Project Pitches

All great scientists are skilled at doing research and at communicating their findings. Ryan challenged each of our interns to come up with an elevator pitch for their research project so they could practice distilling their findings, tailoring their tone and content to a specific audience, and presenting out loud with no props. Mya was the first to finish up her poster and presentation, so she got to work writing her project pitch, and delivered it to Ryan. She did a great job, and it was good practice, especially for someone who gets nervous for public speaking. Everyone else has worked on their pitches as they are able, and they each came up with something good. Read on!

Mya: Artificial harbor seal haulouts

Harbor seals can be cute, but they are eating our fish and destroying our docks. Artificial haulouts, which are man-made structures like logbooms and marinas, give them space to lay there, populate, and eat our fish. How has the area of artificial haulouts changed from 1990-2021 in South Puget Sound? I took the time to measure the area of the artificial haulouts in South Puget Sound. The log booms have shrunk drastically, and the marinas and aquaculture floats have stayed the same. Now with this information we can better protect our salmon from the harbor seal THREAT!

Seactis: Does lure size matter?

Does size matter? I was interested in this project because I wanted to go catch more fish. My research question is: does lure size matter to catch more legal sized fish? We fished two lures, one small and one large, at the same depths. Our data isn’t significantly different but maybe with more time it will show a pattern that larger lures catch larger fish where there is larger bait and a small lure will catch larger salmon where there is smaller bait. So, does size matter? The study continues…

Aunjraya: Olive snail size distribution

If you are interested in gathering olive snails, learning about their patterns would make harvesting a lot easier. These past few weeks I’ve been doing research to see if olive snails organize themselves by size. I did this by making stations every ten meters on the beach starting from the water line. After gathering up to 100 snails at each station, I measured them to see if there was any trend in length throughout the beach. I found that the snails definitely had a trend in length, the smallest being on the waterline and larger being further up the beach. Every 50 meters, the average olive snail length went up by 2mm. Learning these patterns on the beach will help gatherers be more selective with the size of the olive snails that they are gathering.