One of the shallowest pieces of the observatory lives about a tenth of a mile (200 meters) beneath the water’s surface. After a year it is coated in large anemones, small pink sea urchins, feathery brown crinoids , and small crustaceans.UW/NSF-OOI/Jason
This article was originally published on UW Today: Hickey, H. (2017, August 10). Researchers, students on annual expedition to maintain internet-connected deep-sea observatory. Retrieved from http://www.washington.edu/news/. [link to original article].
University of Washington oceanography researchers, engineers, and students are working off the coast of Oregon on the yearly cruise to maintain the deep-ocean observatory, the Cabled Array, which brings power and broadband Internet to the seafloor and water above. The cruise, funded by the National Science Foundation, left July 25 from Newport, Oregon, and will be back Aug. 29. The group is on the California-based research vessel Roger Revelle, since the UW’s large research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson, is completing its major midlife overhaul.
Deborah Kelley, UW professor of oceanography, is chief scientist on the cruise that recently began its second leg.
While at sea a deep-sea robot will brave the crushing pressures and cold temperatures, while the team works day and night to direct the dives and prepare equipment above water. The researchers will be cleaning some instruments from marine life, and swapping out sensors that collect hot spring fluids and DNA samples over their year-long missions. The team is posting regular updates from the ship. On Aug. 1, members reported seeing pyrosomes, the bioluminescent tube-shaped tropical animals that have been seen this year off the Pacific Northwest. They are also posting highlights of the robot-captured dive videos, including one showing how marine creatures are getting cozy on the UW-built technology.
In addition to the maintenance work, two new instruments from William Chadwick at Oregon State University will be added. The first will monitor tilting and the rise and fall of the seafloor to detect inflation and deflation at Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano that is part of the cabled observatory. A second instrument, to be placed in a nearby hydrothermal vent field, will measure the temperature and salinity of fluids that waft around the vents and in the Axial caldera. More than 120 instruments — including seismometers, high-definition video and digital still camera, and underwater chemical mass spectrometers — will be recovered and reinstalled during the cruise. Data from all instruments is accessible in real time from shore through the Ocean Observatories Initiative Data Portal.
Other cruise participants include a teacher from Kingston Middle School in Kitsap County, faculty members from Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen and UW Tacoma, and a postdoctoral researcher from the UW Applied Physics Laboratory.This year’s cruise includes 24 undergraduate and graduate students from the UW, Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Western Washington University in Bellingham and Queens College in New York. They are posting student blogs. For many undergraduates this will be their first experience at sea.
Follow along on Twitter at @VISIONSops, or tune in during one of the robot’s dives for live video from the deep sea.
This article was originally published as a ‘Faculty Friday’ article for The Whole U: Leib, M. (2017, July 7). Faculty Friday: Luke Tornabene. Retrieved from https://www.washington.edu/wholeu/. [link to original article]. Associate Professor Tornabene teaches the FISH 311: Biology of Fishes course annually.
Luke Tornabene hovers above the abyss, suspended somewhere between fathomless darkness and daylight 800 feet above. A thin layer of condensation has formed on the interior of the five-person submersible—the product of warm air within the cockpit reacting to increasingly cold water without as the research vessel slips ever deeper into the dusk-colored Caribbean waters somewhere off the coast of Curacao.
On Tornabene’s first dive, a droplet from above almost sent him into a panic, but the ichthyologist now knew to expect the occasional splash of condensation as a part of the four to seven hour-long submersions. It perhaps stood to reason that, even from within the humming confines of a state-of-the-art research sub, one couldn’t explore the biodiversity of as yet unstudied stretches of sloping seabed without at least getting a little wet.
The 13.6-foot “Curasub” can dive to a depth of 1000 feet for up to eight hours.
Revealed is as diverse a collection of marine life as could be found on earth. About one in every three fish Tornabene spies through the sub’s 40-inch forward viewing dome is new to science.After a 20-minute descent, the vessel draws alongside a steep reef, cruising well below its maximum speed of four knots. Coming to a complete stop, it trains bright LED panels on the reef’s intricately varied surface, illuminating teeming swirls of small, colorful fish.
“You don’t get to see that very often in the world—above water or below water,” says Tornabene, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences studying the evolutionary relationships and biodiversity of fishes.
Such biodiversity is one of the distinguishing features of the “Twilight Zone”—a largely unexplored band of ocean between 100 and 1000 feet deep.
“We like to think of it as the area of the ocean that scientists forgot about,” Tornabene says of these mesophotic (middle-light) ecosystems. “That’s largely because it lies below the depths reachable by SCUBA divers and above the depths typically studied by deep-sea biologists.”
When deep-sea biologists wish to sample the diversity of life dwelling at or near the bottom of a given stretch of ocean, they will often trawl a net along the flat, sandy sea floor. But getting sense of what life exists in the area between the sea floor and 150 feet beneath the ocean’s surface can be markedly more difficult.
“Much of the habitat between the abyssal zone and the scuba-accessible zones is a vertical slope,” Tornabene says. “You can’t drag a net over these vertical slopes because you’d rip the biodiversity apart.”
Proliferating throughout these mesophotic reef zones are thumbnail-sized gobies, the most taxonomically and ecologically diverse family of marine fishes in the world. Studying them—and their changing interactions with the ecosystem as a whole—calls for a degree of delicacy and nuance delivered in the unlikely form of a six-ton submersible (the technical difference between a submersible and a submarine is that submersibles are not fully autonomous, relying on a support facility or vessel for replenishment of power and breathing gases).
Tornabene and his fellow researchers capture fish and other marine samples using specialized suction tubes and a basket fixed to the sub’s front, while HD video and still cameras record all the scientists see. It’s all part of the process of identifying and classifying what presently exists to better understand broader trends of movement in the ocean during a time of potentially drastic change.“When I give presentations about this stuff, I show a picture of Bambi’s mom and an M1-Abrams tank,” Tornabene says. “You’d think it would be overkill, but it [the submersible] is actually extremely effective.”
“Understanding how species change their vertical distribution in response to climate change is incredibly important, but there’s no way you can even begin to understand how species move in the ocean if you don’t know where they live in the ocean.”
As climate change continues to warm oceans, shallow-water species begin swimming deeper in search of cooler waters. Tornabene says these mesophotic reefs can potentially serve as a refuge for shallow-water species, but there are some species living on these reefs that might not be so easily displaced. Invasive species such as lionfish have already entered these deeper, cooler zones as outside predators.
“When climate change forces species to go deeper, it’s forcing them out of their home,” he says. “The first thing to see when we go down there is understanding the diversity that’s there, their range of temperature, and if there are limits to their distribution.”
Tornabene says a driving question of his research is, “when a species are given a completely clean slate to change their behavior, what happens?” adding that we are only just beginning to understand how species are responding when taken out of their native environment.
His next dive is planned for later this summer off the coast of Honduras in a submersible capable of diving as deep as 2700 feet. The more he learns about the ocean’s Twilight Zone, even more layers of ocean open beneath it, awaiting exploration and analysis. He describes the ongoing research process as “taking a series of slices out of the ocean from what we don’t know.”
To date, less than five percent of earth’s oceans have been explored.
“We’ve sent more people to the moon than we have to the bottom of the ocean,” Tornabene says, adding that the equivalent cost of a single day of moon or Mars exploration would fund hundreds of years of ocean exploration and sample collection using submersible technology.
And while Tornabene says he’s the first to cry foul whenever funding for space exploration is cut, he says the biodiversity of life beneath the waves speaks for itself when it comes to articulating a vision for the future of scientific exploration.
“Nobody’s found a new species on Mars yet.”
Deep Dive
Growing up on Long Island’s Great South Bay, Luke Tornabene always felt a deep connection to the ocean. But beyond excursions on a 17-foot Boston whaler to go fishing, clamming, and crabbing, he never harbored aspirations of being a marine scientist or researcher.
“I wanted to teach 10th and 11th grade biology and be a wrestling coach,” he says.
Then, as part of a senior research project, he volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, working with James Van Tassel, a retired high school teacher who’d earned his Ph.D. in ichthyology only after retiring from the classroom. Tornabene recalls “working mostly with dead fish in jars,” but that Van Tassel told him if he got good at that, it would eventually lead to working with live fish.
The research finally came alive later that year when Tornabene traveled with his mentor and the Smithsonian to conduct research in waters off Panama.
“That really fostered this idea that I didn’t just want to be a researcher, but an educator and mentor as well,” he says. “I realized you could actually study evolution, fishes, and ecology for a living and that it was more than just being in a room full of jars.”
But even so, specimens in jars still account for a significant portion of his work. After completing post-doctoral work at The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., Tornabene joined the UW in January to serve as curator of fishes for the Burke Museum, where he presides over a catalogued collection of 450,000 fish specimens preserved in ethanol in the basement of the Fishery Sciences Research building. He also oversees the storage of 2.5 million otoliths: bones from the head of fishes which preserve in layers of calcium carbonate an annual account all the chemical properties of a fish’s environment.
By Tornabene’s estimate, the Burke’s is the largest collection of its kind in North America. Some specimens are more than 150 years old.
“It’s more than just a fish in a jar. It’s a catalog of life and a snapshot of time,” he says. “We have 11 million records of the lives of organisms dating back to the 1860s.”
Beyond the odd bottle of exotic spirits, the collection as a whole is extremely flammable due to the high quantity of ethanol used to preserve each specimen.The collection’s size only keeps compounding. In addition to more academic specimens, Tornabene will occasionally be shipped items confiscated by customs agents, who, likely perplexed as to where to send something as strange as seahorse wine from southeast Asia, bring them to the attention of Fisheries Sciences.
“We’re one of the only buildings on campus that is allowed to have that much alcohol in one spot, so, unfortunately, we will not be going with them to the new Burke,” he says.
Even so, the construction of the new museum space finds Tornabene as excited as anyone.
“Being able to put the research that we do on public display is going to be amazing,” he says. “I’m really fortunate that I get to step in as new curator. I get to be involved with exhibit design and placement of specimens and where we want to take the audience. To me that’s super exciting.”
He says he perceives a growing disconnect between regional and state museums and the universities that support them, but that that’s not the case at the UW.
“The UW maintains a super strong relationship with the Burke and that’s something that should be acknowledged,” he says. “We should be proud of it.”
Another thing he’s observed in his first half-year at the UW is the level of engagement from students in the Fishery Sciences program.
“This is not a knock on students that I’ve worked with in the past, but this is the number one Fisheries program in the world,” he says, adding that in his fish biology class last quarter he had 100 students, whereas elsewhere a professor might only expect 15 to 20.
“Across the board, the students in my class were absolutely brilliant and incredibly passionate and all-hands-on-deck all the time,” he says. “For me to experience that in my first quarter here, it’s a fire.”
Understanding the Effects of Ocean Acidification on Predator-Prey Interactions
by Sasha Seroy
Sasha Seroy is a graduate student in the Oceanography Department at the University of Washington, advised by Dr. Daniel Grünbaum.
Marine organisms are experiencing dramatic environmental changes due to global climate change. As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise, the oceans absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide, which results in acidification. While ocean acidification affects several different types of organisms, calcifiers — those that make their shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate like shellfish or corals — have been identified as particularly vulnerable. Acidification not only increases the likelihood of shell or skeleton dissolution, it can also make it more difficult for organisms to create calcium carbonate in the first place. Several studies have investigated the effects of ocean acidification on calcifiers in isolation; however, in nature, organisms interact with a wide variety of other organisms, from predators to prey to competitors. These interactions have the potential to amplify or reduce the effects of acidification with consequences that could propagate up to population and community levels. I am particularly interested in how interactions between predators and prey are influenced by changing ocean chemistry.
Fig. 1: Individual feeding zooids within a bryozoan colony (left), an entire single bryozoan colony (center), and multiple bryozoan colonies growing on kelp (right).
The encrusting bryozoan Membranipora membranacea is commonly found in the waters around San Juan Island and presents a good model system to investigate the effects of acidification on predator-prey interactions. Membranipora forms large circular colonies composed of zooids — the individual units within a colony (Figure 1) — on kelp blades. As they grow, colonies add subsequent rings of zooids to their outer edge. This structure makes it simple to divide colonies like cutting a pizza, and then expose genetically identical slices of the same colony to different environmental conditions via laboratory manipulations. Membranipora exhibits an inducible defense — a defense that is only formed in the presence of predators — which helps protect them from being eaten. Upon receiving chemical cues that the predatory sea slug Corambe steinbergae is close by, Membranipora produces spines on skeletons of newly-formed zooids along the outer growing edge of the colony (Figure 2). While these inducible spines are beneficial, they present a trade-off because they require energy to make, and leave less energy to put toward colony growth. Therefore, the cost associated with increased protection is a reduction in overall colony growth. Thus, similar to tree rings, we can see which rings of zooids were formed at a time of high predation by looking for defensive spines. Since these interactions are easy to quantify and Membranipora forms its skeleton from calcium carbonate, this system is a good model to understand how ocean acidification might affect predator-prey dynamics.
Oceanography senior Frances Eshom-Arzadon collects beach sediment at Edmonds Marina Beach in February. She sampled each beach in the same way and at the same point in the tidal cycle to allow comparisons between sites.
This article was originally published on UW Today: Hickey, H. (2017, June 29). UW oceanography senior finds plastic microfibers are common on Puget Sound beaches. Retrieved from http://www.washington.edu/news/. [link to original article]. Frances Eshom-Arzadon is a major in Oceanography and a Minor in Marine Biology. The COASST lab is recruiting current UW undergrads, and you can find out more about COASST internships here.
As the infamous floating “garbage patch” churns up bits of plastic in the tropical Pacific Ocean, a University of Washington undergraduate has discovered a related problem much closer to home: nearly invisible bits of plastic on Puget Sound beaches.
As a year-long project toward a UW bachelor’s degree, the oceanography major visited 12 beaches around Puget Sound to tally the number of microplastics, generally classified as fragments between 0.3 and 5 millimeters (1/100 to 1/5 of an inch) or smaller than a grain of rice.
While she found all the Puget Sound beaches to be clean when compared with the Mediterranean Sea, local shores are far from pristine. Residents also may be surprised to learn that polar fleece and other synthetic fibers are the main source of plastic fragments on our beaches.
“Plastics can harm marine life, and can in some cases be the primary cause of death,” said Frances Eshom-Arzadon, who graduated in June. “Smaller organisms ingest microplastics, and then larger organisms, including humans, consume it indirectly.”
As part of her senior thesis project, Eshom-Arzadon visited each location once at the same time in the tidal cycle between November and February. She scraped sediment from an area just below the wrack line, the line of debris left by the high tide. She visited beaches from Tolmie State Park near Olympia, along the Seattle and Everett shorelines and as far out as Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula, a control site far from populated areas.
Back in the lab, Eshom-Arzadon dried the samples, then used chemicals and weight-based techniques to separate the plastic from sand and other material.
Her sampling methods followed the procedures established by Julie Masura, a UW Tacoma lecturer who has been tracking marine microplastics in the region for almost a decade.Her results show that small plastics are widespread along the shore of Puget Sound. All 12 samples contained microplastics, at an average of 1,776 pieces per 3-foot-square sampling plot. The highest concentration of plastics by number was at Howarth Park in Everett, followed by Carkeek Park and Alki Beach Park in Seattle. The cleanest beaches were at Mukilteo Lighthouse Park and Edmonds Marina Beach, both situated on points of land near ferry terminals.
“Plastics, specifically microplastics, have been found in over 90 percent of the surface samples collected in Puget Sound since 2008,” said Masura, who was not involved in this course. “We have yet to correlate the presence of plastic and other environmental factors.”
Eshom-Arzadon’s project included counting the plastic fragments and classifying them into six types: Styrofoam, fibers, fragments, flakes, films and synthetic sponges. Some 73 percent of the pieces she collected on local beaches were microfibers. These thin strands are not from the breakdown of larger litter, such as plastic bottles or disposable cutlery; rather, they start when fabrics shed fibers that flow out with laundry water after washing synthetic fabrics, like polar fleece or other types of polyester.
“I wasn’t expecting to find so many fibers,” Eshom-Arzadon said. “When people do laundry, all their effluent with those microfibers is getting washed out. Those fibers come off clothes and get washed out already in the size of microplastics, so they can’t be filtered out.”
She noted that front-loading machines have been shown to generate fewer microfibers in washing water, while Patagonia and other clothing companies have recently begun efforts to produce synthetic fabrics that shed less fuzz.
The average overall concentration of microplastics was slightly higher on Seattle city beaches, providing only weak support for Eshom-Arzadon’s hypothesis that microplastics would be more common in densely populated areas. But she and her advisers concluded that a one-time sample was probably not enough to properly rank the locations.
“All of these beaches are cleaned by volunteer groups, and it’s not clear which are cleaned more regularly,” Eshom-Arzadon said. “Ocean currents can also carry debris to different places, and can affect how much litter you would find in a one-time sampling.”
Eshom-Arzadon became interested in this topic after doing an undergraduate service learning project with the UW-based Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, COASST. She volunteered to survey beaches around Seattle and her native Edmonds looking for stranded birds and marine debris. She also took an undergraduate class on marine pollution that included a section on marine plastics.
Two other UW oceanography senior thesis projects this year also looked at microplastics. Ty Mahoney sampled microplastics in Hood Canal and faster-flowing waters around Whidbey Island, and found that the debris tends to accumulate in the more stagnant sections. Gerrad Hofmans sampled water from near the source of the glacier-fed Snohomish River down to its mouth in Puget Sound, finding that the concentration of microplastics increases on the way downstream.
“Over the past three years we’ve had a student each year looking at plastics, but Frances is the first student we’ve had that wanted to sample beaches,” said Kathy Newell, a research scientist in UW School of Oceanography who supervised all three undergraduate research projects. “Some studies suggest plastics accumulate in certain areas. There are so many variables — tides, winds, currents, time of year — and there hasn’t been a long-term study on plastics in Puget Sound.”
Those results could help inform the work of Masura and others who are trying to measure and understand plastic pollution locally.
“As with many research groups, we find that plastics are quite prolific,” Masura said.
Her group is working to develop an interactive map that will display the results of the samples collected with the support of government agencies, colleges, schools and nonprofits.
from UW Today, June 1, 2017. Note: Luke Tornabene teaches classes applied towards the Marine Biology minor such as “FISH 311: Biology of Fishes”.
Caribbean coral reefs have been invaded by lionfish, showy predators with venomous spines. And they’ve found a new market to exploit: the ocean’s “twilight zone” — an area below traditional SCUBA diving depths, where little is known about the reefs or the species that inhabit them.
Researchers from the University of Washington and Smithsonian Institution have reported the first observed case of lionfish preying upon a fish species that had not yet been named. Their results, published May 25 in PLOS ONE, may indicate an uncertain future for other fish found in the largely unexplored deep-ocean coral reefs.
“Lionfish aren’t going anywhere, and we are faced with the fact that they are permanent residents on Caribbean reefs,” said lead author Luke Tornabene, curator of fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and an assistant professor at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “The hope is that the learning curve is quick and other fish realize lionfish are predators. Right now, studies have shown some prey species to be pretty naïve.”
from UW Today, June 29, 2017. Note: Deborah Giles from the Center for Whale Research teaches the FHL 375: Marine Mammals of the Salish Sea course at Friday Harbor Labs in spring quarter.
A multi-year survey of the nutritional, physiological and reproductive health of endangered southern resident killer whales suggests that up to two-thirds of pregnancies failed in this population from 2007 to 2014. The study links this orca population’s low reproductive success to stress brought on by low or variable abundance of their most nutrient-rich prey, Chinook salmon.
The study, published June 29 in the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by researchers from the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, along with partners at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the Center for Whale Research. The team’s findings help resolve debate about which environmental stressors — food supply, pollutants or boat traffic — are most responsible for this struggling population’s ongoing decline.
“Based on our analysis of whale health and pregnancy over this seven-year period, we believe that a low abundance of salmon is the primary factor for low reproductive success among southern resident killer whales,” said lead author Sam Wasser, a UW professor of biology and director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “During years of low salmon abundance, we see hormonal signs that nutritional stress is setting in and more pregnancies fail, and this trend has become increasingly common in recent years.”
Southern resident killer whales typically feed from May to October in the Salish Sea, and spend winters in the open Pacific Ocean along the West Coast. Unlike transient orca populations that feed on marine mammals, more than 95 percent of the diet of southern resident orcas consists of salmon, with Chinook salmon alone making up about three-quarters of their total diet.
This article comes from “Tide Bites”, the monthly newsletter of UW Friday Harbor Laboratories. “NOAA Tide and Weather at FHL” by Erin Dodge: read the full article on the FHL website.
The NOAA meteorological station near FHL’s pumphouse.
I work for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Ocean Service (NOS) as a Physical Scientist for the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS). We are part of the Pacific Operations Branch team based in Seattle, WA. We collect data from as far north as the Arctic Ocean, as far west as Guam and as far south as American Samoa, including coastal Alaska, the U.S. West Coast, Hawaii, and the Pacific Trust Territories. Products and services derived from CO-OPS data are used to: produce tide and current predictions and forecasts, support nautical charting and shoreline mapping, improve GPS accuracy, support coastal and emergency managers with storm surge warnings in hurricane and storm-prone coastal areas, support tsunami warnings, help scientists, coastal managers, and engineers understand sea level trends, forecast harmful algal blooms, provide critical decision making information to commercial shipping ports and pilots, provide useful information to coastal recreation users, and many other uses. Our Seattle team focuses on installing, maintaining, and repairing our oceanographic and meteorological observing systems within these areas. I am personally in charge of monitoring and maintaining the Washington and Oregon observing systems and stations.
The UW Friday Harbor Labs hosts a National Water Level Observation Network (NWLON) Station as well as a remote, stand-alone meteorological station. Established in 1932, this station continues to operate as part of a nationwide network of 210 long-term, continuously-operating water level stations throughout the U.S. and its territories that provide crucial data for government and commercial sector navigation, recreation, and coastal ecosystem management. The station has existed in its current location since 1989, on the pier at the FHL. The remote meteorological station was added on nearby Cantilever Point in 2008.
The following position is being offered at the Western Fisheries Research Center-Seattle, WA.
As a Biological Science Technician (Microbiology) in the Fish Health Section of the Western Fisheries Research Center, some of your specific duties will include:
Designs and completes laboratory experiments including the expression of recombinant proteins and characterizing immunological tools for freshwater fish.
Test fish immune responses by quantitative RTPCR and flow cytometric analyses.
Maintains complete experimental records, analyzes the data, and presents preliminary conclusions.
Trains other staff in microbiological and immunological techniques such as QPCR, Western blot and ELISA.
Prepares draft reports of work accomplished to be included in publications, reports, or presentations.
Salary: 43,900 (Step 01) to 57,113 (Step 10) plus benefits. Note: First time hires to the Federal Government are typically hired at the Step 01.Job location: Western Fisheries Research Center located in Magnuson Park.All interested applicants are encouraged to see the official posting on USAjobs (https://www.usajobs.gov/). Position will be advertised starting June 5th and closing on June 9th.
LOTT Clean Water Alliance’s WET Science Center provides the community with a fun, hands-on opportunity to learn all about water – one of our most precious resources. The WET Science Center is hiring two full-time Environmental Education Assistants. These are one year positions, with optional extension, beginning in July 2017. Join our education team and help teach thousands of students how to conserve and protect water!
The Environmental Education Assistant is responsible for performing and assisting with a variety of education tasks and interacting with visitors in the WET Science Center. This position plays a key role in the education program by assisting the Education Program Manager with classroom presentations to school groups (5thgrade and up), overseeing the hands-on exhibit gallery, leading tours, delivering programs for the community, and taking key messages and educational materials to special events.
Duties include, but are not limited to: greeting guests and welcoming them to the WET Science Center; overseeing the exhibit gallery and interacting with the public to facilitate learning; assisting with research and delivery of classroom presentations and Saturday community activities; leading tours of the wastewater treatment plant and green building; data entry related to program tracking and evaluation; representing LOTT and the WET Science Center at community events; implementing and tracking the social media program; recruiting, training, and supervising volunteers; writing articles for internal and external audiences; taking photos of educational activities; and other related duties.
Compensation and Benefits:
These positions pay $15 – $18 per hour depending on qualifications and include a full benefits package. These positions are one year in length with the potential for annual renewal. Working hours are between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, with occasional evening and weekend work. A variety of valuable trainings and professional development are also offered throughout the year.
Come dive into a “Super Awesome Ocean Science Theatre Show”
Byron Walker, a current senior majoring in both oceanography and theatre will be performing his senior thesis the second weekend of June the 8th through the 11th at the Glen Hughes Penthouse theatre on campus. Come watch the performance for FREE Thursday and Sunday at 1:00 PM or Friday and Saturday at 7:30 PM.
