currenttidings2022-1
Current Tidings
Shannon Point Marine Center
Volume 2022, Issue 1
The past three decades have seen remarkable change and growth in the research directions, educational programs, facilities, and personnel at SPMC. Amid all this change, the one constant has been the Manager of Academic Support Services – Gene McKeen. As described in this newsletter, that title doesn’t begin to capture the numerous roles Gene has filled over the years nor the impact he has had on a host of SPMC students, staff, faculty, and visitors. Indeed, he has been a major force contributing to much of the growth and progress. After so many years of exceptional work, Gene is stepping down to spend more time with his family. He will be missed but leaves a deep legacy of dedicated service. We wish the best to a long-time colleague and friend.
Still Crazy (about research) after All These Years ...
Long-time Shannon Point lab manager (officially “Manager of Academic Support Systems”) Gene McKeen is retiring on April 1, 2022 (no joke!) after nearly four decades supporting marine science and education at WWU. It’s a huge challenge to summarize Gene and his contributions in a few short paragraphs. Somehow this eastern Washington kid, raised among rattlesnakes and apple orchards, became a first-generation college graduate with a profound love of the sea and those creatures (especially the ones with fins and tasty flesh!) that inhabit it. Somehow this same young man developed the ability to straddle the worlds of lab maintenance, construction design and oversight, larval crab research, and classroom support. And somehow (we are sure) he’s already finding ways to bring his many talents, post-retirement, to the world outside of Shannon Point Marine Center.
Gene was first hired on at Shannon Point in 1985 as an assistant to then lab manager Paul Cassidy, to help with a water quality project. With a B.S. from WWU’s College of the Environment freshly in hand, Gene had gotten wind of big things planned for the marine lab (like hiring a full-time director!) and wanted to be part of the action. When Dr. Steve Sulkin arrived as that full-time director in 1986, he needed assistance with a Sea Grant-funded project rearing red rock crab for a possible soft-shell industry, and Gene stepped in as technician on this grant. As he puts it, “this underachieving undergraduate, not known for his academic prowess, got a chance because he was in the right place at the right time."
As underachieving as Gene might (or might not) have been, he obviously got his sea legs in just a short time. He was Steve Sulkin’s right-hand man on crab research projects for years, ringing the changes from red rock through Dungeness to purple shore and beyond. (This writer clearly remembers the days when purple shore crabs were a common sight scuttling around under counters in the analytical and teaching labs at Shannon Point.) Gene’s motivation was always to be part of the team working in marine science, whether that meant feeding crabs, helping with scheduling, logistics, and the herding-of-cats for an alphabet soup of programs (REU! MIMSUP! MSSP!), fixing things, or lending his considerable creativity and vision to the entity that is Shannon Point.
Gene is most proud of the relationships he has built over the years, with folks on campus, at the Department of Ecology, and with any number of students and researchers who have passed through Shannon Point. He knows he has annoyed people at times, because his motivation has always been, “How are we going to get this done?” in light of safety, budgetary considerations, and University policy. He played a major role in developing the current array of physical spaces at Shannon Point, most notably the ‘new building’ that hosts the main entry, administrative and faculty offices, deluxe analytical laboratories, and the Sulkin Commons with its gorgeous views over Rosario Strait. But, to a first approximation, almost all of the SPMC campus has been renovated during Gene’s tenure (including invisible infrastructure such as power and internet connections), with Gene acting as sounding board, co-planner, and liaison between main campus, the city, and Shannon Point inhabitants. Gene also pushed for establishment of the dive program, believing that any marine lab worth its salt should have the capacity for SCUBA in support of research.
From this editor’s perspective, Gene’s contributions go well beyond what he is willing to claim for himself. Gene has stepped in as a leader during various gaps in Shannon Point’s official leadership and has for decades articulated a clear and unwavering vision in support of research as a key component of education and of Shannon Point’s place at WWU. Gene is also a connector – of people, of information, of logistics and facilities and opportunities. He’s the one who plans the taco bar when Shannon Point social life needs a boost, who lets us know when we’ll be without power for a morning, who can drive the boat, or reorganize the space, or find the right IT person, often at a moment’s notice. The questions Gene has answered and problems he has solved, for my lab group and others, range from the mundane to the profound and are much too numerous to be counted.
Plans for the future involve lots of travel in the near term. Gene and his wife Terry have a motorhome and already have summer reservations at campgrounds in the upper Midwest. (So many lakes! Hopefully with so many fish!) They travel regularly to Hawai’i. Gene is a grandpa and there have been numerous requests for custom grandkid furniture and other handyman projects. And there are bigger, saltier plans in the works - not ready for prime-time newsletter description – but sure to be interesting, creative, and worthy if the past is any guide!
I will close with Gene’s own hopes for Shannon Point’s future. “I hope, moving forward, that people take the opportunity to get to know each other, to build a community of research culture that makes being at the marine lab unique and fun – that adds the spice to education and research. That has made my career.”
Tiny Mollusks in Their Multitudes
WWU/Biology graduate student Lizzie Diehl has been passionate about science since first grade. Somewhat unusually, however, her passion doesn’t center on sharks or whales; rather, it is marine invertebrates that fascinate her. She loves how they exemplify the completely different ways that life manifests itself the world’s oceans. So it is fitting that she found a research ‘home’ with Dr. Deborah Donovan exploring the conditions that best support young pinto abalone (Haliotis kamtschatkana), an endangered species in the State of Washington.
Lizzie’s research is examining the interplay of temperature and larval pinto abalone CO2 as they influence survival, growth and morphology of post-larval pinto abalone. This work is a close collaboration with the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, an agency whose mission is, in part, “to recover species and habitats that are imperiled or diminished.” PSRF provided Lizzie with the requisite 4,000 (!) individual post-larvae, and Lizzie’s research will provide PSRF with knowledge about the best conditions for out-planting hatchery-raised abalone.
Using the ocean acidification research facility at Shannon Point, Lizzie was able to create a fully crossed experiment testing the effects of low and high CO2 in concert with constant and fluctuating temperature conditions. The tiny abalone were fed a mix of benthic diatom species and Lizzie monitored their survival, shell length and morphology, and characteristics of their (super tiny) radulae, the feeding appendages (‘tongues’) used to scrape diatoms off surfaces. Understandably, Lizzie is most proud of her data collection for survival, which involved checking all 4,000 of these individuals in 4-d rotations throughout her 40-day experiment duration. She also highlights the dissection and prep of the radulae for scanning electron microscopy; these structures at ~150 µm are significantly smaller than a human eyelash. The most enjoyable part of the research (so far!) was setting up and trouble-shooting the experimental system in collaboration with fellow graduate student Jaclyn Stapleton. A significant challenge was controlling for water quality issues – for example, changes in salinity as pre-treatment bubbling to control pCO2 led to evaporation.
Results of the research have been (not surprisingly!) somewhat of a surprise. Post-larvae appeared more sensitive to the temperature regime than to pCO2. Additionally, survival was the lowest under conditions (fluctuating temperature, low pCO2) in which shell length was the highest. Radula data collection is on-going, and Lizzie hopes to pull this story together for a defense before long, perhaps in the fall. She highlights Shannon Point’s size as a much-appreciated element of her graduate experience. Coming from a small undergraduate institution to WWU’s large and busy campus, the SPMC community felt like a familiar and welcoming home for her research endeavors.
Box-and-whisker plot showing mean (heavy black lines), 50th percentile (gray shaded region) and range (vertical bars) of shell length of post-larval pinto abalone grown under 400 versus 1200 pCO2, and constant (10°C) versus fluctuating (10-14-10°C) temperature regimes.
When she’s not busy examining tiny invertebrates and their tinier feeding structures, Lizzie loves hiking or, on a rainy day, curling up with Jane Austen novels. Her pet beta fish, Enzo, is a valued companion. “He has a very energetic personality and is always swimming around his tank and tearing up his plants. Enzo's energy helps me feel energetic as well so I can accomplish the day's goals.” Lizzie’s energy is certainly evident in the scope and quality of her work at Shannon Point and WWU! We anticipate seeing her work inform Salish Sea pinto abalone restoration efforts, and have no doubt that her next steps – a PhD program? – will be as successful as those profiled here.
Marine and Coastal Sciences major and WWU 4th-year undergraduate Katelyn Piwowar has been test-driving the new MACS curriculum, including various adventures in research at Shannon Point Marine Center. In Fall 2021 Katelyn joined 3 other students in an intensive internship course, designing, conducting and presenting research projects carried out in Shannon Point’s culture and radioisotope labs. Subsequently, Katelyn is following up with a capstone project in Suzanne Strom’s lab – as far as we know, the first MACS capstone to be conducted at Shannon Point. I caught up with her to find out how all of this salty investigation has shaped her thinking about science, the ocean, and her future.
Katelyn’s research in fall quarter compared the photosynthesis – irradiance responses of different coccolithophore (Emiliania huxleyi) strains. Both strain diversity and high light tolerance are thought to be important to the success of this widespread, bloom-forming phytoplankter. For her capstone Katelyn is taking it up a notch, incorporating two trophic levels into her experiments. She grew local isolates of Heterosigma akashiwo (a phytoplankton species which can cause fish kills in the Salish Sea) under different light and nutrient conditions and is in the midst of investigating how these different growth states influence growth of and/or toxicity to the predator dinoflagellate Oxyrrhis marina. Both of these research projects have used the culture lab extensively, including the new Guava flow cytometer.
H. akashiwo (chloroplasts fluorescing bright red) and predator O. marina (green, containing remnant ingested prey cell in red). Photo from Katelyn’s capstone experiment.
Katelyn had never spent time in a research lab before these experiences. She reports that she expected the experience to be more difficult, imagining that it would be harder to adapt and to learn new things (a shout-out here to Strom lab members Kelley B., Kerri F., and Megan O., who have spent considerable time and energy facilitating these research projects). Most enjoyable for Katelyn has been working with everyone in the Strom lab and getting to know them (editorial note: agreed!). Most challenging for her has been trying to come up with ideas and questions, as well as figuring out what to do when the research doesn’t work out as expected, and one has to steer the work in a new direction (agreed x2!).
For fun and relaxation Katelyn likes to explore Seattle, where she makes her home, and catch up on her favorite shows. She shares her home with two cats, Billie Holiday and Gordon Ramsay. Billie is a trusted pal, adopted from a shelter, with lots of energy and an affinity for high places. Billie and Katelyn have helped each other through some health issues (Billie’s) and the many challenges of the working student life (Katelyn’s!).
When beginning this research, and perhaps MACS in general, Katelyn’s main interest was in marine mammals. She never thought she would be interested in phytoplankton and had no idea how much there was to this aspect of biological oceanography. She’s currently exploring internships and giving serious thought to the possibility of graduate school. Having Katelyn and other MACS students bring their energy to Shannon Point these past two quarters has been fun and rewarding, and we wish her all the best as she carries her new knowledge and inspiration into the future!
Dr. Kathryn Sobocinski has received a new grant from Puget Sound Partnership to work on a Cumulative Ecosystem Effects Evaluation of salmon habitat in the Whidbey Basin. The project partners include NOAA-NWFSC, PNNL, Skagit River System Cooperative, Tulalip Tribes, Cramer Fish Sciences, and WDFW-Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program. This grant is to set up a research plan for the CEE evaluation, hopefully with on-the-ground work to come. She and graduate student Heidi Stewart will again be sampling herring around Birch Bay this spring.
Dr. Erika McPhee-Shaw spent a month in the field last fall with graduate student Liesl Danyluk, measuring currents, water column structure, and optical properties in Lake Cayuga. This research is supported by her NSF grant, “Collaborative research: Internal swash zones and boundary interior exchange.”
Dr. Shawn Arellano and a large WWU contingent departed on March 13th for Lau Basin (east of Fiji) to embark on an NSF-funded study of symbiont – larval interactions and their influence on species distributions across southwestern Pacific hydrothermal vents. The cruise on R.V. Thomas G. Thompson will use two deep-submergence vehicles (AUV Sentry and ROV Jason), as well as high-volume pumps and lots of microscopy. The group will quarantine for a week in Hawai’i before transiting to the southwest Pacific for a total of 51 days at sea! WWU participants, in addition to Shawn, include Dr. Tanika Ladd (postdoc), Dexter Davis (technician), Tessa Beaver and Vanessa Jimenez (graduate students), and Maia Heffernan (undergraduate). Other members of the science party are from Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB)/ University of Oregon (UO), University of Rhode Island (URI), Temple University, and the Gollner Lab at NIOZ. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter: #veligervoyage.
Please join us at the retirement party for Gene McKeen on March 28!
Newsletter content prepared by Suzanne Strom (stroms@wwu.edu) unless otherwise specified.