UPDATES FROM THE ODFW MARINE RESERVES PROGRAM
We completed our spring hook and line survey at Cape Falcon, and hook-and-line/longline survey at Redfish Rocks. Our fall surveys will start at both sites in August.
Thanks to the help of our volunteer scientific divers, we completed all SCUBA surveys slated for June. Surveys will start back up this fall when underwater visibility tends to improve.
We installed two oceanographic devices in June, one at Cascade Head and one at Cape Falcon. Take a peek at this video taken while at sea at Cascade Head.
Our staff led a rocky intertidal undergraduate workshop with Dr. Selina Heppell’s students, from Oregon State University, at Otter Rock in mid-June. We also participated in two Bioblitz events organized by the Oregon Coast Aquarium. A big thanks to OMSI for inviting us to host an Oregon Marine Reserves outreach table at last month’s OMSI After Dark: Ocean event in Portland.
UPDATES FROM OUR COLLABORATORS
We continued collecting samples from SMURFs set out at Otter Rock and Redfish Rocks as part of juvenile fish recruitment surveys, led by Oregon State University and in collaboration with the Oregon Coast Aquarium. We’ve been seeing pulses of juvenile cabezon, rockfishes, and kelp greenling this past month. We’ve also seen a small handful of snailfish and clingfish in our samples. These surveys will be continuing through the summer.
We conducted biodiversity, sea star, and mussel bed surveys in rocky intertidal areas at both Otter Rock and Cascade Head. Check out photos of our research on our Flickr page.
Our staff went down to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology to meet up with researchers from the Smithsonian Institution to learn more about processing samples collected using underwater structures called ARMS to help us study biodiversity in the marine reserves. Smithsonian researchers have been using ARMS to study marine invertebrate biodiversity on reefs around the world for more than half a decade.