Had a great time on Saturday working with Ventura Surfrider and Ventura Audubon to clean up the nesting area for the threatened Snowy Plover at Ormond beach. This is my second season working with the local nest monitor for the Western Snowy Plover and California Least Tern. I brought my niece and nephews out to learn about the habitat and why picking up trash is so important.
This weekend I worked with kids from Robert J. Frank Middle School in the NOAA B-WET Program at the CI Boating Center. The kids worked on their scientific presentations and got a chance to kayak around the beautiful Channel Islands Harbor. Its great to see future scientists in the making!
Michaela Miller, Robyn Shea (our research coordinator) and I were able to go to the west end of Santa Cruz Island for a quick trip this weekend. This end of the island is owned by the Nature Conservancy and is travelled only by researchers with special permission. We arrived on island Friday afternoon and left Saturday. Even though our trip was lightning fast we were able to collect data for both projects from Christy’s Beach, Sauces Beach and Frasier Point on the west end of the island. Due to the earliness of the season I was only able to find adult crabs on one of the beaches but did collect sand from all three.
Today I finished processing the 20th sample population of sand crabs and put together a small graph to share.
The sample sites are listed from North to South along the California coast. Each bar represents a percentage of the sample population collected that was found to have ingested microparticles. Of the 20 sample populations, two did not have any micro particle ingestion, however the other 18 sample populations had sand crabs that ingested microparticles. Each sand crab found to have microparticles was photographed and recorded. I am interested to see how the rest of my samples look and plan to have a more complete set of results in the next 2-3 weeks.
I spoke with Monika Krach from LiMPETS|Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and she has 30 more crabs to send to me for dissection. The great news is that 2 of the sites are from north of San Francisco even further extending the range of samples. I am excited to see what I find!
Spoke with Monika Lynn Krach from the LiMPETS|Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary to collaborate in Sand crab collection as well as future student education. Monika runs the program for kids learning science through intertidal and sandy beach surveys and has collected more sand crabs for the project! We are sharing procedural information as well as data as the group is tracking parasites inside of the sand crabs. I will be creating a video for the students explaining the micro plastics procedure and writing in the LiMPETS blog to share my research. I am very excited to have more groups involved in the education of the public and hopefully some ideas on how to fix the problem!
Tuesday night at Patagonia headquarters Dr Clare Steele, Michaela Miller and I presented our Pervasive Plastics research to the Ventura Surfrider chapter. The rise above plastics campaign from the national surfrider foundation is directly inline with our overall project of removing plastics from our sandy beach and marine environment and educating the public on the need for change.
We were able to discuss our current projects and where we are headed with the different facets of the plan. I was very excited to meet so many other people that love the beach and want to protect it! I hope that more students from The ESRM Dept at CSU Channel Islands will be able to share their projects and be able to achieve a higher rate of public involvement.
VC Reporter story on Pervasive Plastics was published today about Dr. Clare Steele’s library talk on plastics in our environment and my research on the discovery of microplastic ingestion by Sand crabs.
As of today I have sample populations of Sand crabs from 16 beaches processed and will be sharing this data at the Surfrider meeting Tuesday evening. I have been lucky to find 6 undergraduate students that are interested in working on the different aspects of my project! This will rocket forward the processing of the 50 plus sand samples I have in the lab and allow me the time to finish processing the 26 other sample populations of sand crabs I have.
So far 14 of the 16 sample populations have had sand crabs with particles or fibers ingested. I know that every single sand sample processed has had fibers and/or particles in it so I am interested to find out what the remaining crab samples look like.
