Bamfield

A summer of science at Bamfield Marine Science Centre. 5 courses. 23 Whales. Bears. Seaweeds. Nudibranchs and more.

Despite a bumpy start to the summer (vomiting non-stop from Kelowna to a brief hospital visit in Victoria and a long winding bumpy ride down a dirt road Bamfield), this was probably the best summer of my life. The things I learned, the people I met and the experiences I had will be hard to summarise for you here. The best I will be able to do is mention a few of the best moments.

Leah Coombs on a trip out to Kii?xin, a Native archaeological site, with Stella Peters, a local Huu-ay-aht, as our guide.

Anthopleura elegantissima, an undersea bloom.

Seaweeds in the bucket. Collecting seaweeds on Seppings Island, BC.

My first course of the summer was Diversity of Seaweeds. Seaweeds may not sound like an interesting course to some, bringing images of soggy green masses stuck to rocks, but you should throw that image out the window. Our first day we were issued with our buckets and hip waders discovering algae varying across the colour spectrum, algae not only visible to the naked eye but forming large branching structures made of a single cell (Codium fragile), algae that secretes sulphuric acid (Desmerestia, the only one they advise you don't eat), kelps with floats (Nereocystis luetkeana, Macrocystis integrifolia), aglae forming pink crystallised skeletons (Coralina officinalis), Nori used in making sushi (Porphyra sp.), algae that resembled small golden sacks you could squeeze and squirt (Halosaccion glandiforme), long feather boas (Egregia menziesii), tiny palm trees that bounce in the waves (Postelsia palmaeformis), and an algae that made the water shimmer with purple iridescence as currents drifted over it (Mazzaella splendens).

Why is there so much biodiversity in the sea? Because there are so many leaky condoms (Halosaccion glandiforme)!

Colin Bates (my seaweeds professor)

The long hours spent collecting, identifying and pressing seaweeds paid off. By the end of the course I had a beautiful herbarium of 50 species! I also won a jar of fresh home made honey (Colin Bates also in addition to being a seaweed expert, teaches beekeeping too) for the best pressed seaweed.

Bumblebee, Bombus sp., visits a thistle. Broken Islands, BC.

I must have visited over a hundred Islands that summer. Much of Coastal Community Ecology was spent leaping precariously off boats onto tiny slippery and jagged islands battered by the waves. We definitely risked our lives for science then but the class' hard work surveying plants to establish the effect of exposure on island biogeography of tiny islands was published.

This Giant Pacific Octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, was a surprise to us seaweed students while dredging for deep sea reds.

Catching an octopus, and picking it up to send it back into the sea is something I'm never going to forget. It wasn't easy. They're incredibly squishy and watch out for that beak!

Myself

Helping Hands. A family out fishing while we conducted our surveys in Survey Methods for Coastal Wildlife.

Cape Beale. Those two little specks in the middle are my friends and classmates Jenna Facey and Janet Ferguson.

Music by the Sea. Gavia Lertzman-Lepovsky serenades us and the lighthouse keepers round a fire on a violin of one of the lighthouse keepers' grandfathers' who fled Nazi Germany. Cape Beale, BC.

Steve Beale. An American coast guard dummy who washed up on the rocks of Cape Beale, now the befriended prankster of the lighthouse keepers hoisted on the shoulders of my classmate Neil Hickerson to stare creepily through the window.

When we first arrived at Cape Beale a door at the end of the guest house hall was left ajar. As each member of the class stepped in and took notice different reactions began to be displayed. Some did a double take. Others quickly averted their eyes. Some whispered anxiously to one another, "do they know they left the door open?" Until someone dared to check it out. At the end of the hall was a bathroom and perched on the toilet seat with pants pulled down was a manic looking mannequin. This was how we met Steve Beale. You can add him on facebook.

A Rough Skinned Newt, Taricha granulosa, crawls out of the cool water. Rough Skinned Newts secrete a neurotoxin resulting in the development of an evolutionary arms race with snakes. Sarita Falls, BC.

For the Love of Trees. Hiking out after a swim at Sarita falls, BC.

Frog Prince. Sweet little frog was probably terrified, plucked from the muddy West Coast Trail, BC.

Splish Splash. Swimming with friends during a weekend of camping on Brady's Beach.

While field courses are intense and there is little time away from your studies, there was also room for a lot of fun in the few spare moments we had. In between two classes, once every three weeks, we could have a weekend off. And in the evenings if work was done we would often all pile into whoever's car and head to Pachena Bay. There we would sit round the fire and get to know each other better, play music or leave to take a swim with the seals and young humpback whales that would come into the bay. The most magical experience of all was when the waters were filled with a bio-luminescent bloom.

It was as though you were swimming through the universe, with stars twinkling above and beneath you.

Myself, swimming through a bio-luminescent bloom

Sea star wasting disease devastated the population that summer. We did a little class project modelling and analysing this in Ecological Models and Data.

It might seem odd to take a modelling course in a field research facility. In such a beautiful place this is probably the last thing most people would want to do. But it was that summer that I discovered what I loved most about research was analysing and modelling data. For some reason that part of each project just always got me so excited, especially since this summer was when I was first introduced to R. I just loved how easily you could develop such interesting plots and create different models with such freedom!

There's also just something wonderful about sitting down with a cup of hot chocolate powder mixed into your coffee (mocha a la Bamfield) while there's a torrential downpour outside preventing you from watching whales to a nice juicy dataset. But there's also something wonderful about sitting in the wide open RIX centre, with a view of the entire inlet and potential for whales, while you draft up models too.

Another highlight was all the snorkelling we got to do in the Marine Behavioural Ecology course. We conducted behavioural surveys and explored The Great Tidepool, a massive tidepool the size of a public pool filled with crabs, fish, kelp forests, sea cucumbers and even an octopus or two!

You were one of those kids who just never gets out of the water, weren't you?

Isabelle Cote (my marine behavioural ecology professor)

It was pretty cold water even in a wetsuit. Most people had to take breaks to warm up on land. I couldn't bear the thought of wasting time on that when there were such cool creatures to see.

The door frame of one of the longhouses at Kii?Xin still stands (photo cred to Stella Peters, our guide).

Another great opportunity Bamfield presented was to get to know the locals. Students and researchers were often invited to the House of Huu-ay-aht for events and potlucks in Anacla or on the beach in Pachena Bay. It was there I tried chiton for the first time and learned to shawl dance and smoke salmon. I also learned how to say thank you, klecco klecco. Stella Peters took two other students and I out to Kii?Xin, her ancestral home and now spectacular archaeological site. This is where the totem poles guarding the entrance to the Royal BC Museum came from.

Watching for Whales. photo cred to my classmate and friend Shelby Gill.