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Week Three: A week in Astoria
On Monday Lydie and I went to Astoria in order to run maintenance on the ESP. The amount of water being flushed through the syringe during the last deployment of the ESP did not match the volume that Lydie had expected to be flushed. This suggested that there could be a problem with the syringe but upon examining the ESP we found that the real problem was that the bag filled the flush solution had a kink in the line that prevent the liquid from flowing to the syringe. By simply moving the bag to a higher point on the ESP we were able to rectify the problem.
We also scouted out a new sampling site on Knappa dock (Named for Captain Knapp as I learned at the Maritime Museum on Thursday) that runs up against Cathlamit Bay. Along with this we planned with Michael at MERTS to take three other samples using the rubber boat of sediments from the middle of the bay.
On Tuesday I preformed another RNA extraction from the filters that had been used in the last deployment of the ESP and prepared for the sampling trip on Wednesday and Thursday.
Wednesday we took samples from Knappa dock and tried to access a second land site on Cathlamit Bay but were unable to because the road was impassable. We then made our way to MERTS where we ventured out on the rubber boat and, with the help of Micheal and Katie, got the samples from sediment in the river.
Thursday we collected the rest of the sediments from both Baker and Youngs’ bay (sites are depicted in the map below). This sampling trip ended with me falling in the mud twice in my epic attempt to retrieve samples at one of the sites in Baker bay. After getting cleaned up and freezing all the samples I joined the other interns at the Maritime Museum where I learned a bit about the history of Astoria and the Columbia River.
Finally on Friday I extracted DNA from all the soil samples and performed a qPCR on them. On Monday I will be able to analyze the data and hopefully find some interesting results.
