fisherman were making and Jersey gangs. Check out this super interesting National Geographic article to learn more about glass eels and the political fire storm around it.
So another project we worked on was a sand dune restoration project and oh man I got a lot of sand in my eyes. To start off the project we went to the Hampton Beach State Park and planned on harvesting the beach grass from within the community beach garden. However when we got there we ended up not even having to harvest from inside the beach garden because of how successful the garden was. The beach grass ended up growing outside of the the designated area and onto the walking paths so we harvested that instead. Although that day when we harvested it was raining and a storm was coming in, the wind was unbelievably strong so we had to cancel part two which was the planting. When we did reschedule the day was absolutely perfect. Random people on the beach relaxing and hanging out offered to help which made the process go even faster.
It was amazing to see the volunteers show up consistently with a positive attitude always eager to help out and give back to their community. Numerous folks go out every week to collect data on eels, to help plant beach grass in dunes suffering erosion and families who saw us doing work in public areas and wanted to help out. It's always refreshing to see a community coming together.
I never thought that I would ever be picking up eels just like I never thought I would be picking up crabs. Don't get me wrong I love my internship and I love dealing with animals and critter but there's a select few like eels, snakes, spiders, crabs that I am not too shabby for. But just like the eels I dealt with it and was picking up crabs in no time. I put my science hat on and did some crab hunting with a group of high school students and folks from the aquarium. Grabiela Bradt is a commercial fishery specialist and has been going out with volunteers at different locations to collect data on green crabs. Green crabs may not sound like they are special but they are super important because they are an invasive species. So no one knows what to do with these green crabs, besides them making a decent pet crab. Their shells are too hard, they don't become big enough to be worth eating, they eat whatever they want so they are taking food away from natives and they have no predators. Overall green crabs are pretty invasive and not much data has been collected on them. Which is why we stepped in and collected data from Adams point that has not had data collected from it before.
Me holding a crab for the first time!!
So that's all for this blog post! I'll try to remember to continue taking photos!
~Tina
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