What could be better than being a marine biologist? You get to travel to out of the way places, work with cool animals, and do things few other people get to see or do. Projects in my lab right include a study in the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea, and Port Valdez, Alaska.
I'm an invertebrate taxonomist, benthic ecologist, and statistician. Most of the work we do in our lab is identifying invertebrates from sediment samples, mostly worms and clams. It may sound boring, and at times it is, but we get to see some really cool stuff! Check out the photo below of the polychaete worm Pista cristata taken with our digital microscope:
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| Pista cristata |
I manage a long-term project in Port Valdez, Alaska, that has completed it's 40th year of sampling. In science, 3-5 years is often as much as people get to work on one project so 40 years is a LONG time to work in one place.
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| Priapulus caudatus |
Port Valdez is a glacial fjord in Alaska surrounded by the Chugach mountains. On a clear day, I'm not sure that there is any prettier place in Alaska than Port Valdez. The Port Valdez Environmental Studies project monitors sediments to support the NPDES permit for discharges of treated ballast water. I've been evaluating the long-term data set for indicators of long-term change and have demonstrated responses of fauna to the Great Alaskan earthquake in 1964, climatic variability, and human activities in the fjord. You can check out my website (see the links on the blog) for more information and publications on my projects.
Our project in the Chukchi Sea is to establish baseline environmental conditions in the NE Chukchi Sea. My team has had a great time sampling and working in the Arctic. Among other things, we are looking towards drawing some comparisons to data from earlier studies in the 1970's and 1986 to see if there have been any changes in the fauna over time.
Until the next post, remember: invertebrates rule!
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