A Mess of Macroalgae

I've made it back to Corvallis and am ready to crash. I had a productive past tide series though! I collected a ton of biomass samples, both eelgrass and macroalgae. I'll continue to take these samples monthly throughout the year as part of the monitoring part of my study. I'm comparing sites of varying marine influence, and think that the huge quantities of macroalgae (mainly green ulvoids) that I find in the marine sites may have an affect on the eelgrass growing at these sites. The monitoring is necessary to establish the seasonal patterns and site differences before I start doing experiments and other analyses.

So anyways, I spend a lot of time picking away at the macroalgae in the eelgrass beds, collecting samples from 5 quadrats at each site. It gets a bit tedious when the macroalgae crumbles or is composed of tiny little pieces or is embedded in the mud. But, I had fancy new blue industrial glooves to work with (to keep my hands warm and protected from unknown gunk in the mud) and the weather was great so I didn't mind the self-inflicted task. Processing the samples was another deal..... Luckily Dafne showed up to do recon for her project and helped me sort the stuff for an entire day! This consisted of emtying my samples into buckets, scooping out handfuls, getting rid of all the sediment, worm casings, dead and dying inverts (poor baby Dungeness crabs!) and pieces of eelgrass. Then we'd squeeze as much water as possible from the samples, categorize the macroalgae into different types (ulvoid species vs. drift red red and browns), fold them up into nice little aluminum foil packages, and take a picture and wet weight before freezing them for later determination of dry weight (biomass). Some samples took almost an hour to sort through, which made for some incredibly long days.

Thank god for long summer evenings and help! Dafne was a good trooper and sacreficed her afterrnoon for the cause. And I somehow convinced John and Jeremy (Hacker lab techs extraordinaire) to stop off en route North to help me count eelgrass this morning (that's another story, which already has a dedicated poem... to be posted later). If they hadn't showed up I'd probably still be in Coos Bay covered in eelgrass-diatom juice. Time fore bed, this is going to be a good one, ciao, Margs