Hi readers!

Welcome back to another day in the lives of Salish Sea Science’s awesome students. Today we woke up at 7:30 and started our day off by driving to Friday Harbor Labs to view another necropsy. However, when we got there, we discovered that there was no necropsy happening today (GASP). Luckily, Adam’s lightning quick thinking saved us. He drove us down to False Bay, an important spot on San Juan Island where all of the bay water completely disappears during low tide. We walked on some of the flats in the bay and found literally tons of crabs.

When we were done, we returned to the dorms and got some extra time to work on our final projects. Some of us were very productive, but others(me) got distracted playing Wikiraces 3 and spent more time finding Benedict Cumberbatch’s wikipedia page than working on our projects.

After eating lunch, we left for the Friday Harbor Whale Museum and learned about the massive marine vertebrates that call the Salish Sea home. We got to touch a gray whale’s baleen plate and learned about the Salish Sea’s Resident killer whales. But for some reason, everyone’s favorite part of the museum was the coloring pages they had in the kids section. Relatable.

After an eventful time at the whale museum we got to go to the Friday Harbor High School and do some experiments with mussels. Using PCR we will be able to identify which mussels are the invasive species from the Mediterranean, which are native, and which are hybrids of the two. We smashed the mussels (sorry Maya), cut out some membrane, mixed in buffer and proteinase k, and left them to process overnight. 

Although it was just thrilling to be in a school during the end of summer, we were excited to go to the thrift store after and try on some ridiculous outfits (I think William would win if it were a competition). 

Then everyone had the exact same craving for French fries, lizzy and I went to a restaurant down by the pier while Cleo, William, Una, Millie, Stella and Riya got some from the bait shop. We will be testing tomorrow which fries are better, we’re very excited for round two of French fries. We roamed the town a little bit before coming back to campus to do our jobs like dinner, blogging, and research on our dinner guests. Today Justin Cox and Jessica Farrer from the SeaDoc society who would’ve done our highly anticipated necropsy that we sadly did not have. Lucky for us we have an entire dinner to ask as many questions as possible to make up for it!

Hi readers!

After a slightly later wake up than yesterday, we took a trip to the Friday Harbor Labs to watch a necropsy. The Washington Stranded Network found a newly dead seal pup which was luckily able to be preserved enough to have a successful necropsy in order to figure out the cause of death. The workers found strange bumps on the seal neck which could have been from a dog bite and put many pieces of the seals into containers to be shipped to other facilities for research on the animal. 

After an eventful necropsy we made our way to a hiking trail and walked for around 30 minutes to find a sea star surveying location with Dr. Derek Smith. Unfortunately, we didn’t find our pathway down to the beach so we had to venture out into the forest and hurdle over large ferns to get there. A few of us had an interesting conversation about what we would do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. 

When we got to our site, we started trekking over the intertidal area, counting and measuring several types of sea stars. These populations had been severely decimated by the sea star wasting disease, so we were counting them to see if their numbers had increased or decreased since the past few years. Everyone did an amazing job helping the scientists find the sea stars, even though it was a little slippery (poor Caleb!).

After hiking back from the beach, we took a tour of the Friday Harbor Labs. We were able to explore many of the different labs spaces and hear lots about the projects going on. The lab experiments used water pumped directly from the Salish Sea so that all of the subjects are in their natural environment. We also learned about different kinds of microscopes like TEM and Confocal laser microscopes that can show us 3D images of organisms. For all the science nerds out there, GFP, an incredibly important protein in monitoring gene expression in organisms, was first discovered at Friday Harbor Labs!