Graduate Student

I am a graduate student in the Benthic Ecology lab at Moss Landing Marine Labs. My interests include bentho-palegic coupling, trawling’s impact on the seafloor, factors that influence the distribution of benthic organisms, invertebrate taxonomy, and using stable isotopes and fatty acids to understand the cycling of carbon within food webs. My work has been under the guidance of Dr. Stacy Kim and Dr. Nicholas Welschmeyer.

My thesis at MLML (www.mlml.calstate.edu) deals with understanding how sponges in the high Antarctic subsist through out the food poor months of winter. Very little has been done, especially in the Antarctic, as to what sponges eat. Although it has been shown that Antarctic sponges are capable of feeding on bacteria sized particles, the actual input of bacterial sourced carbon has not been shown. My study applies both stable isotopes and fatty acids, two independent diet tracers, in deciphering what the sponges around McMurdo station subsist on.

Another project that I have been involved with looks at bycatch that a potential trawl fishery in the Antarctic would result in. The Antarctic Marine Living Resources (AMLR http://swfsc.nmfs.noaa.gov/antarctic.htm) program carries out a fish stock assessment every two years. This past cruise Dr. Kim and myself went along as part of a group of invertebrate biologists to identify the invertebrates that come up in the trawl. Much of this bycatch will not survive after being taken to the surface, especially the habitat forming animals such as sponges and tunicates. These animals play a variety of roles in the ecosystem including as a food source, a possible hiding location, and a location where fish lay their eggs. The goal of Dr. Kim’s and my involvement is to quantify the composition of the invertebrate fauna, both to increase our knowledge as to its distribution as well as get an accurate new baseline incase the moratorium on trawling is lifted.

In Monterey Bay, I have looked at pigments that are preserved in the sediments of Elkhorn slough. This seasonal estuary has been characterized by two distinct phytoplankton communities (http://biooce.mlml.calstate.edu/). To determine how long these two communities have existed, sediment cores were taken and the concentration of photosynthetic pigments and accessory pigments measured on a HPLC throughout the depth of the cores. Preliminary results suggest that diatoms were much less abundant in the inshore sections of the slough although the length of time that this represents is still being studied.

I am also a participant on the Icefish cruise (http://www.icefish.neu.edu/). The goal of this cruise it to compare islands from either side of the Antarctic convergence, a barrier where two water masses meet and separate Antarctica from the rest of the continents. My role is to help identify invertebrate specimens from the trawl as well as sort the infaunal cores. Through species composition and distribution patterns we hope to get a better understanding of the impact of the Antarctic convergence on the fauna. This is also a rare opportunity to sample many of these locations so we will collect a voucher collection of each of the animals we see for future work.