Returning to Midway!

Don, Anne, and I are finally heading to Midway on Thursday, August 5!!! We’re still working on finalizing our 2010 Monument permits, but we hope they’ll be complete by the time or soon after we reach Midway. Until then, we’ll work on the one permit we still have active (my juvenile pearl oyster growth and survival cages) and preparing for our various projects. We look forward to seeing our friends at Midway again and resuming our work there.

Our 2010 Mitsubishi volunteers will join us a week later on Thursday, August 12. They’ll be lucky enough to fly into Midway during the day, so they’ll see Midway from the air. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to see more than a few, if any, albatrosses, since all the juveniles have fledged and the adults won’t return until October or November.

We know that Midway will be the same in some ways and very different in other ways. For example, FWS refuge manager Matt Brown has moved to another position on Maui and former refuge biologist John Klavitter is now acting refuge manager. We’ll miss Matt, but we’re also very happy for John. FWS has also added other staff, and I’m sure the Chugach staff has changed. The albatrosses will be almost completely gone, which is partly sad because we love seeing them and partly good because we’ll be able to arrive during the day and we won’t have to worry about tiger sharks cruising inside the lagoon to eat fledglings.

Since my last post in March, we’ve all been very busy.

• I finished teaching Ecology of Reefs, Mangroves, and Seagrasses (including giving a final exam and final grades!!), went to Maui for a week for an education workshop, and completed the steps to advance to candidacy (which include a public seminar which was the the occasion for the photo above).
• Don returned from Australia, worked very hard on completing our permits, and went to Germany for two weeks to analyze the cores collected in Australia.

Anne completed her first year at UCSC with some very intense classes and her scientific diving certification, spent a few weeks exploring Seattle and the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound, and looks forward to resuming fieldwork at Midway. As you can see in the photo to the left, she also went skydiving!!

• Helen and Rachel both completed their comprehensive exams and are getting started on their own research.Helen just returned from an intense 5 weeks on Palmyra working on coral recruitment tiles with Dan Brumbaugh, a UCSC affiliate that is a scientist for the American Museum of Natural History.

• Kate returned from Antarctica and will be joining us on the G-1 plane for a short visit to friends at Midway. We all look forward to seeing her again and hearing about Antarctica!!