My first trip to UW Friday Harbor Labs was in 1995. After completing my undergraduate thesis on freshwater zooplankton and spending a post-bac year chasing primates through the jungles of Borneo, I had been accepted into the PhD program at Oregon State University in the Menge/Lubchenco rocky intertidal ecology lab. My new advisors were aware that I had never actually been to the rocky intertidal zone before I got to OSU, and they encouraged me to head up to FHL for summer courses at the end of my first year. A coin toss led to my application for the Marine Phycology course during A term (tails would have equalled Invertebrate Zoology), and to promote intellectual breadth I applied for the Marine Fishes course for B term. As has happened to thousands of students before and since, I learned more in those 10 weeks than I had in any other 10-week period of my life. Since 1995 I’ve taken every opportunity to go back to FHL, to build on those intellectual experiences and the personal and professional relationships that kick-started my marine biology career. I lived at the Labs for three years as I conducted the field research for my PhD thesis; I taught the ‘Bot’ part of ZooBot, I’ve mentored 9 students through the Blinks and REU programs, and brought 14 undergraduates and 5 Masters students to the Labs as I've moved through my faculty career. In 1998 when I established a manipulative field experiment to explore the effects of the kelp Hedophyllum sessile on the low intertidal community, I had no idea that I’d still be collecting data on those same plots 22 years later!
This TideBite was inspired by one of those graduate students who came up to FHL. As a Masters student in my lab at California State University Fullerton, Rachel Pound was interested in understanding how exposure to high temperatures during low tide might affect the susceptibility of limpets to predation. At the end of her first year, with the support of Richard and Megumi Strathmann Endowed Fellowship funds, Rachel was able to spend a summer at FHL. Rachel’s previous research experience had primarily been in studies of marine plankton, and at FHL she focused on building her expertise in rocky intertidal field survey methodology and honing her understanding of the elements that control body temperature for limpets during low tide. Dr. Emily Carrington generously offered time, energy, and equipment to help us with the latter, and Rachel spent many hours working with Emily’s wind tunnel, carefully manipulating different environmental conditions to examine how each one affected limpet body temperature. As the summer came to a close and we started to consider the predation part of the equation, Rachel and I would pose hypothetical questions to each other such as “So if we wanted to look at predation by birds, how would we set up an experiment?” Then we’d reach out to anyone who might have insights. That particular question led to a long and entertaining discussion with Emily and Dr. Dianna Padilla on the porch of the FHL Dining Hall, where we sat together brainstorming about methods and equipment. This conversation was one of thousands of similarly productive and energetic encounters that have happened in those very chairs.