Whither? Meeting, Jan 5, 2008 · 5 January 2008, 20:26 by Julie Loyd
Present: Laurie G, Donna & Fred A, David & Julie L
Purpose: To answer Russel B’s query about what we can commit to for this coming year.
David: Should we modify the plankton tow protocol?
Fred: We should get through a whole year’s cycle before we decide.
Donna: We started in July. We need to create enough data before we analyze. We need to sample at least once a month for, say, five years.
Julie: We’re agreed on not changing the protocol yet. We’ll sample twice monthly, count at least once monthly and twice if we can, and re-evaluate later.
Donna: We can enumerate baseline samples, and survey the rest of them, like if we’re doing hourly samples or some other test that isn’t part of the baseline sampling.
Fred suggested we get a sieve that will stop gammarids, chaetognaths, and fish, but let the other stuff through. We have to sieve the plankton anyway to prepare them for counting.
Fred: At some point we could try a bigger sieve net, because we don’t want to see diatoms anyway.
This last time we got baby sea cucumbers, which is exciting.
David: I’d like to see us count the seabirds while we tow, too. Every time I go to the labs, when I talk to a plankton person they’re really excited by our project.
Fred: We do this every week. I think we’re getting pretty good!
Julie: We need to have verification so that scientists can feel confident talking to us and so we can make a contribution.
Donna: And so we can teach. We have money for quarterly reviews and should hire Molly Jacobs to teach us further. Maybe we should go to somebody else for count verification if Molly isn’t available?
Fred: We’re not keeping up with our commitments right now. Can we add stomach contents? I’m spending 15 hours a month now. I like that we’re getting interesting results. Things do happen in winter, despite what we’ve been told.
Fred and Donna: We found baby sand lances with the egg sacs attached in Severson’s cove on the 1st. Not in North Bay.
David: I would like to see a correlation between fragments of eelgrass floating and what we count. Just noticing more stuff.
Fred: I’d like to tow around Point Hammond where the water’s more active. It’d be interesting.
Laurie: Clarity of water? Counts? Flotsam? What differences are you seeing?
Donna: Sometimes North Bay has more volume than Severson’s, and sometimes the other way around.
Fred: The time at Severson’s, there were lots of gulls with a black stripe across their tail, we had lots of hyperids, but there were neither gulls nor hyperids at North Bay. One of our disciplines sbould be not to overcommit.
Julie: Some of this is social. People will show up if there’s a good social scene.
David: Let’s answer Russel’s email with his proposals. Russel and Madrona’s presentation on the Native presence on Lopez was fabulous. We can bring in people that way.
Donna: Russel wrote that he and Anne would like to schedule a workshop January 19 – 20 to take stock of where we are and clarify our research needs. They also ask about the gastric contents data, which we don’t have.
Fred: We can count at least one of those, or at least see about doing it.
Julie: We can get more people, there are some who intend to do so and it wouldn’t take much to get them to show up.
Donna: The dynamic of teaching people is different than just counting. I could use help to set up the pupil cam. Don Moss has it now. I can capture an image but it isn’t good. About four people have shown interest in splitting, which would speed up the counting.
David: I would be willing to volunteer for that.
Donna: 45 minutes to an hour per sample. If we filtered out the larger items to count separately, we could do it faster.
Laurie: Sounds like it would be a good idea to bring in lots of people for the longevity of the project.
Julie: I want to do a presentation on what the archivist has done. Maybe I could do a joint thing and recruit, with somebody else.
Russel: I’d like to see how Fresh and Beamer train volunteers.
Donna: I think we can tell Russel, yes, a meeting like you describe would be fine. What we need to do here is to see if we can count the ten gastric samples and see how it goes.
Julie: Sure. We should have a similar meeting in June when we know how the summer people want to fold in.
Fred: We should ask him what his sampling goals are – how many fish do we catch and how many stomachs will we investigate?
Donna: The second thing he wants is for us to prioritize workshops. These are about what happening on the land masses as they effect salmon.
David: Let’s put a signup sheet on the board for a week, asking people to rank which ones they want to attend. We’ll only get a fraction of the actual attenders anyway.
Discussion: We do want a plankton refresher from Molly Jacobs. Maybe she can give a beginning one in the morning and advanced in the afternoon. Any workshop is great. Scott Veirs sonar tracking project sounds suspicious – sonar is detrimental to whales. Can we hear more? Counting plankton is pleasant but not worth it unless it feeds in to a larger thing.
David: Fresh and Beamer split Russel’s proposal out from theirs because they were afraid the SURFboard wouldn’t understand it, but both got funded. Russel is interested in the isotope study because it will push us a step forward.
Glen: Let’s see Fred Sharp, the birding guy, here. What about looking at coho here?
Julie: Yes, we can do that on our own, but Russel has to stay within his funding.
David: Glen and I want to do a beach seine soon. The seine group is in its initial phase, but it’s firming up.
Glen: I’m working on a document about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Julie: Here’s a list of stuff I’ve done as Raynier Archivist. I’d like input on what else might happen. (The list I presented was a summary of what you see on this website.)
Laurie: Some people are into insects, or other stuff around the island. There’s a lot of interest.
Glen: We could have a day where everyone goes to look for birds, or butterflies, or something.
Fred: Birders are fanatic.
Glen: It’s hard to access anecdotal data. Let’s set up data sheets and have teams check them off.
Donna: A field note sheet for plankton tows, codified.
David: Targeted meetings for plankton tow sheets, for example.
Donna: Contact Fresh and Beamer so we’re prepared to go when they call on us. We should get waders.
Fred: Historically, we’ve never had to consider codling moths in apples, but now we have them. There were some last year, quite a few this year. I looked for solutions online. It has five instars, mostly unsuccessful. Of the various things to do about it, I haven’t decided to do anything because there are so many options and they don’t seem to agree. Spraying with BT. Pheromones. Scabbing and Melrose apples let them climb in, while Wagner and Gravenstein, Enterprise, Gold Rush, the newer tighter non-scabbing apples are freer of moths.
Julie: Should we eradicate ivy from the island?
Glen: Should you do a Raynier report?
Donna & Julie: I’ll help.
Donna: I’m concerned about the drifter project. The Rino GPS may not be right. We need to decide what model we need, and how that fits with our budget.
David: They’re doing something like that downsound. I’m meeting with a drift study person next week.
Donna: There are tracking chips, which may be all we need. We might add temperature and turbidity sensors.
Glen: What are the seabirds eating?
Fred: There are more Buffleheads in the pond, eating something. There were 34 at Severson’s.
David: Birds are telling us stuff and we’re not listening.
Fred: When we were working in Westsound, there were 100’s of Buffleheads, and the otters would come zipping out and catch them. About five years ago, we thought all the birds have gone. In the last five years they’ve been coming back. We’ve had Ringnecks in the pond, and there are more Harlequins and Surf Scoters. The birds of prey hang out and catch them during nesting season.
David: Biologists suspect that Eagles have hit their maximum and are hitting on seabirds.
Fred: Winter wrens, last winter and this, have been dying, lying on the porch, the greenhouse, we don’t know why. They redid a swallow’s nest, and raised babies in there for a few years. None fledged one year, and then one bird went out and tore up the next. The flickers go around and rummage in the swallow nests.
Glen: Get a site counter for thewhelk.org.
David: Mike Kaill in FH knows about microscopes. He might come out.
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