Making a Living and Having Fun

I suppose when I made the list of things to blog about next, I just wanted to give those readers who haven’t seen us in a while (or maybe even those who do but don’t know our seedy underbelly J) a chance to get to know us a little better. With that in mind, I’ll start with our jobs (OK, so not so seedy…)

Jon and I were both given the opportunity of a lifetime two years back when our advisor, Steve, offered us positions as grad students. Not just grad students, but paid, fully insured grad students! The positions were at the School for Marine Science and Technology (from now on referred to as SMAST) which is located on the south shore of Massachusetts, in New Bedford. It’s a new division of the University of Massachusetts, and our degrees will actually come from the School for Marine Science students (SMS), which is a collaborative between all the different UMASS’s all over the state. Confused over the identities? So are we, and all the administrators involved J You can try and navigate the websites and figure it out yourself in the links on this page…

A compilation of the various organizations that sponsor us

So what do we study? Jon is the master of the codfish, the infamous fish here in New England which gave Cape Cod its name. Here are two paragraphs he wrote when I asked him to explain it:

“I am testing for patterns in the movement of cod (Gadus morhua) tagged in spawning groups along the New England coast. Movement patterns have a number of interesting implications, and previous tagging investigations as well as several genetic studies offer prior evidence that they exist. The main method I have been utilizing is conventional tag-recapture, where a plastic tag, containing an individual identification number, is attached to a live cod. The position and time of the cod is recorded and the fish released. Later a fisherman will hopefully catch the cod, see the tag, and report the date and position where they caught the cod. There are numerous methods that can be applied towards analyzing patterns in tagging data. I am very interested in expanding those methods commonly used in fisheries investigations.

One of Jon's many tagged cod

So, you may wonder why should be interested in the movement patterns of cod. There are several important implications that could arise from patterned movement. For example, if there are noticeable patterns in the area where cod from a spawning aggregation are recaptured we may be interested in developing more informed ways to manage this particular group. An interesting historical aside are cod numbers along the Maine coastline. Prior to the 1930’s there were large quantities of cod that lived along the Maine coast (now famous for lobster). Tagging studies showed that these cod were very sedentary. Large catches of cod in the 1930’s lead to a dramatic decrease in the cod numbers and these numbers have not rebounded.”

Thanks Jon! :-)

I myself am studying the lobster Homarus americanus the animal that the tourists to New England go crazy for. For good reason, the meat is delicious (imagine a creamy kind of chicken…or feel free to describe the taste in the “comments” section if you can think of something better) and filling. For all my Hampshire friends out there, this means that yes, once again, I am working on lobster sex J More specifically, I am working on a project that tried to restore a population of lobsters to Rhode Island after the 1997 North Cape oil spill. The method used to restore the population was tagging, with a v-notch in the tail, which signals to the lobstermen that the lobster cannot be harvested. These notches are only put on a female, which means she has a chance to reproduce and create a clutch of eggs before molting her shell and loosing her v-notch and protection (they theoretically will reproduce before molting). The project involved six years of this kind of tagging, with the hope that the estimated 9 million lobsters that got killed by the oil spill would be restored. I, my friends, am the lucky lady who gets to take all this data and determine if they reached that goal. This entails a lot of modeling (translation: lots of math) and biological work to determine if we think the effort brought the population back to its place. Stay tuned to find out the answer.

In addition to the work we do on our thesis, we help out around the office on other projects as well. I help a lot with outreach to local schools and programs, showing kids how we tag fish and why. Jon works a lot on other animal tagging, such as scallop, winter flounder, cod and yellowtail. Then, of course, there’s the classes, which used to involve a lot of tests and *groan* homework. Both of us are almost done with our course load, thank goodness. But on pain of death, don’t you dare ask when our thesis will be done…

I started with our jobs because it lets you, the reader, know why we are tied to our area. Right now we live in Mattapoisett, MA, right on the coast and close to SMAST. Well, we aren’t *directly* on the coast, but pretty close. Our bestest girly girl (also known as “grand-dog” to my parents, “sweety”, “boot-boots”, “leela-may”, “leela bean”, “stick dog” and “doofus”) Lila (pronounced lee-la) LOVES that we live so close to the ocean – true to her lab roots she is a water dog! When she was a puppy we named her Salila, which in Hindu means “water”, to encourage her to be into the water like we were. We certainly didn’t need to do that, fetching sticks came quite natural to this lab mix dog! We got her from the greatest shelter out in Oregon (http://www.homeatlasths.org/) when we were living there. My co-worker Jody’s mom was one of the main caretakers there, and let us see her when she was only 5 weeks old, and from then on it was true love! Man was she cute.

I really could start a different blog about our dog, but I won’t here. I apologize for the diversion, but she really is an integral part of our little family unit here in Mattapoisett. “Integral” meaning she makes us take at least two walks a day down to the lighthouse, where she gets to swim on the beach and occasionally meet with other dogs and plays.

So how do we afford living in such a beautiful area? One of the reasons the SMAST opportunity was so awesome was thanks to my parents. When my grandmother passed away in 2004 my parents bought her house on the ocean, which served as a weekend getaway for my dad occasionally. They have been super good in letting us stay in the house, for free, while we tried to get our degrees. This means ocean kayaking, boating, and beach walks abound!

So why don’t we get married on the coast? As much as we both love and work on the ocean, the salt water isn’t as true to our love as freshwater is. Jon, as many of you know, grew up in a beautiful and remote area of Washington, close to the Columbia river and deep in the woods. Likewise, I grew up alternating time between our suburb-of-Boston house in Massachusetts and my grandparents place in Meredith, New Hampshire. This house is right on lake Winnipesauke and thanks to my nature-loving grandmother, I spent plenty of time in the woods, appreciating nature and freshwater stuff – mainly waterskiing and swimming.

Well, I am getting tired of writing and need to get some work done, so I will talk about what we do for fun next. Perhaps I will even convince Jon to write a little bit about his recent kayaking adventures…