Are you curious about what a marine biologist does during an average day at work? Julie Barber, one of our team mates, is a marine biologist for the Swinomish (Swin-a-mish) Indian Tribal Community in La Conner, Washington. She has three WATER DROPs from the toddlers at the Child Care Center for the Tribe. So she took these drops through a typical day of work with her at the Tribe.
Here is her story:
Guest Journal
I juggle a number of tasks every day including counting clams on beaches and growing clams on another beach. Do you know where clams are found? The clam populations I work with are found in the intertidal zone. This is the area of land that is exposed to air when the tide is low, and covered by water when the tide is high! So my work is done when the tide is low and I can walk to the part of the beach the clams like to hang out in.
Here is a photo of me digging for clams on a beach. Photo by: Jim Gibson
Clams have a pretty neat life. They start out floating in the water as baby clams called larvae. When they are ready to grow up, they find a spot on the beach they like and they settle down. The little clams quickly dig into the substrate. Many young clams have to worry about being eaten! Watch out for crabs, ducks, gulls, and hungry snails! If the clams dig a bit deeper into the substrate, they might avoid becoming dinner. Once the clams get big enough they only have to worry about one big predator. Do you know who that is? People! Fuzzy sea otters can also reach bigger clams, but they are not found in all the oceans of the world.
A gull drops a clam to try and crack it open. Have you seen gulls do this at the beach? Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Here is a blue crab eating a clam.
Image from: http://users.hartwick.edu/kuhlmannm/images/SERC.html
So what is my job? Well, I help monitor beaches with biologists who work for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. We carefully count and weigh clams on a beach, then we go back to our computers and estimate how many clams are on that beach. Using this information we can recommend the number of clams that can be taken from the beach. The goal? To allow people to harvest enough clams to be full and happy, and to leave enough clams on the beach so they can reproduce and provide more clams for next year’s harvest!
Look at all the butter clams (top left) from this tiny digging area! Photo: Jim Gibson
My other job is to grow clams on a beach on the reservation. It is common for people to grow clams on beaches in Washington. My department would like to eventually have enough clams growing to support an annual harvest for tribal members. But before my department can go and plant baby clams on a huge area of the beach, we have to see if clams like the beach! First my boss, Jim, and I set up plots along the length of the beach. Some areas were planted with little baby clams (called "seed") and others were not. We also rolled out netting over the top of the seed. Why in the world would we put plastic netting on the beach? To keep those hungry predators out!
Here is Lone Tree Point, the beach that we are planting clams on for the Tribe. You can see the rolls of the netting we were about to roll out.
Little clam!
Plastic netting sounds cool right? After all, it does keep things from eating the little clam seed. Well, we also have to pay a lot of attention to the netting. Seaweed and other organisms like to grow on surfaces just like plastic netting. So we have to check our nets now and then and clean them off. Too much seaweed might make it difficult for the buried clams to feed and breathe. I took the WATER DROPs out with me to check the nets last week.
Why is it dark out? Well, once the end of September rolls around the lowest tides occur at night in Washington. I took this photo at 5:30am on the beach. That is why I have a headlamp on! I needed something to help me find those nets.
Lucky for me, it started to get light out around 6:15am. Here the WATER DROPs are showing off a nice clean net.
I sure was happy to have the DROPs along for help!
Once biologists finish working outside, they spend a lot of time inside working on computers. I use a lot of math for my job and I also make a ton of neat maps. So when I finished cleaning the nets off, I headed back to my office and spent the day playing with numbers. Math is fun!