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Discover the heartbeat of Juneau's cultural and community landscape with 'Capital Chat.' This series explores the vibrant world of the community, arts, and dynamic cultural and social events happening in Alaska's Capital City. Tune in to 'Capital Chat' for your essential guide to the pulse of our community, where every story is an adventure and every voice matters.
Joining me from uas is Nicole as part of the faculty there and student Eliza and Beatrice. Nicole, welcome to KINY.
Speaker 2:Hi. Thanks. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:How long have you been with the university?
Speaker 2:Only two years. So this is my first year as term faculty. And prior to this, I was postdoctoral researcher with Julie Schramm, also in the biology department.
Speaker 1:And, coming to Alaska and experiences this ecosystem, how different has it been and and what has been the some of the surprises?
Speaker 2:Well, we had a bear break my side gate this weekend. So that's that's new. But I am coming from Coastal Oregon, so I'm used to the rain and a little bit of the cold. Snow's new. And so actually that for my work has been really interesting understanding even lower temperatures, how they impact intertidal organisms that we study.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And I'm looking forward to talking about your research and some of the things you've found there. Eliza, where are you from?
Speaker 3:I'm from Long Beach, Washington. It's just a peninsula in Washington right by the mouth of the Columbia River.
Speaker 1:And so you're familiar with this kind of weather?
Speaker 3:Kind of like Nicole. I'm familiar with, like, the or not this cold, but a little bit cold. The snow, very, very new.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Listen. The snow the last couple of years has been very new to everybody. Like enough already.
Speaker 1:And and what year are you in now?
Speaker 3:I'm currently in my senior year. Hopefully, I'll complete all my classes adequately and graduate on time. I don't have any doubt that I won't, but, yeah, I'm just a senior.
Speaker 1:Oh, good for you. Okay. And Beatrice, you're from New Mexico, I understand. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's correct.
Speaker 1:Completely different ecosystem there. Spent a little
Speaker 4:time. Love
Speaker 1:New Mexico. Santa Fe is one of my favorite places. And what brought you to Alaska?
Speaker 4:Well, there aren't any oceans in Albuquerque. So, studying marine biology is a little bit hard to do down there.
Speaker 1:The and and sorry. What what, what grade are you in?
Speaker 4:So I'm a sophomore, theoretically. K. So I'm I'm relatively new here. I'm super lucky to have gotten to do some research with Nicole and company.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, welcome. Nicole, let's talk about some of the research and and what each of these students can can enlighten us with as far as, the the state of our oceans right now, I guess.
Speaker 2:Sure. So, working with Julie Schramm at UAS, we actually, have a lot of projects ongoing. But the one I wanted to highlight was, experiment that we ran in our wet lab this last summer. We actually had seven interns. And so we've got two of them here today, to talk about their parts.
Speaker 2:But what we did basically is we ran experiments with elevated temperature and lowered salinity, so fresher rather than saltier water with Pacific blue mussels. So those are the black bivalves that are really common in the intertidal here, and we could eat them. People do eat them. A lot of animals eat them. They play a really important role in the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:And so basically we wanted to understand how these mussels respond when they're exposed to high temperatures, low salinity, and the combination of both. And to understand their response, we measured a bunch of stuff. So, while they were living, Beatrice will, talk about how she measured Bissell thread strength. So those are the threads they make to actually hold onto the rocks. And then Eliza actually used respirometry to understand how their metabolism was responding, by measuring the oxygen consumption.
Speaker 2:And then we had a bunch of other students who were measuring things like organic content and caloric content, how many calories are in the tissue, like how good of a food source are they in response to these stressors. And basically we're now still processing all the data, looking at it together, and then we're gonna rerun, this experiment to gather more data. But basically what we saw and what we've processed so far is that the combination of stressors was the most detrimental. We saw the biggest difference in response in those various parameters when there was both high temperature and low salinity compared to the control, which was normal temperature, normal salinity.
Speaker 1:And this is the state of our world. This is global warming. This is the effect on all of this. And when you think, like, Eliza mentioned the the surprise of the amount of snow that we had here this year, it's hard sometimes to think, how that is affecting the oceans and the food source specifically. What what what effect did it have on the quality of the food source?
Speaker 1:Can you tell yet?
Speaker 2:We cannot tell yet because actually I just had a student process the endpoint for the some of the tissue quality samples.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But actually, these two got funding. They're gonna continue collecting data on the tissue samples we preserved at the end of the summer, at the end of the experiment
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:This coming academic year.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I can't wait to hear the results of that. Beatrice, why don't you share your results or the process and what you discovered?
Speaker 4:Yeah, sure. So I was looking at thistle threads, which are the little threads they produce to attach to things. So we have these muscles in our experiment attaching to little containers that I would pick up. And then I would use a force gauge to measure how much force it would take to break those threads.
Speaker 1:How much force was there?
Speaker 4:No more than like two newtons, which is like, it's less force than you would take to break hair.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Okay.
Speaker 4:And then I would also count how many Bissell threads they had produced. That's anywhere up to 60, I think was the highest number I found. During the experiment, we found that particularly in low salinity and higher temperature water environments, They started producing fewer byssal threads and weaker byssal threads, which is obviously a problem because if they break off of the rocks where they live, they die or they get eaten by predators. We also found that in the middle of the experiment, we did a large scale freshwater flush to sort of simulate the flooding of the Mendenhall River, right? That sort of thing, where there's this big influx of freshwater.
Speaker 4:And we found that the mussels who had already been living in low salinity environments, fresher water, they stopped producing byssal threads almost altogether, which is a problem.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Eliza, what about you? Your area of expertise and what you cover?
Speaker 3:My area of expertise was the respirometry, which basically just means the amount of oxygen consumed over a certain period of time. And I did all of my data collection at the end of the experiment, while they were still in the freshwater, warm temp, all those combinations. And my, kind of preliminary results, very preliminary, were, that the juvenile mussels had a sort of resilience to, all the temperatures and salinities that we threw at it or throughout them. And, yeah, I'll be continuing my research on the adults. We're hopefully gonna start the experiment up again this fall, I think.
Speaker 3:And, this time, I'll just be focusing on adults rather than the juveniles. So, hopefully, maybe they'll, show a different story.
Speaker 1:So, Nicole, when it comes to temperature difference Mhmm. What kind of variant are we looking at here?
Speaker 2:In our experiment, and these were, based on field sensor data for summer, right, specifically.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So, we had between nine and thirteen degrees C. Those were our temperature ranges. So nine was ambient like what was just coming in from Auk Bay into our seawater system. And then we had a series of heaters where we heated it up to 13 degrees. And that was actually because this is a new experimental system.
Speaker 2:We wanted to go a little higher, but we were having trouble. And so we were doing a lot of troubleshooting on just how we could raise the temperature and maintain it. We wanted to aim for more like plus five, plus six c, but we were able to do about plus four.
Speaker 1:You know, it's it's evident to me why we're attracting students from across the country to to come to our state, to, our city, to to learn the the, the things that you're teaching there. Thank you, and congratulations.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:Is there anything, in in closing that you want folks to know about what you're doing and and maybe, when we expect to see some some more tangible results from what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would check-in at the end of fall. We'll have a lot more of our data processed, both, the samples done and data analyzed. And then, you know, if there are any students listening who have this tiny little dream of pursuing marine biology, Just try it out. Even if you don't become a marine biologist, there's so many skills and so much fun.
Speaker 2:You could really walk away with a lot, pursuing this field. And I don't know. Maybe you'll be a professor someday.
Speaker 1:Love that. And before I let you go, the what what are you hoping the resolution to this research is going to give us when this is all said and done?
Speaker 2:You know, we're not gonna be able to stop climate change because we have findings, that it negatively impacts the mussels. But I think it's gonna tell us a lot about maybe, if we notice declines in our food source, people are gonna take that seriously. Maybe these, animals are gonna move to more habitable spaces based on things like temperature and salinity. But basically, it's to to inform those people who use this as a resource, what they can expect to see.
Speaker 1:Nice. Beatrice, Eliza, good luck with your school year.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much.