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!