Lab News

I'll periodically update the News section to keep interested parties informed about cool news and interesting updates... Stay tuned!

March 2023

Our new research published in Proc B was featured in the New York Times! We measured the feeding rates of Pycnopodia on purple sea urchins and show that these sea stars can play a key role in helping kelp forests recover through their predation on urchins.

October 2020 - new paper: "Climate drives the geography of marine consumption by changing predator communities"

We are really happy to share news that a global scale "squidpop" experiment, which PhD Student Ross Whippo helped lead, is now published in PNAS! I am a coauthor as well, for contributing the local OIMB data. Congratulations to a huge team for this effort, and especially Ross, who is the 2nd author on the paper!

August 2019

My postdoc Dr. Julie Schram and I had a great summer of research working with our 2019 NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students (Hannah Hayes and Steven Manos)! We also had a Murdock Trust Fellow working with us again for the 2nd year (Erica Street), and our 2018 REU (Natalie Thompson) is now working in the lab as a technician! This year our projects focused on experiments to quantify the effects of ocean acidification on juvenile Dungeness crab behavior. What a team!

Picture: clockwise starting on left back row: Natalie, Steven, Julie, Hannah, Aaron, and Erica

April-May 2019

We completed our research diving expedition to study the seaweeds and benthic food web of the Antarctic Peninsula! I've given summaries of the mission in invited zoom lectures for a few groups since our return. Let me know if you want to give this talk to your group and I'll try to accommodate you!

August 2018

My collaborator Dr. Alex Lowe and I received support through the SeaDoc Society to do a few submersible dives with OceanGate's Cyclops1 in the San Juan Islands in September 2018! Our research team will focus on observations of deep water red urchins and the drift algae that supports the urchins!

Check out this article in GeekWire about the project. 

March 2018

I'm pleased to announce that we (my postdoc Dr. Julie Schram and I), were recently funded by Oregon Sea Grant to research the effects of ocean acidification on newly settled juvenile Dungeness crab. We'll be investigating crab behavior, predator-prey sensing (i.e., "smell"), and other responses under OA conditions in the lab. Please see the summary on the Sea Grant website for more information. The photo on the left shows a high density of crabs in the age class we will be working on. Photo credit: Reyn Yoshioka.

July 2017

Thanks to Reyn we now have a lab crest/logo. Somehow it covers all of the bases I hoped for: fatty acids, invertebrates, algae, OIMB; all while looking super cool. 

7 May 2017

I have a new paper in Ecology in 'The Scientific Naturalist' series, published this May! In this paper we describe an exceptionally high-density juvenile crab recruitment event on the Oregon Coast that we documented last spring. The article (download) links to some additional videos of crabs in nearby areas and documents some really interesting behavior. 

We actually know very little about the ecology of juvenile Dungeness crab. The period of time between settlement from the larvae and harvest of mature males in the fishery (usually 4 year old crab) is still largely a mystery, despite the fact that this is one of the most valuable fisheries on the west coast.

March 2016

I have been documenting large aggregations of newly settled, juvenile Dungeness crab (Cancer magister) recruits on scuba dives in the rocky shallow subtidal zones on the Southern Oregon Coast. Here is a photo taken on 13-May-2016 (Friday the 13th). The picture was taken at an angle to the bottom making a determination of the image area difficult. Each crab is about 9mm wide. On this day we estimated densities of ~5,000-11,000 individual crabs per square meter. In the initial observation made 3 weeks earlier (no photos available), densities ranged from 22,000-65,000 crab per square meter. We have a new paper on this exceptional event in Ecology. 

10 Sept 2015

I've started my new position at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology! The Charleston OR campus is beautiful. The photo shows the current home of the Galloway wet/experimental lab. 

30 March 2015

Geoducks are large, long-lived bivalves that are an important part of ecosystems and our economy. Wild subtidal populations are harvested using SCUBA, and intertidal aquaculture of these clams is on the rise. I am co-author on two papers (led by P. Sean McDonald, UW) that just came out in the Journal of Shellfish Research special issue on Geoducks. The first paper (McDonald et al. 2015a) uses a combination of SCUBA survey and remote drop camera techniques to estimate geoduck abundance in a Hood Canal, a very large fjord in Puget Sound. The second paper investigates the short-term effects of structures associated with intertidal geoduck aquaculture on other intertidal organisms (McDonald et al. 2015b). Check out the special issue to learn more about geoducks!

28 January 2015

My collaborators in Finland and I have a new paper out today in Ecosphere (an open access ESA journal)... Here we asked: What phytoplankton are in the lake? We compared results from a fatty acid mixing model and traditional microscopy. To the right is my 'twitter' version of the paper. Check it out! The link to the paper is here.

June 2014

I have a few updates on new papers from myself and collaborators; 1) marine particulate organic matter composition and biomarker dynamics (Oikos; Lowe et al. 2014), 2) an analysis of intertidal isopod resource use with a Bayesian fatty acid mixing model (MEPS; Galloway et al. 2014), and (see the figure) 3) effects of diet-degradation on red urchin gonads and biomarkers (MEPS; Raymond et all. in press). There are PDFs of all published manuscripts here.

Also, check out the FASTAR model script and a series of related datasets we used for the published papers on the EcologyBox website:

http://conserver.iugo-cafe.org/user/gway

March 2014

Our research on red urchin density and movement in fixed subtidal transects at several sites and seasons in the San Juan Islands was recently published in Marine Ecology. This project was lead by Alex Lowe, who is now a Ph.D. student in the Ruesink Lab (see the Collaborators page). This work followed up other projects in our lab aimed at quantifying the effects of a large flux of macroalgal detritus to deep subtidal habitats. We found that red urchins move very little in this system, presumably because they can 'sit and wait' to catch all the algal detritus they neeed (this is a link to a YouTube video by Tim Dwyer). This sedentary behavior has effects on associated sessile and mobile benthic invertebrate communities. A PDF can be found here. Also see website of collaborator on this work, Ross Whippo (UBC Graduate Student). 

Nov 1, 2013

My research is featured today in the new monthly FHL Tide Bites newsletter. Check it out! Here are links to the previous Tide Bites issues, where you can learn about Dr. Robin Elahi's work on subtidal rock wall ecology (Tide Bites #1) and Dr. Misty Paig-Tran's work on giant rays that eat teeny tiny things (Tide Bites #2)

June 8, 2013

One of the chapters of my dissertation was officially published today in Limnology and Oceanograpy. You can access the paper here from the publisher or on my CV and Publications page.

March 25, 2013

Today was a good day for the lab; our paper on fatty acid and stable isotope variation at seasonal and spatial scales was officially published today! We are honored to have the feature article in this issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series. You can download the paper by clicking on the PDF [here].