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Meet Maya Our 2024 REU Student
Meet Maya Clarke!
Hello! My name is Maya Clarke, and I am an environmental science major with a minor in economics at the H.L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. I am delighted to be working under the NSF CSUMB REU program at Moss Landing Marine Labs in the Environmental Biotechnology Lab this summer! I am working with Dr. Holly Bowers and Hannah McGrath studying how temperature impacts the abundance of Harmful Algae Bloom species in Monterey Bay.
Professionally and personally, I love learning about interactions at intersection points. Estuaries are particularly interesting, as they are where the impacts of humans, land, and sea are concentrated.
As a Floridian, the water is practically family. From rowing in the St. Lucie River, to kayaking through the Indian River Lagoon, to sailing or swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, I relished any opportunity to interact with my local waterways. Through in this age of “once in a lifetime” climatological events, I also became familiar with seeing stingrays one day, to the wildlife disappearing as the water turned rancid the next, to a week after, the normally blue visage turning a muddled green. My observations sparked an interest in how human activity impacts the interactions within the world around us, from the microbial level to the atmospheric. These interests drove me to study Environmental Science with a minor in Economics. Beyond my academic and professional curiosities, I also enjoy spending my free time crocheting, listening to audiobooks, and playing with bread, cookie, or pasta dough.
20th International Conference on Harmful Algae
20th International Conference on Harmful Algae
Holly, Olivia, and Hannah attended the 20th International Conference on Harmful Algae in Hiroshima, Japan, November 5-10, 2023! Holly presented the EPA project looking at HAB response to agricultural run-off (PI- Ross Clark; CCWG), Olivia presented a poster on her thesis project measuring phytoplankton response to agricultural plastics, and Hannah gave an ignite talk and presented a poster highlighting EBL’s monitoring station at the Monterey Wharf as part of CalHABMAP. We left the meeting with loads of information, fresh ideas, and new collaborations to explore!! Already looking forward to Chile in 2025!
EBL Takes a Field Trip to the Monterey Wharf Sampling Site
EBL recently had the chance to participate in a site visit with members from NOAA’s Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Federal Advisory Committee! This program funds our weekly monitoring station (https://calhabmap.org/monterey-wharf ) so we can continue to provide key data on harmful algal bloom species and associated water parameters to stakeholders. Hannah and Holly were on hand to demonstrate net tow sampling and standardized reporting of water quality data. “June Gloom” was nowhere to be found, as sunny skies greeted the group!
Photo credit: Alex Harper, CenCOOS.
Meet out REU Student of Summer 2023- Carissa Tinney
Carissa Tinney- REU Student of Summer 2023
Hello!
My name is Carissa Tinney and I am a biochemistry major with a minor in environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento and am part of CSUMB’s REU (research experience for undergraduates) program this summer. I will be working with Dr. Holly Bowers and Olivia Pawlyk at MLML’s Environmental Biotechnology Lab studying how agricultural microplastics impact phytoplankton. My interests lie in environmental biotechnology, with special interest in water quality and algae. In my free time I love to read, garden, cook and travel when I can. I’m very excited to work at the lab this summer and learn as much as possible!
The Pond Doctors Compete in the Algae Prize Competition 2022-2023
Giving Diatoms a New Home in the EBL
In the month of March, our graduate student Hannah has been busy culturing and creating a museum of diatoms from Monterey Bay. All of the newest diatom EBL members are photographed below. These diatom species include detonula, Lauderia, Licmophora, Coscinodiscus, Thalassiosira, Ditylum, P. nitzschia, and Asterionellopsis. We look forward to keep growing up diatoms in the lab especially since spring tends to be diatom season!
Happy New Year! 2023 Updates from EBL
Although the New Year has just begun, the lab has been busier than ever. Hannah is working on testing the efficiency and sensitivity of qPCR assays for harmful algae bloom species such as Akashiwo and Cochlodinium. In addition, Hannah is continuing to routinely monitor the Monterey Wharf every Wednesday to document phytoplankton community composition. Meanwhile, Olivia is starting to ramp up her thesis work where she plans to investigate the effect agricultural plastics have on phytoplankton community composition. This involves lots of planning, collecting species of interest, culturing, and constructing. Lastly, Holly has been closely working alongside her graduate students with current grants/projects. In addition, she recently wrote a couple new grant proposals! (more information to come shortly).
Even though the start of our new year has been busy, the members of EBL have also had a lot of fun. In January, we had a January birthday bash (since all of the EBL members have January birthdays!) which involved lots of baked goods/sweets, live music, dancing, mingling, and feeding goat and sheep. One of our favorite things to do as a lab is going out to lunch together (our favorite being Thai food).
Recap of Summer 2022
What a busy and productive summer this lab has had!! This past summer we had three student workers (Olivia Pawlyk, Jasmine Ruiz, and Hannah McGrath) in the lab alongside Dr. Holly Bowers. Olivia was working on the EPA grant. This included prepping for experiments, setting up mesocosm bag experiments, preliminary flask experiments, and growing/isolating cultures in the incubator. Jasmine was brought in from UC Santa Cruz to help with CenCOOS Monterey Wharf sampling. This happens every Wednesday morning. This is a collaborative project with other locations along the California coast (https://calhabmap.org/.) It allows us to see a snapshot of what phytoplankton communities are populating in different locations at the same time. Hannah is a new incoming MLML student! The last couple weeks of August she came into the lab to shadow Jasmine because she will eventually take that job over. We are excited for the rest of the year!
Just Published! Assessing the performance and efficiency of environmental DNA/RNA capture methodologies under controlled experimental conditions
As part of our ongoing partnership with collaborators at Cawthron in New Zealand, our new paper is out in
Methods in Ecology and Evolution!