Going out and getting my hands dirty...I mean wet.

One of the great things about the REU program is that you are not just boxed into one project. A few weeks ago, Dwight asked for volunteers to go out on a NOAA project that was placing salmon carcasses in the Elwha to study marine derived nutrient diffusion. I figured, why not, it is field time doing something I had never done before. That worked in the past when I put on the dry suit and went out with WDFW for some sampling.

I volunteered for one day, having no clue what I was getting into. All I knew is that I needed chest waders, which in January usually spells some sort of trouble. So I showed up at the hotel the researchers were staying at with my waders, boots, lunch and a whole bunch of extra clothes.

We rolled out to the hatchery near the mouth of the Elwha and talked with some of the workers there and were out in the field within a half hour. NOAA has been monthly visiting the site collecting baseline data for their reference and treatment sites. The treatment sites will have salmon carcasses placed in them starting next week, data collection for the MDN will start after that.

A little bit of an update on the river after the December storms…it did some damage. The bluffs on the west side of the river were cut back pretty far, in one spot it is about 25 ft (as best we can tell) from a house on top of the bluff. The research crew had placed rebar in the side channels to tack the salmon carcasses to, but the river buried, moved, or plucked out the pieces of rebar so we pounded more into place.

In terms of research work there were to side channels we worked in, each with a reference and treatment reach of the stream. At each site we collected fish to take blood and tissue samples (the fish gurus worked on that) and I helped on the habitat information including sampling benthic invertebrates (clean off rocks and scrape the bottom of the stream to collect bugs in a net), capture terrestrial invertebrates (dance around along the stream banks with a net…one of the hatchery workers asked that no photos be taken while he does it because he looks like he is a little girl running through the tulips). This actually takes a lot of coordination because you have to keep the net moving so you don’t let bugs fly out, but you also have to stay on your feet while walking through the stream, which you can’t see the bottom of.

We collected rock samples for analysis as well as recorded flow characteristics including channel width, depth and velocity. That was fun because that is more my gig, got to use the laser range finder (thank you USFS for introducing me to that over the summer) as well as a flow meter which I haven’t even seen since freshman year at Green River in geology. We used a densitometer to calculate canopy coverage. A weird simple little convex mirror with a grid on it…look at it correctly and wherever you see canopy on an intersection counts towards canopy cover.

One of the jobs that I didn’t work on was shock fishing…one of the guys wore a proton-pack looking thing that had a rod that went into the water. The rod shocks the fish and another guy picks them up with a net.

The NOAA scientists were very nice and very willing to share their knowledge, no question went unanswered and they were a very efficient crew.