The fall 2024 cohort of Semester by the Bay students at the Kachemak Bay Campus finished their semester with a two-day symposium including presentations on research conducted this semester, internships hosted by various marine-based organizations in Homer and a display of posters in the Kachemak Bay Campus hallways.
The students in each cohort are undergraduates from various colleges who come to Homer to study marine, biological, climate and ecological sciences and marine mammals. The courses vary by semester. This fall there was one Homer student who participated, Javin Schroeder, and one student from the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Mat-Su College, Nyla Klein.
In fall 2024, the students’ independent research projects were focused on whales and other marine mammals.
On Dec. 10, the students provided oral presentations of their projects to faculty members Dr. Debbie Tobin and Marc Webber, lab technician Sarah Wilhelm and adjunct faculty member Ken Goldman. Community members and representatives from the internship organizations also attended. That evening they shared posters.
Internship hosts this semester included the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, the NOAA Kasitsna Bay Lab, Sweetgale Meadery and Winged Whale Research.
Internship projects included identifying new porpoises in Kachemak Bay (and getting the chance to name them); harbor monitoring for seals and otters pre-harbor expansion and monitoring at Mariner Park at the base of the Spit pre-hotel development; creating science brochures for water taxis; contributing to the Kachemak Bay Humpback Whale (HUMW) catalog; and monitoring cameras at the Wynn Nature Center and Homer Harbor.
One student, Sam Chalmers, is a wildlife biology major visiting from the University of Maine at Machias. She is scheduled to graduate in 2026. Her internship was a little unusual compared to the others because it was more focused on marine education and outreach than the actual practice of science. Some of the regional activities she contributed to were training on invasive species monitoring of European green crabs, attending Science Week in Whittier for K-12 homeschooled students, Science Friday in Seldovia and plankton tows in the Homer Harbor.
“One thing I got to do that I really enjoyed was participating in a Coastwalk, which is basically a form of avian mortality monitoring on coastlines where you’re just moving across the expanse of a beach looking out for any injured or deceased birds,” she said during the presentation.
An audience member asked Chalmers if she wished that her internship had included more direct science to which she replied, “no, I want everybody to be excited about science because we all need it. So, I was glad to be able to work with some younger people and show them how they can help locally.”
Ansley Gibson’s internship was in skeletal articulation with Lee Post. Gibson attends the University of Central Florida where she is in a pre-veterinary and zoological sciences program as well as attending veterinary school. She shared the process of taking a skeleton apart, cleaning the bones and putting the animal back together.
Nathan Majors and Nyla Klein completed a duo internship with Winged Whale Research, an organization directed by Homer local Olga von Ziegesar. Their internship included uploading older records of whale encounters from film from locations including: Hawaii, Shuyak Island, Kachemak Bay and Barren Island. The students helped transfer more than 600 whale fluke photos to online database Happywhale.com, according to their presentation.
Happywhale is described on the homepage as an organization that “engages citizen scientists to identify individual marine mammals, for fun and for science.”
Other fall participants in the program were Mo Rzane, Lucy Pyne, Carleigh Frino, Ash VanNorwick, Justin Rhoads, Javin Schroeder and Edwin Viramontes.
Additional information and features related to Semester by the Bay is available at https://semesterbythebay.org/.
