Going with the Flow in Juneau: Day Fifteen on the Alaska Road Trip

I would like to begin this blog by highlighting my stupendous mom who made this whole trip possible and amazing and awesome.

Everybody, Jane in two habitats:

Jane birding on Mt. Roberts.

Jane and her alter-ego, the giant hoary marmot.

Thanks for everything, Mom! I love you!

Ok, now for the Day Fifteen update. Juneau was lovely and vital and full of people who seemed really happy to be there. Our friend Marna and her two daughters live in a house on a crooked street in a quirky neighborhood filled with steep hills, flower gardens, dead-ends and staircases. The waterfront, quiet in the morning, soon filled up with four enormous cruise ships, each of which disgorged a thousand passengers onto the quaint downtown streets to shop for jewelry and trinkets.

Jane and Marna on Basin Road.

Marna was impressed by the fast-paced road trip schedule we’d been keeping, so she gave us four different attractions to pack into our day. “My family would take on one of these in a day,” she told us, “but for you guys, no problem!” We started with a walk up Basin Road, a street that soon became a cantilevered wooden track under sheer cliffs of moss and precarious forest.

We then headed down the hill to the waterfront, where we caught the first tram up to Mount Roberts. It’s unbelievable how steeply the mountains rise around Juneau!

Looking down the tram wires from Mt. Roberts.

The network of alpine trails could take a backpacker weeks to explore, so we saw just a snippet with breath-taking views and a handful of shy songbirds. The Lobaria lichens were the lushest, greenest, shiniest, most lung-worty specimens I’ve ever seen!

So green!

Nice ascocarps!

We looked for willow ptarmigans, but instead found another thrush. We should be getting good at these guys by now, but we still can't tell... is she hermit or gray-cheeked?

Birders, what do you think: hermit or gray-cheeked?

We left, before we had seen enough, to catch the 1 pm tour of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) fisheries science building. Compared to dramatic clifftops, touring a government building may sound dull, but I love seeing NOAA labs, and my mom indulged my strange request.

Compared to the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center where I worked this summer in Seattle, the Juneau building was state of the art. A mural of 50 life-sized model fishes from the region adorned the lobby’s wall. Four projectors shone on a globe-shaped screen to give the impression of a rotating earth. We got to watch NOAA’s “Science on a Sphere” presentation about the world and climate change here.

Science on a Sphere and the fish wall.

The wet lab contained touch-tanks of my favorites, including a sunflower star, Pycnopodia helianthoides. The biology and chemistry labs were staffed with friendly, busy scientists, and the lobby’s aquarium contained the largest leather star, Dermasterias imbricata, I’ve ever seen.

Jane examines squid eggs.

Two sculpins, a great (Myoxocephalus polyacanthocephalus) and a buffalo (Enophrys bison), cuddle puddling.

The building is heated by an efficient heat-exchange system that draws energy from the chilly waters of Gastineau Channel. In winter, it also recaptures heat blowing up through vents from the chemical hoods. The conference room has a glass wall overlooking the ocean, and our tour guide told us he gets too distracted by breaching whales when he sits facing that way. What a life!

I want this poster for my wall!

After the tour, we headed straight to Mendenhall Glacier. Two of the four trails were closed: one for bears, the other for flooding.

Mendenhall Glacier melts into Mendenhall Lake.

I think these terns may have been flooded out of house and home.

We fought our way through the crowd of cruise-boat tourists for a look at the receding blue ice, admired the icebergs she had calved into Mendenhall Lake, and moved on to the stream.

Red squirrel munching on a mushroom.

Here, bright red sockeye salmon were spawning! The waters were so shallow over the river rocks that the salmon had to expose their dorsal halves in their frantic push to move upstream. Several white carcasses rotted on the banks. I realized that I had never seen a healthy stream of salmon before! I’ve learned about these fish since grade school, visited the fish ladder at the Locks, witnessed the life stages at the Seattle Aquarium, watched documentaries about the fate of Alaskan salmon if Pebble Mine is dug… but here in front of me were the real thing, unaware of their symbolism, just trying to reproduce like the rest of us. I wish you the best, big sockeyes!

A sockeye too large for its small stream.

As we watched salmon from the bridge, a National Forest ranger approached us. “Are you looking for birds?” she asked. Finally, a ranger-ornithologist! Together we spotted juncos, yellow-rumped warblers, a Pacific slope flycatcher, and a western wood-pewee. She gifted us a Birds of Southeast Alaska checklist and recommended a trail for dippers.

Pacific slope flycatcher.

Western wood-pewee.

We were in luck. As we walked back to the parking lot, we passed a secluded bridge over another stream. The tree branches dripped with lichens, and the soil embankment was caked with emerald moss. “If I were a dipper, I’d live here!” I told my mom. “Oh my gosh, there’s a dipper!”

Ideal dipper (and Nina) habitat.

There she was, popping in and out of the clear water, the droplets rolling off her graphite back. A bird that loves mossy streams! I am so fond of dippers.

Dipping for bugs.

Ahhh!

Now back to Marna’s for a mouth-watering salmon dinner. Our first home-cooked meal. And after that, a jaunt back up the tram (tickets are good for the whole day, so we wanted to get our full use!) for sunset on Mount Roberts.

Gastineau Channel at sunset.

Looooong shadow dancers.

I think this black leafy stuff is tree pelt lichen, Peltigera collina.

We were hoping to get to bed early, but at 10:30 pm I realized I couldn’t find my (dead) iPhone, so I spent half an hour tearing apart my suitcase, the car, and everything in the room. Finally Annabelle (that’s my iPhone) appeared in the folds of an emergency blanket in the trunk of Prius. Oh, what can you do when inanimate objects play pranks on you…

End of day summary:

• Day of road trip: 15 
• Start: Juneau, Alaska, United States 
• Miles traveled: 45 
• Hours driven: 1 
• Favorite bird sighting: American dipper 
• End: Juneau, Alaska, United States

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Well, Officer, We're Poaching!

The Washington State Fish and Wildlife game warden pulled up next to the boat. "Whatcha fishing for?" he asked.

"Bocaccio," Nick replied.

The game warden gave him a skeptical look, owing to the fact that Puget Sound bocaccio rockfish are an endangered species, totally off-limits to fishermen.

"And canary," Nick continued.

The canary rockfish, a lovely orange-creamsicle with scales, is listed as threatened in our area.

"Really," responded the game warden, not sure now whether he was kidding.

"Oh! and yelloweye," Nick finished, naming the third and final species of threatened rockfish in the Sound. [Click here to read about my impromptu beach necropsy of a dead yelloweye!]

The warden's eyes got wide as he began to believe Nick's story. I've caught the dumbest poachers in Washington State! he must have been thinking.

That's when Nick hit him with the final piece of information. "Oh, and we're with NOAA under a federal fisheries research permit."

Nick keeps the game warden on his toes.

Sadly, I was not present when this conversation took place. I've heard it retold by my NOAA Hollings Scholarship mentor, Nick, and I can only imagine that game warden's face. I was, however, lucky enough to accompany Nick and a band of dedicated local anglers on a similar mission.

Our goal was to obtain genetic samples of these three endangered species of rockfish to determine whether their south Puget Sound populations were distinct from their open coastal counterparts, as had been predicted when these populations were given endangered status, or if they moved and bred freely with coastal fishes.

The yelloweyes, canaries and bocaccios evaded us that day, but I proudly hauled up one brown rockfish, Sebastes auricuculatus.

My most exciting catch, the relatively common a brown rockfish.

We measured each fish before releasing it with a special weighted pressure-release clip that held the fish by its lower jaw without damaging it.

The rockfishes, used to being at depths of at least 100 feet, had a little expansion trouble at the surface. This one's stomach can be seen protruding from its mouth. The hope is that everything returns to its normal deflated state once the fish is released at depth.

The crew also caught two species of sculpin: a buffalo or Enophrys bison, shown here, and a red Irish lord or Hemilepidotus hemilepidotus, my personal favorite. I sure wish I could have magically shipped these guys back in time and space to Friday Harbor Labs, where my Puddle research crew could have studied the functional morphology of their jaw muscles!

A buffalo sculpin shows off his preopercular spines and makes cute little growling sounds.

But mostly we caught dogs. By which I mean sharks.

"I got a big one!!!"

A spiny dogfish, Squalus acanthias, to be exact.

Another dog!

Did I mention it was Shark Week?

We recorded the size and sex of each dogfish we caught, even though we weren't there for shark research. The day's motto: "Don't waste an opportunity to take data because you'll never know when you might need it!" I lost count around fifty. Next time you're trying to sex a shark, just remember:

A male spiny dogfish has two claspers, modified pelvic fins that transfer sperm to the female during sexual reproduction.

A female spiny dogfish has no claspers. 

Dude, that's private!

We also hooked some unexpected invertebrates...

Such as this scallop.

And this purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus.

We didn't accomplish our goal of sampling endangered rockfish genetics, but we had a great time out on the water. There's no such thing as a bad day spent boating on the Puget Sound, sandwiched between silver water and pewter sky.

I think these gulls, hitching a leisurely ride on a barge of sand, would certainly agree.

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A Marine Mammal Murder Mystery

* Please be aware: there are graphic images of blood and body parts in this post. *

A crowd gathers.

A crowd gathers down on the dock... What's going on?

The body bag.

It's a crime scene. The body is lifted out of the ocean and rolled onto the dock.

The victim.

Then the victim is revealed: a large male harbor seal. Our mission: to determine the cause of death.

Of course, what I'm witnessing isn't truly a crime scene -- it's a seal necropsy conducted by the NOAA Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Anyone who finds a dead marine mammal can call the Network, and a team of responders might be able to collect the animal for a research necropsy like this one.

Here on the dock we have a whole crew of Stranding Network members gathered: a local whale-watching boat guide, the Whale Museum Stranding Network Coordinator, a veterinarian named Dr. Joe, a couple of vet students from UC Davis, and a hoard of curious labbies (me included).

First, Dr. Joe observed the body for external signs and found...

Clue #1: a series of puncture wounds through the seal's backside.

A vet student examines the incision.

He made an incision next to the punctures, allowing us to discover...

Clue #2: a hemorrhage, visible as a block of frozen blood filling the space between the skin and the abdominal cavity. (The seal's body was frozen after it was collected to preserve it for this necropsy.)

For the next hour experts examined the body front and back, inside and out, looking for more clues. Everything looked normal until we cut into the chest around the lungs and heart and found...

Clue #3: another enormous hemorrhage filling the entire thoracic cavity.

Clearly, this seal had been badly injured. But what actually caused the death? Was it attacked by a Stellar's sea lion, then hit by a boat in its compromised state? Or did orcas bite it and smack it around with their tails before deciding they weren't hungry after all?

These two hypotheses seemed to be the most likely, though we'll never know for certain what happened. Dr. Joe took dozens of samples from all over the body to send to the lab for processing, so maybe the Stranding Network will have a better idea once the results come back.

One thing we did find out for sure is what the seal ate for his last meal...

Stomach contents.

A huge salmon! The fish was partially digested, but its head and skeleton were still intact. At least this seal ate well before it died.

After the seal necropsy, the Stranding Network had one more puzzle to solve, this time by examining a porpoise head.

A porpoise ear.

The main question was whether the porpoise had any damage to its ears. Porpoises use echolocation to navigate and find prey, and scientists are concerned that the noise from large ships might be harming porpoises' sensitive ears. The Network will have to wait for lab results to come back before they know the health of the ears.

Although we all would have preferred to watch this seal and porpoise leaping from the ocean, healthy and happy, we were grateful for the chance to learn from these animals' deaths. One day I will be as knowledgeable about anatomy and ecology as Dr. Joe so I too can solve marine mammal murder mysteries.

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You Just NOAA It's Gonna Be a Good Time!

A mere two days after I touched down on American soil, I repacked my bags and headed to Silver Springs, Maryland for the NOAA Hollings Scholar Orientation.

(Noah, like Noah's ark, you ask? No, NOAA, as in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Get with the program!)

(And if you are a SOPHOMORE in college with any remotely ocean or weather-themed interests, apply for the NOAA Hollings Scholarship. For cereal. You won't regret it.)

So there I was, still trying to remember how to speak English and throw my toilet paper in the toilet instead of the trashcan, hobnobbing with government big-wigs and struggling to learn the multitude of acronyms within the "NOAA org chart."

To keep this quick, I'll give you a rundown of the high points.

In no particular order:

• NOAA paid for everything including airfare, fancy hotel rooms, and tons of food.
• Our first day was Memorial Day, so we got the day off to roam Washington D.C.
• It was my first visit to D.C. and it turns out our capital city is fricken awesome!
• I got to visit two aunts, an uncle, and a friend from my Galapagos study abroad while I was in town.
• I realized that I might like a career at a federal science organization like NOAA, and that I'm most interested in the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
• I learned all about the NOAA internship which I'll participate in next summer, and I'm excited to start hunting down potential mentors in Alaska or Hawaii (Pacific Ocean all the way, baby!)
• I got to tour Oxford Laboratory and meet a research veterinary technologist who preforms necropsies on sea turtles and marine mammals (dream job? I think yes.)
• I made friends with awesome science nerds from around the country, and even played a little frisbee to boot.

Here is some photo evidence to support my claims. 

The Korean War memorial stood out to me with its inscription, "Freedom is not free." 

Abraham Lincoln is not the only larger-than-life statue in D.C.!

The majestic hall of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They didn't let me get too close... but I pretty much felt like CJ Craig from the West Wing. NBD.

Michelle Obama's bees in the White House garden!

We spent a long time exploring the nooks and crannies of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

So many (stuffed) birds!

We got to practice fish necropsies at Oxford Lab.

There were even two large hawksbills awaiting dissection. I wish we could have helped.

Let's not forget the urban wildlife! Here's an American robin.

Eastern gray squirrel.

European starling.

House sparrow.

A wacky black squirrel!

And best of all, three new friends. :)

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