SFOS Newsletter
Spring 2009
Featured Student
Megan Murphy, Ph.D. Biological Oceanography
by Carin Stephens,
SFOS Public Information Officer
Megan Murphy collects plankton tows in Kachemak Bay, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Megan Murphy.
Megan Murphy already knows she wants to live and work in Homer, Alaska, and is pursuing a graduate degree in biological oceanography at UAF to help her achieve this goal. She is studying the oceanographic effects on crab larval transport in Kachemak Bay. She received her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
What brought you to Alaska?
I came to Homer five years ago for a Student Conservation Association internship with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.
What made you decide to do graduate school at UAF?
I knew that I wanted to do a larval transport project in Kachemak Bay and wanted to stay in Alaska. Also, I immediately connected with Katrin Iken, the first professor I spoke with while visiting the Fairbanks campus and my present advisor, and this reinforced my decision to choose UAF for graduate studies.
Why larval transport?
I knew I wanted to study plankton. I enjoy looking at plankton. There is a lot that needs to be done to study it and understand it better here (in Kachemak Bay) and in other places.
How do you do your research?
In March through October last year, I used the Kachemak Bay
Research Reserve's skiff to take weekly plankton tows and
salinity and temperature measurements at both ebb and flood
tides. These tows and measurements were taken along a transect
line from the end of Homer Spit directly across to the McEwan
Flats. This line acts as a gate between the inner and outer bays
which allows me to observe what zooplankton, specifically crab
larvae, are coming and going out of the inner bay.
Surface and oblique tows (net dropped down to 20 meters and
then pulled to the surface) were both used, and were towed
for five minutes. On a good week (weather-wise) we go out
just one day and come back with 12 plankton samples and 16
temperature and salinity vertical profiles of this transect line.
Besides juvenile crabs, what do you find in your plankton tows?
That's the neat thing about doing it from March to October because we get to see the pulses of different plankton. You get copepods (always), arrow worms, small larval fish, many eggs of various kinds, snail larvae, jellies and more. There's both the holoplankton, the things that are plankton their entire lives; and there's meroplankton, the things that are going to develop into a larger (typically) marine invertebrate.
What do you do with the larval crab in your samples?
The samples are taken back to the lab where the time-intensive part begins -- picking the crabs out of the zooplankton sample. The samples are rinsed and preserved with ethanol and later identified and enumerated. I try to identify them both to species and their larval stage. For example, Dungeness crabs have five zoeal stages and one megalopae stage before they settle out of the water column... this requires counting ridiculously small things like the setae on their arms and other defining characteristics.
And you compare all of this with all the data you've collected about the water column?
Definitely. The goal of taking both surface and oblique tows is to get a better idea of where the crabs are located in the water column. Pairing this with where major density layers are located in the water column (there's a major density layer ~10m depth during the summer and fall) gives us some idea of where these crab might be hanging out.
If you have an understanding of how the water is moving, then you have a better idea of how things in it are moving. So again, the temperature and salinity measurements are used to create density profiles of the transect line which gives a physical context for the crab data.
By studying the larval transport of crab, you get a lot of physical oceanographic information about the bay that may not already exist. I think that's one of the best parts of my project – getting baseline temperature and salinity (ultimately, density) profiles of the inner/outer bay boundary over time. This data is generally not considered 'sexy' and it is sometimes harder to fund longterm data acquisition of baseline data – but understanding the physical environment is an integral part of understanding what is going on in that environment biologically, chemically, etc. The data I've collected, combined with other temperature and salinity work done by others, is providing information on circulation between the inner and outer bay and how the water column changes over seasons.
What do you think you are going to do in the future?
I look forward to teaching and would love to continue doing research projects in the Kachemak Bay. Doing research is interesting in and of itself, but the part I really dig is the dissemination of that information, sharing findings with other people, and ideally, facilitating better decision-making. This is what makes me really excited.
Megan lives in Homer but does her coursework in Fairbanks. She was studying for an M.S. but recently changed to a Ph.D. program.
Read more about Megan at www.sfos.uaf.edu/newsletter.
Click on the image to download the Spring 2009 newsletter (3 MB PDF).
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Featured Student: Megan Murphy
Megan Murphy already knows she wants to live and work in Homer,
Alaska, and is pursuing a graduate degree in biological oceanography at
UAF to help her achieve this goal. She is studying the oceanographic effects
on crab larval transport in Kachemak Bay.
Standouts - Student News
Other Student News
Featured photo
Mayumi Arimitsu, a master's degree student in fisheries, conducting her thesis research in Kenai
Fjords National Park.