Daily Archives: July 20, 2023

Projects and more Necropsies!

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Warning !! The harbor seal photos are, as the last necropsy was, relatively gory, and not for the fainthearted !!

Hello again everyone, It’s the Students of Salish Sea Sciences returning with a brand new blog post! Today we once again partook in a wide variety of somewhat random activities. As usual, our day began with waking up (recommended at least once a day). After waking up and munching on a nice breakfast, we all departed for Friday Harbor Labs to watch a necropsy. As some of our faithful readers may recall we already observed a harbor porpoise necropsy. Today we watched another marine mammal get cut open. Instead of observing a harbor porpoise this time, we watched a harbor seal. While it was undoubtedly cool, most of us concluded that it was kind of underwhelming compared to the porpoise.

The squad looking at the super interesting thing in the water below them (can confirm there was nothing actually there)
Dockside interview with the dissector himself, pictured later with garden shears
Kind of self-explanatory here. Unfortunately, not a lot of info came out of this guy because although they looked pretty good on the outside, the internal cavity was rotting and had been scavenged for the most part.
gorgeous gorgeous girls stare pensively at a necropsy and contemplate the meaning of life
gorgeous gorgeous dinosaurs try to blend into their surroundings and curse their owner for bringing them here

Most of our day thereafter was devoted to collecting project samples and developing our own research. Cassandra from the fish lab came by for an hour to try (and mostly fail) to teach us how to use data software, which left most of us exhausted, close to tears, and overwhelmingly confident we weren’t going to major in computer sciences. Hannah spent her day fertilizing and observing more Ascidian embryos, Maddie collected water samples, Ethan set up snail habitats and Emma cooked seaweed into a delectable concoction. Many other project activities occurred as everyone was hard at work.

We tried to understand the software, I promise we tried so hard, but …
The lads swimming helping Emma with her rockweed collection, and my ascidians that developed abnormally because of the LiCl I treated them with (don’t worry, it was on purpose)
Tommy at FHL for reasons still unknown, and Philip’s spawning sand dollars !!

Nothing terribly noteworthy happened (other than a brief thrifting expedition) until dinner time rolled around. We were joined by Ms. Shauna Barrows, a field assistant for San Juan County Land Bank, an organization devoted to protecting vast swaths of land for conservation and various ecological purposes. It was a very interesting talk that took a more political perspective and diverged from our usual scientific talks.

In summary, today was another stellar day in which we engaged in very fun activities and greatly furthered our projects. Moreover, we had a fantastic speaker and even got to thrift some clothes to wear to the Barbie movie. Welp, signing off for now,

The Students of Salish Sea Sciences