Greetings from the field: by Stephanie Bilodeau

Post date: Jul 9, 2015 11:29:00 PM

From early July:

We awoke this morning to a sepia-tinted world, as the smoke from a wildfire in Port Alberni turned the sky orange. The weather here has been beautiful, clear and warm, but Bamfield is actually in the middle of a drought, and the risk of fires is high now.

Yesterday, we spent the morning playing golf on the mudflats at low tide and the afternoon listening to musicians warming up in the Rix Center for the annual event Music by the Sea. I was down on the dock towing for plankton around 11:00 PM when the event ended and had a wonderful discussion about our research with some of the locals who were waiting for the water taxi back to the West Side. I love how receptive everyone here is to learning about the work we do, so we talked about rockfish and the plankton I was collecting and where I'm from while they waited and I towed. I was collecting late as an experiment, hoping to obtain a higher plankton yield. Copepods migrate upwards in the water column at night, and my net can only reach so deep. As it turned out, my final plankton collection was no higher than usual, but the bioluminescence from the dinoflagellates in the water was beautiful, especially when the water taxi finally pulled away, leaving a glowing green trail in its wake. It gets dark so late here in the summer that I'm rarely still down by the water when the light show starts, but it's well worth it!

We're beginning our second stage of the experiment with the coppers today and spent the day photographing and weighting the fish before placing them in plastic bags. The bags were then moved from bucket to bucket, slowly acclimating each bag of fish to the temperature of their final treatment. It's a long but not terribly complicated process and went much smoother this time since we'd already practiced it with the blacks. I think much of this second round of experimental procedures should be more straightforward, now that we've practiced a bit, and Michelle, our visiting 2015 Rolex Scholar, has been wonderful. She's technically here to help out anyone who needs it, but she's spent most of her time with our lab, in between diving, and it's such a relief to have another set of hands to help out, especially on the long processing days like today.

Now that the experiment is underway, we've had more time to explore Bamfield during the day, and some of the hikes are amazing! The temperate rain forest here is beautiful, and I actually prefer it to the tropical rainforests I've visited in Belize, maybe because it looks like the quintessential fairy tale landscape and isn't quite so swelteringly hot and humid. A few days ago, we hiked just under 20 km round trip along the West Coast Trail to a sea lion colony. The trail itself is a fun hike with ladders and bridges and periodic views of the seashore. I really enjoy the juxtaposition of old-growth rainforest with the open ocean that can be glimpsed through the trees. The sea lions were entertaining and very cool, especially since I had never seen them before in the wild, but the best part of the day was the pod of humpback whales diving right off of the shore by the colony. There were fifteen to twenty whales, by our estimate, and some were just traveling past, but a group of them stayed for the hour and a half that we were there. We lingered far later than we had planned, watching them diving and tail flipping and bubble netting in the water, while we chatted with a group of older hikers, who I believe may have come over from Nova Scotia. That was by far the coolest wildlife encounter and one of the best days overall that I've had this entire trip. We all agreed that the whales we've been seeing out in the Sound are suddenly a much less impressive sight, although I'm sure that won't stop us from watching for them every night from the observation deck.

The sunset tonight was still mostly obscured by the heavy smoke, but the air has cleared a bit now and the smell of burning from earlier has mostly faded out. The girls in my cabin have been watching the wildfires on the news online, and the one near Alberni is currently large enough to be seen via satellite. I really hope that they manage to control and halt the fire before it does any further damage, not only to the people living on the Island, but also to the amazing ecosystem here.

From early June:

Since I arrived here in Bamfield, my family and friends keep asking how it's going, and I feel like I'm repeating myself when I tell them how gorgeous it is, but everything I see just keeps reminding me how lucky I am to be able to visit this amazing place. In the evening, when our lab work is done, we can watch the sunset from the observation deck and look for whales out in Barkely Sound. I spend my mornings and evenings towing for plankton down by the dock, and I've seen more wildlife in the past couple days than I did all last summer. There are always bald eagles and gulls and usually kingfishers, and the water is teeming with perch and jellies and sea stars, no matter what time of day I go. I've also spotted a band of river otters, playfully rolling all over each other, as well as a mink and at least one seal. Sometimes, I can see even the whales out in the Sound from where I'm towing on the dock.

The plankton tows are for the juvenile rockfish in our lab. They feed on copepods, and we’ve observed that a single fish can easily eat upwards of 2,000 plankton between the two daily feedings. That means a lot of time spent towing a net on the dock, but I'm really appreciating the time outside of the lab to relax, listen to music on my iPod, and just enjoy the wildlife. The Foreshore dock is pretty busy during the day, so I've encountered most of the station's occupants and a lot of visitors during my towing sessions. I really appreciate how curious everyone is to hear about what I'm doing and why. Even the non-scientists are very curious about the research we do, and everyone here is so friendly. We took a rowboat over to the West Side Store for groceries and spent half the time over there just chatting with the locals.

Sara and I have been working pretty much all day every day since we arrived, struggling to iron out the kinks in our experimental design, but everything seems to be (more or less) functioning now, just in time. After three weeks of troubleshooting and set-up, we finally officially began our experiment this morning. The idea is pretty simple: Mix hot and cold water from larger header tubs in different proportions to create a variety of temperature treatments in the buckets down below. Our goal is to use physical growth measurements, respiration rate, and genetic analysis to determine the effects of these different temperatures on the fish raised in those buckets. We've spent the last few weeks setting up our temperature treatment buckets, checking and revising our design, and watching flow-blocking bubbles slowly creeping down the tubes we worked so hard to set up. The bubbles have now been (mostly) solved with these nifty little air-trapping bottles at the top of each line, and the number of header buckets has increased to allow us to increase flow rate to our different treatment buckets.

This first stage of the experiment will focus on juvenile black rockfish (Sebastes melanops), caught in the field over the past few weeks. In a couple more weeks, we'll terminate the experiment with the blacks and replace them with juvenile copper (S. caurinus), brown (S. auriculatus), and quillback rockfish (S.maliger), collectively dubbed "coppers" for our experiment. Blacks typically favor cool upwelling events for growth and dispersal, while coppers recruit later in the season when the waters are warmer. Because of this, we anticipate there will be marked difference in the blacks' and the coppers' reactions to warmer temperature treatments. We've already encountered more juvenile coppers than we expected to see this early, likely due to the milder winter this past year. Some of the coppers have already been captured and are waiting in holding tanks for their turn in the temperature treatments. We'll probably head out into the field again soon to catch the rest of the fish we need.

Fish collection is a day-long process, between snorkeling for the tiny fish at six different sites and then photographing and weighing them all when we return to the lab. I haven't been in the water yet, staying on the boat to process the animals and empty the SMURFs (Standard Monitoring Units for the Recruitment of Fish) that we use to collect and sample some of the fish. Hopefully, I'll have a chance to actually get in the water soon myself, if only for a recreational snorkel trip. It looks cold, but the marine life here is amazing, and I can't wait to explore!