Jodi Pirtle's Mapping Matters

March 10, 2014

by Lisa Busch 

Habitat maps are a useful tool to fisheries researchers and assessors but are not often available for a large scale project.  Jodi Pirtle, a postdoc working for the Gulf of Alaska project, applies her seafloor mapping skill set to the Gulf of Alaska Integrated Ecosystem project to provide information on habitat.

Born and raised in Cordova, Alaska, Pirtle finds a lot of meaning in the work she is contributing to the project. "I've been thinking about this stuff my whole life," she says.  In the effort to better understand five species of commercially caught fish, Pirtle has been overlaying fisheries survey data on high resolution seafloor maps to get a better idea of the habitat preference of different fish. 

"It's landscape modeling which has been going on a long time on land, now applied to the ocean," says Pirtle who works at the NOAA Auke Bay Lab in Juneau.  "We are taking GIS data of all kinds - kelp beds, geology, seafloor terrain - and merging that with fisheries survey data to generate habitat suitability models and maps."  This kind of work has gone on on a small scale throughout the Gulf but this is the first large scale Gulf wide project of its kind. 

What do you do in Alaska in the Winter: Rockfish Party!

February 21, 2014

by Molly Zaleski

It's a rockfish party up here in Juneau! We're bioprocessing young of the year (YOY) rockfish that were collected in 2013. What does 'bioprocessing' mean? It means we've taken fin clips from them so that a partnering lab can identify if they're Pacific Ocean perch or a different kind of rockfish. We've also taken tissue samples from some to measure their RNA/DNA ratios. On top of that, we removed their stomach contents so that we can get a snapshot of what these little fellows have eaten. This can be pretty difficult because, while most of them have been frozen nicely and look like this:

Some of them have been squished in the transfer from the Gulf of Alaska to Juneau and look like this:

But we've got a crack team on the job to pull the stomach contents proficiently! Shout-outs to our contractor team: Wess Strasburger, Casey Debenham, Hannah Findlay, Tayler Jarvis, and Eamon Conheady.

Finally, they rockfish are dried (to calculate how much of their bodies are tissue versus moisture), and then processed for their chemical components: energy, lipids, ash, and protein. The energy is calculated through bomb calorimetry which is a really fun way of saying we blow them up and calculate the resulting energy from their fish-splosion!

It's a lot of information from some very tiny fish! And while it's fun working with the rockfish, we've noticed, anecdotally, that their eyes seem to be the last things that grind up when we try to homogenize the fish into a fine powder, which leaves me with the Rockwell hit, "Somebody's Watching Me" stuck in my head. If it's now stuck in your head, you're welcome! Rockwell:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody%27s_Watching_Me

In from the Field  Work

by Olav Orsmeth

December 16, 2013

Greetings from an adventure of a different kind- our postseason wrapup. Now that the field work is over, we are faced with two immediate new tasks: dealing with our gear and getting all of our sample analysis lined out.

Just yesterday I went down to the Alaska Marine Lines terminal to pick up our final shipment of gear, barged down from Juneau. Last week we got the bulk of the gear from Kodiak. The first and most important task is to dry everything out- stringing nets to dry, hanging up raingear, and spreading out all the electronics to get any residual moisture out. At the moment our gear room (pictured) looks like a bomb went off inside. Once everything is aired out we will clean, lubricate, and polish, then store things away in preparation for the next field effort (who knows when that will be!).

At the same time we're working on gear, we're also preparing all of our samples for analysis. We have zooplankton samples and fish stomachs in formalin (a preservative), frozen fish for the fatty acid and stable isotope analyses, and fish that we have saved for species identification by our taxonomy experts. We prepared sampling designs for all of these collections before starting the field work but we always collect more samples than we can analyze, because we never quite know what we're going to encounter in the field and how that will affect the ultimate sampling design. So, our challenge now it to asses the spatial and temporal breadth of the samples we were able to collect and revisit the original design. The main limitation is the cost of analyzing samples, as most of the procedures are quite expensive. It's often a trade-off between number of samples and the level of detail we can get from each sample.

For example, our zooplankton samples could be treated in two ways. We could do a basic description, where we identify the organisms to a lower level of taxonomic detail (family or genus rather than to species). Because the time spent per sample would be relatively short, we could analyze all of the samples we collected and have high spatial resolution. We could also take a contrasting approach, in which we identify every organism down to species level. This is time-consuming and would limit the total number of samples we could analyze, but gives us much more valuable information, especially considering that very little sampling has been done in these bays prior to our study. Which one is better?

I talked in a previous post about the question of scale. In the case of zooplankton, our temporal scales are pretty much fixed- we want sufficient samples to make seasonal and interannual comparisons. The question really is the appropriate spatial scale- if we do fewer samples, do we have sufficient spatial resolution to describe the zooplankton community in a bay? How about describing prey fields for young fish?

After wrangling with such problems, it's somewhat of a relief to break off and spend a couple of hours scrubbing out buckets and spraying WD40 on rusty c-clamps. All in a day's work!

More is Better 

December 10,2013

by Molly Zaleski

The Gulf of Alaska project has 5 focal fish, that we're trying to learn more about:

Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus)

Walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma)

Rockfish (Sebastes sp.)

Arrowtooth flounder (Atheresthes stomias)

Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria)

That last one has been a tough one for us to find; this summer's survey on the Northwest Explorer resulted in only three sablefish collected! So, imagine my surprise when I was out on the Oscar Dyson fall survey and we pulled in this haul:

That's right, we single-handedly doubled the year's catch in one haul!

In total, we brought home 5 sablefish from that trip, and while that might not be much, it's a start to learn a little bit more about this elusive, tasty species! In honor of the Black Cod Five, here are 5 fun facts about sablefish:

1. Black cod aren't really gadids - they belong to the family Anoplopomatidae as opposed to cod and pollock who belong to the family Gadidae

2. Our Alaskan population of sablefish ranges from the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea through the Gulf of Alaska to Northertn British Columbia, but there's a southern population that runs along Washington, Oregon, and California!

3. Yet another common name for sablefish is "butter fish" because of their high oil content - they melt in your mouth (in the yummy way, not the gross way). My favorite way to eat these fish is smoked: so. amazingly. good!

4. The fishery is mainly a longline fishery, using a line with thousands of hooks spread along the sea floor to catch them. As the line is hauled up, some boats experience whale depredation, which is when sperm whales or killer whales pick the sablefish off the hooks and eat them!

5. There's a tagging program in Alaska NOAA scientists tag the sablefish so that when fishermen catch them, they can report the tag number to NOAA and the researchers can then learn just how far the fish might have traveled. As a "thank you" for the returned tag, you can generally get a hat!

Learn more at NOAA FishWatch!

To Everything There is a Season

November 18, 2013

by Olav Ormseth

A few days ago I returned from our last inshore survey of the 2013 field season (and the last field activity of the GOAIERP). The survey went very well, despite the challenges of short days and cold temperatures. We were blessed with weather that, while not perfect, didn’t get in the way of our research as it has sometimes done in the past. It’s always interesting to return to the same places in different seasons and see the changes that have been wrought, on land as well is in the sea. In Kiliuda Bay, the bare hills are sort of a tired brown in spring, bright green in summer, and golden in the fall (see picture). In Port Dick, a hint of termination dust was to be seen at the very top of the coastal peaks. 

In my last post we were headed north to Port Dick, and that is where we worked for the remainder of the survey. The situation there was similar to Kiliuda Bay, with fewer fish all around. We were confirmed in our belief that eelgrass patches seem to retain more fish than kelpy habitats later in the season. Why might that be? We don’t know, but one idea is that eelgrass persists year-round (although it dies back considerably) whereas many kelps disappear almost completely. So, it might be that during the winter, eelgrass simply provides the sort of protective habitat that little fish need.

We were also able to recover the mini-mooring that we had in Port Dick since May. I’ve taken a quick peek at the data and there are some interesting patterns there, including that the deeper water continues to warm even after the surface waters have begun to cool. Comparing the east and west inshore moorings should be interesting.

On the flight back from Kodiak to Anchorage, as we flew over two of our sampling sites in clear weather, I experienced a good illustration of the concept of scale as a major factor in the GOAIERP. From the viewpoint of our little skiff, the distance from the mouth of Izhut Bay to its head seems huge. But from an airplane the two areas seem very close, especially relative to the entirety of Marmot Bay and the Kodiak Island Archipelago. So it is from the perspective of a fish- or for that matter, a parcel of seawater- how different are things within a bay? How about among the various bays just on Kodiak Island? What about variability over the entire northern GOA? In the GOAIERP we are working at multiple scales, which affects everything from how we conduct our research to our interpretation of how the ecosystem works.

NPRB Co-Sponsors Arctic Ocean Workshop

By Jamal Moss from the Northwest Explorer

Fun photos from Barrow May 18-23.

NPRB co-sponsored a recent workshop that brought together Arctic scientists and educators from the North Slope and elsewhere in the United States to develop lessons about the Arctic Ocean. The workshop was organized in collaboration with the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), the Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE) Alaska, and the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS).NPRB Arctic Program Manager, Danielle Dickson, participated in the workshop May 18 – 23 in Barrow, Alaska.

Among the participants were several scientists who are actively engaged in Arctic research, educators from the North Slope Borough School District representing a variety of grade levels, and teachers from outside of Alaska who have participated in the PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) program. Researcher-teacher pairs who formed lasting relationships through PolarTREC shared their experiences and inspired North Slope teachers to reach out to the scientists who frequent the Alaska Arctic to bring Arctic science into their classrooms. Local Barrow community members including elders and whaling captains also shared their wisdom.

The incorporation of traditional knowledge and the importance of putting lessons into context using local examples figured prominently in the workshop. The teachers from the North Slope Borough School District developed lessons based on the Iñupiaq Learning Framework that is currently being implemented. Lessons were developed for many different grade levels from kindergarten to high school and their focus ranged from basic Arctic Ocean food webs to the potential effects of changing environmental conditions on the balance of ecosystems. The finished products will be made available on the ARCUS website in early July.

Short days; Science Crew Enjoys Prime Rib Dinner

Short days; Science Crew Enjoys Prime Rib Dinner

by Olav Ormseth

November 6, 2013

We are sitting at the dock in Kodiak having our brief mid-cruise stopover. This time around it's just a few groceries and some bolts, so it's a quick stop. We just spent a productive 3 days down in Kiliuda Bay, doing our usual combination of seining, acoustics, and oceanography. There are definitely fewer fish around this time of year, sometimes to a surprising degree. In the inner part of Kiliuda we got a good haul of the "usual suspects"- saffron cod of various ages, age-zero Pacific cod, greenlings, etc. but in the outer parts of the bay our seine nets came up almost empty. We did catch a number of glass-clear fish larvae, which we are bringing back to the lab for identification. There also didn't seem to be as many fish in the deeper areas sampled by our acoustics. The water is definitely getting colder. It was quite a relief to get a good haul of little Pacific cod- as I told my skiff mate Matt as we hauled in the catch, with this one haul we can now consider the cruise a success, no matter what else happens. A bit of exaggeration perhaps, but I say that because the seasonal nature of our work is very important. We now have what we need to determine growth rates and to investigate how diets and energy stores change over time. Without the fall data points our information from earlier surveys is left hanging. Although we have been blessed with good weather (by November standards), working this late in the year is hard work. With the short days we are constantly running against the clock, and still have to finish up after nightfall- we wrapped up our first day in the skiff with a run in the dark, fighting rain and chop, and using the "strobe" function on my headlamp to let the boat know where we were. That evening' s prime rib dinner felt well-deserved! We now head north to Port Dick, hoping to repeat our successful work in Kiliuda. 

Reeling from the Shutdown, and Battening Down the Hatches

By Olav Ormseth

October 24, 2013

By now I suppose even the hermits sitting in their caves high up in the mountains know that the federal government was shut down for 17 days in October. Federal employees were furloughed (and indeed, prohibited from working) and federal research vessels had to return to port. As I wrote in my last post, for us on the inshore survey it meant cutting our fall east-side survey roughly in half: we were able to survey Salisbury Sound, St. Lazaria, and Whale Bay, but were unable to reach Islas Bay, Torch Bay, and Graves Harbor. The offshore survey on the east-side (which used 2 vessels, one for fishing and one for oceanography) was completed before the shutdown, as was the fall visit to the Seward Line. However, the fall west-side offshore survey was severely curtailed, first because of weather and then the shutdown. I haven't heard yet exactly which stations they were able to complete, but I understand they were limited to the areas closer to shore and in the vicinity of Kodiak city.

We are going to be able to salvage a large part of our fall west-side inshore survey (which was originally supposed to start October 15), but we can't start until November 2. We were unable to ship our gear from Juneau to Kodiak due to the shutdown, and because it is a lengthy process to get the wheels of bureaucracy turning again, we couldn't ship until yesterday. Prior obligations mean we can't stay out later than the 11th, so we'll have a 10-day survey instead of the planned 15 days. Unfortunately the weather is pretty much guaranteed to be awful in November; hence the second part of this post's title. Goat-roper hats (the Peruvian-style ones with the earflaps) and mitts will be standard issue in the skiff, and we'll likely spend a day or two at anchor hiding from the wind.

It's still too early to tell what all this means for the project; at least we will have some data from the fall in both regions (east/west) and inshore/offshore. Until we dig into the data we won't really know how important the missing data are. But we are all frankly frustrated that after so much hard work our research was damaged by something so unnecessary and beyond our control.

Heading Back Early

by Olav Ormseth
October 1, 2013

As I write this the boat is heading back to Juneau with our northern inshore sites still unsampled. Because of the government shutdown, we are having to stop all activities and return home. I haven't heard yet what the impact is to our offshore surveys, but I am guessing it is the same for them. Hard to say yet how this will impact the GOAIERP; but it ain't good, that's for sure. More to come when we are allowed back to work.

Acoustic Work Perseveres Despite the Weather

by Olav Ormseth
September 25, 2013
Once again the weather is a major factor in conducting our inshore surveys. We just got done with three days of sampling in Salisbury Sound, the only place we could get to due to the storms on the outer coast. Despite constant rain ( but thankfully little wind) we were able to get some good seining, acoustics, and oceanography work done. Seems like there are more juvenile shiner perch than usual. We also ran into some healthy-looking young Pacific cod, and of course more herring. We also picked up our mooring and redeployed it with plans to pick it back up next spring. If it survives, that is! We found that's someone had shot our mooring buoy, with the bullet passing clean through. Thankfully the buoy stayed sufficiently inflated so that we didn't lose the mooring. One of the risks you take doing inshore work! We are taking advantage of a lull in the storms (such as it is) to do some work in Sitka Sound and then scoot down to Whale Bay with another big low-pressure system nipping at our heels.

Beating the Weather not Beaten By It

by Russ Hopcroft

September 22, 2013


We are now 11 days into the Eastern Gulf's fall cruise on the USFWS vessel
Tiglax.  Thus far, we are working under the opposite weather conditions
encountered in the spring, in that weather for the Gulf of Alaska grid has
been great, while weather during the Seward Line component has been
challenging.  BUT before I get ahead of myself let me set the stage.

The purpose of our cruise is basically to describe the state of the
physical, chemical and biological condition in the eastern Gulf of Alaska,
and then switch over to the Seward Line time-series in the north-central
Gulf.  The sampling plan involves sampling 65 stations along a fixed grid
of 13 "lines" stretching across the south-eastern shelf at 10 nautical
mile spacing, and then 2 additional lines on our way back to the "Seward
Line domain".  Our general approach involves 3 main sampling tools: 1) the
CTD (Conductivity/salinity, temperature, Depth sensor) plus its various
accessory sensors, along with the "rosette" of 12 bottles attached to it
that are triggered at defined depths to provide samples for nutrients
(fertilizers), chlorophyll (plant pigments)  and micro-plankton
(single-celled plants and animals), 2) Plankton nets - "butterfly" nets
attached to strong paired frames resembling a pair of spectacles or Bongo
drums used to catch the small animals in the water (we will be deploying 2
sets of Bongo nets of different sizes), 3) a special "metal-free" vane
with motorized water sampler and a towed water sampler used to collect
water for analysis of important micronutrient dissolved iron.  Additional
measurement on temperature, salinity, plant pigments, and ocean
acidification are being made continuously on water pumped through the
ship.  Finally, during daytime hours a dedicated observer records the
seabirds and marine mammals encountered.

Setup by our 12-member science team began midday Sept 11. The Tiglax was
early, but we soon discovered the crane requires to lift larger items onto
the ship was not working. After several hours of trying to fix the crane,
we scrambled late afternoon to locate a crane elsewhere in Seward to lift
our heaviest items: the iron van and the winch, each of which weight 3
tons.  Setup was finally finished around t, and Captain Billy
Pepper had us to our first "test" station, RES2.5 and GAK1, at ~4
am on the 12th.  Weather was perfect, and we began our 2-day trek across
the central Gulf of Alaska to meet up with the F/V Northwest Explorer.
The transit days provided a leisurely opportunity to setup and configure
equipment, as well as for the iron team to sample across the central Gulf
of Alaska.

We reached our first station at on the outer end of SEM linet on 13th. 
 Most of the people on this cruise had been on the
spring cruise, and we hit the ground running with high efficiency and few
equipment issues.  The Northwest Explorer was initially ahead of us, but
within a few days we were caught up, and eventually passed them as we
worked the lines sequentially southward.   Our only sampling problem
revolved around repeated failure of the iron sampling bottles to open and
close correctly - after several failed deployments, and no clear
solutions, we discontinued their use and concentrated on the towed iron
sampler instead. All was going well until we realized we were shipped
about half of the nutrient bottles needed to complete the cruise AND it
became clear from weather maps, that a large storm would be hitting us
very soon that could trap us in Southeast Alaska for several days.

After a few satellite-phone calls and e-mails over the weekend, plans were
in place to have more bottles air-shipped to Sitka. We ducked into early
on the morning of the 17th, then headed back out to resume sampling.  The
lost time in Sitka and the looming storm required we drop two of the minor
lines (SED and SEB) to be out of the area ahead of the weather.  By
mid-morning on the 18th our sampling was wrapped up and we were heading
north to Yakutak, while I sorted live zooplankton for caloric analysis by
other components of the project.

We managed to stay ahead of the weather, with relatively smooth sailing
northward.  With a storm sitting over the Northern Gulf, and a brief
fair-weather window coming followed by an even larger storm, we had some
time to kill before moving eastward.  All considered, a brief stop at the
town of Yakatak seemed possible for a few hours on the evening of the
19th.  From there we headed to the final sampling line by Kayak Island
before ducking into Prince William Sound just ahead of the oncoming storm
with 45-50 knots winds at dawn on the 20th.  I'll take events up there
with the "Seward Line" component of the cruise next blog.

In terms of the science, our biggest surprise was how warm the surface
waters were still for September: over 140C at many stations.  The
inner-most stations has a decidedly "coastal" assemblage of small
zooplankton species, while the outer stations, and particular those near
the shelf break, had larger copepods and krill were also often abundant.
I was also surprised to see what I consider "high" numbers of the large
arrow-shaped pteropod or sea-butterfly Clio pyramidata in many offshore
samples.

Fall Inshore

By Olav Ormseth
9/22/2013

We are heading out of Juneau into a "storm force front" to begin our fall inshore surveys. With these conditions we are having to alter our itinerary, working our way through inside waters to Salisbury Sound so that we can avoid the 20+ seas that are currently battering the outer coast. Sampling during the fall is always a challenge; we are pretty much guaranteed to not be able to sample in all the areas we would like. So we just have to come up with plans A through G and see how it goes. A big focus on this trip will be to get some better descriptions of the nearshore habitats that we sample with our seines. We want to know how far these vegetated areas extend. This will allow us to make at least some basic estimates of how many fish are in the bays, by taking the density estimate from our seine hauls and multiplying that by the total area of that particular habitat. To facilitate this work, I built a couple of "underwater viewing scopes" out of plumbing pipe and plexiglass, that will allow us to cut the surface glare and quickly assess the habitat below. Old school science, in direct contrast to our fancy acoustic and oceanographic instruments!

Its Shark Week in the Flesh

by Jamal Moss

9/17/13

Sampling of the Southeast grid is well underway and we have certainly encountered numerous sharks this fall, having captured 2 blue sharks and 8 salmon sharks. A commercial salmon troller off the cost of Yakobi Island confirmed high abundance this year, claiming that sharks have been responsible for damaging the fleets gear. 

When Science vessel meets Science vessel...

by Jamal Moss

9/13/13

The Northwest Explorer  crossed paths with the R/V Tiglax at station SEC30 this afternoon. It was exciting for both crews. R/V Tiglax towed the “iron fish” to measure iron content in the water while we deployed the surface trawl.

Offshore Fishing

September 15, 2013

by Casey Debenham

Welcome to the third research leg of GOAIERP, aboard the F/V Northwest Explorer. We have successfully sampled the both Kayak Island and Yakutat line, and are now working the offshore grid of the Southeast Alaska. Although we are enjoying some nice weather right now we did have one storm blow through as we working off of Yakutat.  At one point we had 15+ft seas and winds gusting over 50 knots.  After completing 3 of the 4 stations we called it quits and anchored up in front of Yakutat. This offered up a nice opportunity for both the crew and scientist to get ashore and stretch their legs in and do some sightseeing in the remote town of Yakutat. After waiting a day for things to calm down we went back out and finished our last station before heading back down towards Cross Sound.  So far compared to the spring and summer sampling, our catches have been light, especially offshore. We have, however, managed, to collect some of our focal fish including rockfish, pollock and even of a couple of the elusive sablefish. Another interesting thing is that we have been catching a variety of sharks. Off the coast of Kayak Island we caught two blue sharks, while off of Yakutat we caught a few spiny dogfish and most recently in Southeast we caught two salmon sharks. One of these Salmon sharks was just a small pup, only measuring 85.5 cm (2.8ft) and weighing 10.2kg  (22.5lbs). I asked if we could keep him as a pet but alas we let him go in hopes that he grows up big and happy. 

SHARK!!

by Jeanette Gann

8/8/2013  

Scientists quickly measure a salmon shark before releasing it back into the water.

More sharks!! This morning started out with part sun and calm seas. Our first surface trawl of the day caught a salmon shark, an unusual sight in our nets, but exciting! According to Alaska Department of Fish and Game, these sharks can live to be 25 years old, with a range across the North Pacific from the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk to the Sea of Japan in the western Pacific, and from the Gulf of Alaska to southern Baja California, Mexico, in the eastern Pacific. Sharks can have a maximum weight of over 660 pounds, and a maximum length of over 10 ft (average length is about 6-7 ft). They eat sea otters, birds, salmon, squid, sablefish, herring, walleye Pollock, and a variety of other fish.  Salmon sharks are widely distributed in the subarctic and temperate North Pacific Ocean.They range across the North Pacific from the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk to the Sea of Japan in the western Pacific, and from the Gulf of Alaska to southern Baja California, Mexico, in the eastern Pacific

Trials and Tribulations of a Purse Line

by Olav Ormseth

August 18, 2013

Our chartered vessel, the Island C, is currently warming up its engines as we prepare to head for Izhut Bay.  We have been down in Kiliuda Bay for the last four days, and steamed in to Kodiak early this morning for water, supplies, and a few other needed things. Having a stop back in Kodiak after doing the first bay of the trip is very valuable, as it allows us to figure out if there is anything that needs replacement, repair, or enhancement.

For example, the first couple of days in the skiff convinced me that our little purse seine wasn't working as it should. A purse seine is a net that is set in a circle, so that it forms a circular wall- corks on top of the net to float it, weighted lead line (as in the the metal) on the bottom. After we get the seine set in a circle, we pull in a line running through runs along the leadline. This pulls the bottom of the net together, forming a large bag or purse and keeping any fish inside the net from escaping. Much larger versions of this net are used by commercial fishers to catch salmon, tuna, and herring; our little net is twenty feet deep and forms a circle about 40 feet in diameter. We have found that this is a great tool for sampling nearshore habitat.

Recently, however, we have been having increasing problems with the purse line getting wrapped in the web, and we noticed that the purse line was getting pretty chafed after being dragged through numerous types of kelps, eelgrasss, barnacles, and gravel. So this morning we went off to Kodiak Marine Supply and got ourselves a shiny, smooth new purse line. We'll string the new line as we steam up to Izhut and should be ready to drop the skiff in the water later this afternoon! More in a week or so.

Heading Out

August 13, 2013

Hello from Kodiak! As I write we are headed out to sea and I am trying to write this before we get out of range. We had our usual hectic 24 hours of prepping for the cruise (including fighting a faulty propane valve on the forklift, shifting our schedule to accommodate the high tide we require to load the boat, and discovering that our skiff's fuel tank had gone missing- good thing we have spares of almost everything!). After all the running around it feels really good to leave town behind, take a bit of a breather, and then be free to turn our thoughts to what we're out here for- the rich world of scientific discovery!

We head first for Kiliuda Bay, south of the town of Kodiak. We'll spend 4 days there. Kiliuda is a very interesting place and always full of life- everything from herring to Dungeness crabs, including of course some of the young Pacific cod and Pollock that are a focus of the study. There are also bears, which adds excitement to our beach seining work. From there we head north. A new addition to this cruise is that we will be collecting some samples for a collaborator who is studying stable isotope patterns in glacial bays (stable isotopes are a sort of natural marker that can be used to determine the source of nutrients and other organic materials). Kiliuda Bay has no glacial influence whatsoever, so it will provide an illuminating comparison to the work done in glacier-influenced waters (we hope). I'm down to one bar AND I smell dinner so I will sign off.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

by Olav Ormseth

August 6 2013

Greetings from Juneau! We (the inshore survey team) just pulled into Juneau to complete our spring eastern GOA survey. Overall the trip went very well. In fact, we suffered a sort of "embarrassment of riches", in that we had so many fish in some of our catches and had to spend so much time working up the catch (sorting and then counting, and then measuring length), that we didn't have time to do quite everything we had wanted to do (i.e. we had to cut a few oceanography stations and skip some surface trawls). That's the nature of the work we do- there are only so many hours in the day, and there's always some trade off involved in where we direct our efforts. The huge catches usually involved young-of-the-year (YOY) Pacific herring, which are only about 4 cm long. In one purse seine set we caught 9,000 of the little guys. Herring were one of the big stories from this trip- we had never seen so many herring, especially the young ones, and in so many places. We also encountered juvenile sand lance in large numbers. In the northernmost bays (Torch Bay and Graves Harbor) we caught a lot of YOY Pacific cod and YOY walleye pollock. In that area we were also sometimes accompanied by a trio of harbor porpoises. The most dramatic event for me was witnessing the live birth of young shiner perch- we seined up a bunch of obviously gravid (pregnant) shiner perch, and suddenly little tiny but perfectly-formed shiner perch started popping out of the mothers. We got those females back in the water quickly so that we wouldn't hurt the newborn perch. Live birth is rare among fishes and it was certainly exciting to see it happening before our very eyes!

Bird Watching

by Jeanette Gann, Chief Scientist aboard the Northwest Explorer

8/2/2013

beautiful day spent heading north to our first station. Below the bird observer John Warzybok checking out the birds and scenery as we head into Cross Sound.

Dogfish

8/3/2013

Our first day of sampling went smoothly with the last catch of the day yielding more than 780 spiny dogfish.  Scientists worked quickly to count and release the fish, as they are not a primary target species for this survey. A few individuals were held for weights and lengths. Spiny Dogfish are found in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in both northern and southern hemispheres, getting their name from spines found on their dorsal fins.  They are a highly migratory species that school with individuals of the same size class as they grow (www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/gallery/descript/spinydogfish/spinydogfish.html) 

Finally found Rockfish

Wyatt Fournier

The narrow continental shelf and steep slope characteristics of the eastern Gulf of Alaska has intrigued biologists and oceanographers for years.  The GOAIERP offers one of the first fisheries oceanography surveys to thoroughly explore this region of the Pacific Ocean thus acquiring valuable data previously not available.  Due to high research interests in the inner domain of the Southeastern sampling grid and limited ship time, the outer most stations (80 miles offshore) were not sampled this year........ up until now.   With a research interest to occupy these offshore stations and explore the fish community, I directed the Northwest Explorer to head out to the deepest water.  

Up until we reached the farthest station we had caught only ~20 rockfish total with our trawl net.  Once we reached these farthest stations we were catching up to 300 rockfish per tow!  It appears I was wrong when I stated in my earlier post that it may be a poor year for juvenile rockfish survival.  This is why we are here, to observe distribution and survival of juvenile marine fish in their ever-changing marine environment. 

With a bum knee, this is my last post from the Northwest Explorer.  I wish her and her crew the best of weather.  I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me again.

Endangered Species Sighted

by Wyatt Fournier

When I asked Marty, our seabird and marine mammal observer from US Fish and Wildlife, what the highlights of his trip were he listed off numerous species of birds.  A Red Legged Kitty Wake, usually sighted in the Bering Sea, took a ride on our bow for a while. A South Polar Skua flew by perhaps at the end of a long journey from the Antarctic.  Marty even helped rescue a Storm Petrel that had crashed landed on the NW Explorer and he built a bird feeder out of a pink pen and a plastic pipette filled with sugar water for a lost humming bird. 

  

But the rarest sighting was the endangered Short Tail Albatross.  This large rare seabird came perilously close to extinction when they were hunted for their feathers in the late 19th century. By the 1930s the only population left was on Tori-shima, which is listed as a class A volcano.  By 1949 the species was thought to be extinct but an estimated 50 individuals returned to the island and the first egg was observed in 1954.

The picture Marty was able to get is of a juvenile, it is still recognized by the brightly colored bill.

Read about US Fish and Wildlife’s efforts to protect this amazing bird:

http://alaska.fws.gov/fisheries/endangered/pdf/STALfactsheet.pdf

and to Encounters North public radio segment on the albatross http://encountersnorth.org/audio_files/Encounters_Albatross.mp3

Zooplankton or Ichthyoplankton??

by Wyatt Fournier

Plankton are organisms that live in the water column and are unable to swim against a current.  I mentioned in my previous post that phytoplankton, which are the photosynthesizing primary producers (plants) in the ocean, are collected by Scott with a water sampler.  Our grad student from UAF, Sterling, is in charge of the Bongo net sampling that collects zooplankton and ichthyoplankton.   

Zooplankton are the small invertebrates that are the main consumers of phytoplankton and also the main prey item for larval and juvenile fish.  Ichthyoplankton are the eggs and larval life stages of fish and since they cannot yet swim against the current, they are easily caught in the Bongo net.  Sterling then has the task of finding and picking out the larval fish from the slew of plankton and preserving them for analysis.  The difficulty of this task is directly dependant on the sea height and weather.

To see what the oceanography equipment sampling on the Northwest, visit the Gulf of Alaska Project on Facebook.  https://www.facebook.com/GulfOfAlaskaProject

Pollock everywhere!!

Wyatt Fournier

As I mentioned in my first post, every year we observe something a little different out here in the Gulf of Alaska.  For the past few weeks we have been catching more Young Of the Year (YOY) Walleye pollock than on any previous survey.  Almost every time we haul the net back there are pollock, both at the surface and at depths up to 100 meters and deeper.  At the same time there has been a relatively low abundance of juvenile rockfish and arrowtooth flounder and no signs of Pacific cod or sablefish.

Our local climate has also been different this year as we experienced a prolonged cold spring that kept the snow pack in the mountains and the ocean temps cool.  Then in June, the state of Alaska had a mini-heat wave that melted snow and had locals peeling off clothing.  The cold spring kept the streams and rivers cool and may have delayed the development of smolting salmon and would explain why we have caught very few pink and chum salmon on this survey despite the warm weather this month. 

These temperature swings that we enjoy here on land are also taking place in the ocean and can influence reproduction timing and survival of marine fish.  It is possible that the ocean conditions and prey availability this spring were optimal for juvenile pollock survival but not as beneficial for other species.   Our physical and biological oceanography observations conducted on this survey will help us answer some of these unknowns as we investigate the mechanisms between climate variability and juvenile marine fish survival.