MAY 2021
Kyra's Blog
Kyra Bankhead, undergraduate student
1 May 2021
I’ve been working hard on my research proposal for merit scholarships and on my poster. I am relatively done with my merit scholarship applications and just finished the rough draft of my poster. I’ve never presented a scientific poster before, so I am a bit nervous, especially because it is going to be over zoom. I would say that I am confident in my research, but my preliminary results are a bit fuzzy. I must finalize the poster before I present it to the lab, so I decided to do the best I can on my data analysis and get feedback on what areas I can fix up.
My main concern with my data analysis is the statistics of the generalized linear mixed model. I’m not sure on the interactions of the variables or whether I should be using random or fixed effects. When I conduct forward and backward regression, all variables are chosen, but I believe the statistics are off. I’d like to clean up my statistics and I hope presenting my poster will give me some much-needed feedback.
This paragraph was written right after I presented my poster to the lab. I got a lot of extremely helpful feedback, and I am so glad I got this opportunity before I present it at the conference. There was a lot of formatting feedback and I decided to re-do my entire set-up. On zoom, the normal PowerPoint format is much better than the normal poster format. Therefore, while I’m changing the size, I can also consider everyone’s suggestions.
Kyra Bankhead
Grace's Blog
Grace Freeman, graduate student
1 May 2021
April was a month of just chugging along. I’ve completed a few more drafts of my thesis and received some helpful feedback. I’ve also scheduled my pre-defense meeting for early June, so I’m going to be sending that draft off to my committee soon. It feels like I’ve completed about a million drafts, but I’m sure I have at least another million to go! Either way, it feels good to be making progress and be on the path to a complete thesis soon.
I’ve also been working closely with Zoë, Kathleen, and Bobbie (the other grads in the lab) to plan the annual meeting of the Northwest Student Chapter of the Society for Marine Mammalogy. We actually planned the whole conference to happen last May, but of course, that didn’t happen. This year, the event will May 8th, on Zoom, and feature presentations by students from students all over the west coast of North America. Planning it has been tricky with a lot of logistics to consider, but I’m looking forward to learning about other projects taking place in the region.
Outside of all this planning and writing, I’ve been looking for and applying to jobs for after graduation. I’m grateful to have a few months during which I can work on that, but hopefully I’ll have some fun news soon.
Fingers crossed!
Grace
Kathleen's Blog
Kathleen McKeegan, graduate student
1 May 2021
The sun is shining and Seattle is officially in bloom! Spring in the Pacific Northwest is absolutely lovely, but right now I’m dialed into my computer and focusing on teaching, photo processing, and classes. Virtual learning is definitely exhausting at times but it allowed me to spend two weeks down in Southern California visiting my parents (who are officially fully vaccinated!). Now, I’m back in the PNW with a nice tan and the determination to get as many photo IDs completed as possible!
The most exciting update I have at the moment is that I received the Washington Sea Grant Science Communications Fellowship! Bobbie Buzzell and Grace Freeman both were WA Sea Grant Science Communications Fellows, so I feel a lot of responsibility accepting this torch and carrying it through the spring and summer quarters. I had my orientation today and I am excited to strengthen my writing skills while learning from professional science communicators.
With regards to my research project specifically, I’m currently working on updating the catalog and slowly (but surely) going through and identifying individual seals. There’s a lot of work to do, but I know we’ll be able to complete a significant portion over the summer. Additionally, Kate and I have been conducting interviews to hire new undergraduate research assistants for Fall 2021. So far, we’ve had several incredible students apply so I’m sure we’ll have a fantastic team to conduct observations in the fall. Kate and I are also working on our poster presentation for the annual conference of the Northwest Student Chapter for the Society of Marine Mammalogy (NWSSMM). The conference is in two weeks and we have a lot to do before then, but I’m excited to meet other marine mammalogists and learn about the research that is being conducted in the area.
My goals for the next month are to hopefully nail down some more summer funding opportunities, work through a significant portion of the photo IDs, and successfully host and present at the NWSSMM conference. I’ll see you all in June!
Holland's Blog
Holland Conwell, undergraduate student
1 May 2021
Wow, this month has gone by so quickly! I’ve had my hands full with scat processing for Zoë’s project and of course the SSMSP work. This project has taken many hits already and has recently been extended to allow more time for processing the remaining samples and the work that will follow. Since I’m still in the beginning phases of this project and all the data won’t be in immediately, I’m focusing on building up my understanding of the context for this project and the questions that I’m interested in. I have also just begun looking at the sample collection data and making sense of the 15 sampling locations, the distribution of samples collected at each location, and the spread of the sites on a map.
I started by conducting a literature review—which I’m still adding to—centered on gathering a body of literature that informs me on where this project fits into and builds off of recent studies that use similar methods (qPCR and/or prey DNA metabarcoding) to analyze predator and prey interactions. Of course, I’m mainly building off of the 2018 paper from this lab that combined these methods, applied them to differentiate male and female harbor seal diets in the Strait of Georgia, and found a male bias for salmon. With the goal of putting an introduction together soon, I'm formulating how I’m going to introduce the study, narrow down to the premise of the 2018 paper, and ultimately present the utility of repeating similar methods with a larger sample size in the southern Salish Sea rather than the Strait of Georgia. In preparation for writing the introduction, I also drafted some main questions and hypotheses. In the next month, I hope to continue down this path and hopefully make more progress on an introduction!
Kate's Blog
Kate Clayton, undergraduate student
1 May 2021
Another chaos filled month! With the start of the quarter and new classes I have been struggling to keep up with all that is going on. Hopefully, I will settle into a rhythm as the quarter goes on.
This month Kathleen and I have been making the poster are going to present at the Marine Mammal Conference (on May 8th). We finally have a format that we like so after a few more edits I think we will be good to go. I am very nervous for the conference especially since it is now only a week away, so I am very grateful that I have Kathleen as my partner! I am hoping we can do a practice session so I feel I little bit more prepared.
We are in the process of hiring new students for the upcoming year. Kathleen and I have been sending out flyers to the Bio and ESCI departments to try and get students interested and we have gotten quite a few replies which is encouraging! I have been in charge of scheduling their interview times and reaching out to the students which has been lots of fun and a good way to procrastinate my homework. We just started our interviews this Monday and I am excited to meet everyone! It is going to be difficult to decide who will join our team next Fall, we have so many wonderful applicants!
Other tasks I have been doing for the lab include making schedules and uploading more photos to crop to Sharepoint. We still have a long way to go to get through all of November. It is hard to get up the energy to stare at a screen after having been on it all day, so I understand the lag. Hopefully, we will get an energy burst from the fresh spring air that will encourage us to buckle down and get things done.
Until next month!
Zoë's Blog
Zoë Lewis, graduate student
1 May 2021
May already?! Days are flying by… I mentioned in my last blog that my month would be divided into two parts: pre and post- surgery on 4/23 to repair my ACL. The majority of this pre-surgery time was spent cranking out samples/laboratory work.
During the beginning of April, my undergraduate assistants and I spent our time processing scat samples at maximum capacity. My goal was to finish all of the scat processing, and most of the hard part separation from Dec-March scats, and send out samples to WDFW for analysis. After a few weeks of long scat cleaning hours, we are now 2/3 of the way through the sample processing for this project, and on target for the goals I set at the beginning of the quarter! It’s exciting to be this far along and I’m really feeling comfortable with my scatology lab work. I’m excited to receive some results back in the next few weeks.
For now, I am not able to bear weight on my knee for at least two weeks, so my goal is to catch up on all the computer work aspect of research, and to dive into modeling. I’m starting to work through the R code for Brandon Chasco’s bioenergetics modeling, to see if this will be appropriate for my thesis questions and to change any parameters that might be necessary for my project. It’s very different than the scat work I’ve been focusing on, so its been a good change of pace!
Out in the field, Adrianne let me know that they have not been having good luck acquiring any harbor seal scats for the entire month of April. This lack of data may result in having to drop harbor seals from components of my analysis, but I’m glad we are collecting these data regardless. I anticipate having to reframe my thesis questions a bit, but I’m spending a bit more time diving into literature to think about how my project might change without the Harbor seal data. Hopefully, it can at least provide a snapshot of some harbor seal diets along the northwest coast of Washington.
I look forward reporting any interesting findings, I might even have data by next month!
Zoë
Bobbie's Blog
Bobbie Buzzell, graduate student
1 May 2021
Already 5 weeks into spring quarter and I can feel the load of my tasks weighing heavy, but as I chip away at the presentations and writing I need to complete over the next couple weeks I’m confident my timeline is shaping up nicely. The majority of my projects are nearing completion which is starting to allow for some creative expression with how I describe the green crab conundrum and the role of river otter diet. I am excited to see how my project is received by those unfamiliar with my study, as this will be a chance to see how I can better communicate my take home message.
I am also extremely grateful and excited to announce that I will be taking the Water Quality Specialist position with the Makah Tribe this summer. The opportunity is a slight deviation from my fisheries pathway, but the baseline knowledge will provide me with an in-depth understanding of environmental work (not to mention I’ll be able draw from my undergraduate chemistry minor). While completing my thesis is still the priority, I now have an extra hurdle of finding housing in a rural location, but I thankfully have some time to secure a residence.