Author Archives: Jessica Dutton

How Do Giant Sea Bass Influence The Fish Around Them?

By: Kiran Reed

Hello everyone! My name is Kiran and I am a 3rd year masters student in Dr. Mark Steele’s fish ecology lab at CSU, Northridge. My project there, and as a 2021 Wrigley Summer Fellow, aims to show how a visual giant sea bass predator cue impacts behavior of smaller fishes. Generally, I am very interested in questions surrounding fish behavior!

Giant sea bass (GSB) are a particularly cool species to study, I think, because so little is known about them and their ecology. The species was fished to ecological extinction in the 20th century; however, in recent years populations have started to slowly recover. Right now, there are just enough out there that we can start to learn more about them. GSB is one of the few fish apex predators in the Southern California Bight and the only one that inhabits coastal rocky reefs, so they hold a pretty unique niche in the ecosystem.

Since studying real GSB can be unreliable and tricky, I spent many of my quarantined months building a fake GSB model. In order to do this, I worked with Reynold’s Advanced Materials, which is a store in Burbank that supplies materials to a lot of Hollywood prop builders. I took a mold of a taxidermied GSB and then cast and painted my own rubber replicate:

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Using a model predator allows me to standardize the visual predator cue that smaller fish are exposed to, which helps to eliminate some unwanted variability in my data. In order to attract smaller fish, I attach my model GSB to a baited remote underwater video system (or BRUV for short). The BRUV is baited, so I can watch how fish act and feed differently when my model GSB is attached or not.

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I have spent this summer traveling around to sites that have higher and lower GSB densities and have run BRUV trials with and without my model GSB attached. Though I haven’t had a chance to crunch the numbers yet, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to find some differences in how fish respond to my model GSB!

This will be the first study to show how GSB ecologically affect other species. As GSB populations continue to recover, it’s important to understand how their growing presence in coastal CA kelp forests might impact ecological dynamics of the system.

Advancing Online Aquaculture Content

By: Victoria Westover

Hello fellow Wrigley/scientific research enthusiasts! I’m Victoria Westover, a senior majoring in Journalism and Environmental Public Policy with a minor in Comparative Politics at the University of Southern California. With the generosity of the Wrigley Institute’s Summer 2021 Bauer award, I worked on a science communication project in the inaugural partnership between the Wrigley Institute and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) — a dream come true!

A little bit about me before we dive into my summer project:

Driving the boat in the Sea of Cortez on the hunt for yellowfin tuna in June 2019

Driving the boat in the Sea of Cortez on the hunt for yellowfin tuna in June 2019

I felt a responsibility for documenting global environmental atrocities and preserving Earth’s ecosystems when I saw the harms of overfishing and environmental degradation first hand. I compete in an annual deep-sea fishing tournament in the Sea of Cortez. Over the past fourteen years, I gradually saw the Sea of Cortez turn into the world’s garbage can and suffer from anthropogenic harm. I was mortified that preventable human activities were destroying the environment and knew I wanted to dedicate my career to bridging the gap between science and policymakers through public awareness of environmental issues.

In high school, I worked with a team of students to renovate a warehouse and turn it into a functioning Innovation lab where we built and managed large-scale aquaculture, aquaponic and hydroponic systems. We even partnered with the CDFW to raise, tag and release Rainbow Trout.

The tilapia aquaculture system in the Innovation Lab at Edison Highschool in April 2018

The tilapia aquaculture system in the Innovation Lab at Edison Highschool in April 2018

Now as a senior in college, I am grateful to have once again partnered with the CDFW and help advance California aquaculture. But this time my work was incredibly different. I, along with my incredibly talented co-intern Alex Tse, worked under the supervision of USC Provost Postdoctoral Fellow Amalia Almada, PhD and the CDFW State Aquaculture Coordinator Randy Lovell to audit two state-run aquaculture websites: the department’s Aquaculture Homepage and the outreach site Aquaculture Matters.

Over the course of six weeks Alex and I analyzed the existing communications tools, content and engagement metrics for both websites to address content gaps and improve user engagement.

The general process we used for auditing both websites consisted of five steps:

1. Review the existing materials: Understand the website proposals, charters, design constraints and site content. Become familiar with the operations management of the websites to later make constructive and reasonable recommendations.
2. Narrow the Scope: Identify a specific purpose and set of goals for each site.
3. Identify Target Audiences: Identify target audiences including (1) audience needs and (2) desired user responses.
4. Analyze: Determine if content meets audience needs and helps facilitate or hinder intended user response.
5. Recommend: Identify how website features could be added, tweaked or removed to better meet the site’s goals.

For example, to narrow the scope of the analysis (step 2 of the audit), Alex and I had to determine how the two websites we are auditing function with the other aquaculture websites managed by the department. This meant identifying a specific purpose and narrow set of goals for each site, as shown below.

State Aquaculture Websites Graphic.

State Aquaculture Websites Graphic.

We determined that the overall purpose of the CDFW homepage is to provide information and materials to aquaculturists and stakeholders to answer the needs of the constituency. On the other hand, Aquaculture Matters is an outreach platform to accurately inform a variety of audiences about the world of aquaculture.

One of the recommendations Alex and I made for the CDFW Aquaculture Homepage was to incorporate a graphic that shows the steps aquaculturists should take and in what order to launch their own projects, including the exact agencies aspiring aquaculturists need to go through for project compliance. We found that creating a visualization of the steps needed to enter the aquaculture industry would help provide aquaculturists and stakeholders clear and easy access to regulatory information.

Example graphic of steps for aspiring aquaculturists.

Example graphic of steps for aspiring aquaculturists.

And like the CDFW website says, aquaculture matters! Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food production sector and it is a new path forward to sustainably meet the world’s growing demand for animal protein. Aquaculture can also be used to promote reproduction of wild populations and there is great potential to use aquaculture to create alternative fuel sources (such as using kelp for biofuel!).

An aquaculture agency’s web presence matters because effective communication between the government and the public is incredibly important as the public’s interest in aquaculture grows and the aquaculture industry expands in the future.

I am incredibly grateful for this internship which provided me a valuable opportunity to learn about and experience the inner-workings of developing aquaculture policy in California. I also was able to learn new skills for effective science communication, such as conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and modifying communication methods for specific target audiences.

Thanks for reading!

Summer Award made possible by the Bauer Family Endowed Scholarship Fund