| Student Spotlight

Research symposium to finish off Autumn Quarter at FHL

By: Niamh Owen-McLaughlin

In a special end to Autumn Quarter 2024, the FHL Fall Apprentice and Undergraduate Research Annual Symposium (AURAS) was held on Wednesday 4 December, at Friday Harbor Labs – UW’s marine research field station nestled in the Salish Sea.

Marjorie Wonham
L to R research mentor Dr. Karly Cohen and mentees Tatiana Egbert, Ellie In, and Owen Proulx with their research poster titled “How does vertebral mineralization of [the sand lance] Ammodytes personatus change over ontogeny and life history?”
A culminating research symposium, the event showcased participants work from the Pelagic Ecosystem Function (PEF) and Autumn Marine Studies (AMS) programs, including many Marine Biology majors.

Held over three sessions, the event gave all 31 participants the chance to present their work to researchers, faculty, staff, community members, and each other.

Session I:

This session involved individual research presentations from PEF apprentices combining new observations with a 21-year dataset, on everything from ocean physics to zooplankton to fishes, birds and mammals.

Session II:

During this session, the Novel Marine Ecosystems course (FHL 450) delivered a 21-author presentation on their field and lab experiments investigating bio-invasion dynamics in an intertidal ecosystem.

Marjorie Wonham
Students Tatiana Egbert, Owen Proulx, and Ellie In present their research poster.

As a whole class, they had attached over 300 clams from three species to garden staples using dental floss and super glue and planted them overnight on an intertidal beach to see how many were eaten.

Why did they do such an odd thing? To compare the results to historical results from 24 years ago, to extend the dataset from 1 to 3 prey species, and to collect baseline data on predation intensities before the introduced predatory Eurasian green crab establishes a local population.

Extending this research question into new avenues were small-group studies including:

  • dropping clams from ladders to see how high birds need to carry them for them to break open
  • testing crab feeding preference on different clam species
  • determining current clam distributions in the field (and finding out they’ve changed)
  • and testing cost-effectiveness and confounding factors of different methods.

Session III:

The final session was a poster session from the Research in Marine Biology course (FHL 470). Overseen by FHL research mentors, the projects spanned kelp growth, eelgrass destruction and restoration, subtidal community structure, fish morphology, seastar morphology, and ascidian genomes.

Interested in finding out more about these projects? Keep an eye out at the upcoming fall UW Tacoma symposium, the spring Mary Gates symposium, and other conferences.

Marjorie Wonham, Associate Teaching Professor who taught two of the courses, said: “It was energizing and exciting to watch students develop ownership over their projects through the quarter! Whether the projects spanned 5 days or 10 weeks, whether they were in exploratory or established research areas, whether they required collecting creatures, training AI, or glueing PVC, they all required grit and creativity, and they all revealed new information. I couldn’t be prouder of all the participants’ accomplishments.”