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Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Do Scientists Do? a podcast
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from Supernova at Dalhousie. Today's episode we talked to Lindsee Clark. She
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does ocean conservation in Newfoundland and Labrador using a bunch of cool
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different technologies to figure out how the oceans are and what we can do to
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help protect them. She talks to us about invasive species like the green crab and
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how to tell them apart. So keep on listening to find out more. So hello and
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welcome to What Do Scientists Do? This is a podcast where I interview a wickedly
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smart sciencey guest and learn all about what they do and what they know. Today
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we're going to be learning about ocean conservation. So conservation is the
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science of maintaining, protecting, and restoring ecosystems from destruction
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and a lot of the destruction is unfortunately caused by human activity.
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So our guest today works specifically in the field called ocean conservation. So
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if you can piece those words together you'd figure it out that we're working
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or our guest is working to protect the ocean from all the things that are
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changing it. So here to tell us all about ocean conservation is our very special
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guest. Can you introduce yourself with your name and pronouns? Awesome, yes I can
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and good day to everyone. My name is Lindsay Clark and I use the pronouns
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she, her. And what kind of scientist are you Lindsay? I am a fisheries research
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technologist. So it's a really cool branch of science where I actually get
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to work to support someone who has a PhD, so another research scientist. I
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basically work under their guidance to carry out the field logistics, some data
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analysis, and different stats for whatever scientific project is within
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this PhD's field. I basically work under a framework of other people and
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collaboratively with other scientists who do work in the ocean
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sector. Awesome, so what would a typical day look like for you? I love this
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question because I asked this in my job interview for this job and it varies so
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greatly, depends on the time of year, which is something that I really
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enjoy. We work in almost like a boom and bust cycle, so we have a really heavy
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field schedule whenever the weather is nice. So typically late spring, summer,
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and fall, especially here in Newfoundland and Labrador, the window is fairly small,
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so we work when we can. During field season I mostly will be actually in a
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boat on the ocean doing eelgrass planting, monitoring that eelgrass that
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I've planted, and doing different techniques to see if how we're
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replanting is working. And field season means that we're collecting data and
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then during the off season, so the cold season now, I actually will process that
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data. So in the off season you typically start as regular office hours, so from
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like 830 to 430, and I do stats, I look at scientific video, I essentially I
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process all the data that I have collected during the field season. And
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field season is not during office hours, field season is essentially whenever the
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tides and the weather are working, so lots of times I'll be working from 4 or
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5 o'clock in the morning until late at night to get done what we have to do to
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fulfill our goals. So it's very variable and it's very high-paced, which is
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something that I really enjoy. So you really like having all of these different
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kinds of things on the move and the go. Absolutely I do. I have ADHD, so it is
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something that really captures my interest to constantly be, I guess,
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adapting to different situations, whether it be equipment malfunction, weather
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malfunction, tide malfunction. There's lots of different things that happen and
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no one day is the same, and that kind of sounds cheesy, but it's very true when it
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comes to any sort of field work. You're constantly taking in information and
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then tweaking your methods to suit the weather, the equipment that you have, and
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the personnel that you have. So that's something that I really enjoy because
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every day is like a puzzle that I have to solve, and I can kind of come home
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and physically look at what I've done during the day and be proud of that.
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That's so cool. So you mentioned you have ADHD, and I wonder if you just want to
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talk about what your experience is like having ADHD and working in
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academia. Absolutely. It's something that I really enjoy talking about because I
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find there's lack of representation specifically of women with ADHD in
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academia. I always kind of felt out of place in the time that I've spent in
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academia because you're surrounded by people who are very, very, just it feels
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like they're very on top of everything. They're very organized, and sometimes as
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a person with ADHD that can feel like you have some sort of moral feeling that
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you're not as organized as everyone else, or you might not be on top of emails
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like everyone else is, but it's been really a really great journey for me to
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kind of harness the positive aspects of ADHD so I can hyper focus and I can get
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things done quickly. I can make decisions quickly, more quickly than a lot of
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people can, or I can do multiple tasks at once. In fact, I need to do multiple tasks
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at once in order to get anything done, and I get to take that and kind of shape
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my project around things that I like to do and things that I'm good at, and it
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also enables me to reach out and ask for help when I need it, and it's been really
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powerful to be surrounded by people who are so supportive and so uplifting and a
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community that is just very, very excited about my strengths and not my weaknesses,
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and it's been really nice actually to form a community around myself and to
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just be open to talking about this with people because I think more people have
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ADHD than we know of, and it's kind of nice to know that you're not alone in
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such a vast and sometimes very structured field. It's nice to know that
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there are other people out there and that you can work together to basically
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play against each other's strengths, so I find that really, really fun.
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That's awesome. I love framing it as, you know, as someone with ADHD. There are a
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lot of strengths that come with that, and even if there are like, you know, if
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answering emails is the vein of your existence and something that your brain
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just can't do, that's okay. Like everybody has different things that
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they're good at and things that they're bad at, and it's so important to talk to
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scientists like you working in this field and doing like a super cool job
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with ADHD, so thank you, Lindsay. That's very cool.
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So what got you into this kind of work in the first place? What got you into the ocean?
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So I grew up on the ocean. I come from a harvester family, so my dad's a
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harvester. Both of my grandfathers on both sides of my family were working
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with the ocean or with the forest, and my dad comes from southern Labrador, so I
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have Inuit ancestry as well. It's in my blood, is what I always like to say, and I
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grew up on a boat. Like I learned how to walk on a boat. I've been fishing with my
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dad since I can remember, and it just seemed like a natural step to have a job
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on the ocean. Like there didn't seem to be any other answer for what I wanted to
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do with my life. I didn't want to be a harvester because I saw how difficult it
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was for my dad to be away all the time, but I knew I wanted to do something
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where I got to interact with harvesters almost every day, and that's something
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that I feel really lucky that I get to do. It has been a driving force because
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this is kind of a difficult field to be in. Sometimes conservation, and
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specifically ocean conservation, can be really like emotionally taxing because
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you're doing all this work and you're really optimistic about the work that
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you're doing, and sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes what you do gets upended
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by a storm, or sometimes all the work that you've put into a place, it just
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gets ripped up by an ATV, and those things are real, and they can be really a
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really big inhibitor to people wanting to be involved in this, but I knew there
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was no other choice for me. I know how I feel when I'm on the ocean, and I can't
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replicate that feeling anywhere else. The feeling of connectedness with
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everything around me. It's a real privilege, I think, to be able to help the
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ocean, but also to learn more about it.
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I love that. So you use the term harvester a couple times. Do you want to explain what that is?
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Yes, of course. Basically, fishing people. So my dad is a shrimp harvester.
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A lot of the people and harvesters that I work with, they harvest crab, they'll
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harvest cod, they'll harvest whelk, which is a type of sea snail. There are a lot
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of different fisheries here in Newfoundland and Labrador, and when I say
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harvester, I'm referring to people who make their livelihood by taking animals
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out of the ocean to sell.
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Okay, cool. So it's not just like fisher, it's also like maybe someone that works in aquaculture and crabbers or lobsters.
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Yeah, exactly, and I also find it's a little bit more of a gender neutral term,
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because a lot of people don't say fisher, they say fisherman, and the
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fishing sector has become a lot more diverse now than when I was growing up,
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so I like to try to use as much gender neutral language as possible, and it's
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much easier to say harvester than for me to forget and say fisherman. So it's just
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a much friendlier term, I find.
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So hopping back a little bit, you mentioned eelgrass, and I know that you work a lot with eelgrass.
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Do you want to explain what eelgrass is and why it's so important?
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I absolutely do. Full disclosure, before I started this job about a year ago, I had no idea what eelgrass was,
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and so as I explain this, I think you're going to be surprised at how important eelgrass is
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and how little we talk about it. So eelgrass is a type of underwater flowering plant,
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is my favorite way to describe it. Lots of times when we think about ocean plants,
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we think about what we really think about is algae, so seaweeds. So seaweeds are fairly simple,
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they only have, they only, they don't have any roots, they only hold onto rocks through a hold fast
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at the bottom, it's almost sticky, and they transport nutrients in their body by diffusion,
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which is a very, very simple way, it's this very simple organism. Whereas eelgrass is an actual
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vascular plant and it does flower. So it has a root system, which is different from algae,
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and it also uses vascular systems to bring nutrients through the body when it performs photosynthesis.
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So there's around 72 species worldwide. Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, we have one,
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and it's just common eelgrass. So the scientific name is Zostera marina, which is a very pretty
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scientific name that I really like. They are considered ecosystem engineers. So essentially,
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wherever there's eelgrass meadows, they modify the environment around it. So they make water
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quality better because they really hold sediment in their roots. They sequester carbon, which is
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really important on a global scale. And they also decrease wave action in coastal areas, which helps
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with coastal erosion, because these are really long and skinny, almost blades of grass is how
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I would describe them. And they grow in meadows, and they decrease hydrodynamic energy in the area,
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which just means that the waves and the sea in that area are a little bit calmer than they would be
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in a place that doesn't have eelgrass. They are also very important nurseries for juvenile fish
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and juvenile crustaceans in the area. So they act as almost like a protection for these young
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species while they grow until they can get to a point where they can swim out to the ocean and
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kind of live out the rest of their adult life cycle. They, seagrasses are actually disappearing
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at a really alarming rate right now, so about 7% per year globally, which is terrifying.
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But that's exactly what I do, is I replace eelgrass loss in areas specifically around
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Placentia Bay, more of the southern part of Newfoundland and Labrador, where we have experienced
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a lot of eelgrass loss because of green crab in the area. So they're very, very important,
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and I love to look at them. They're beautiful, they're a vibrant green, and they're really
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helpful for basically everything in the area. So you mentioned the green crabs, and we're losing
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eelgrass because of the green crabs. Where did the green crabs come from, and how common are they?
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They are a particularly nasty species of invasive species, so they are believed to be introduced
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in Atlantic Canada in the 1950s, and most people think that this was through bilge water in the
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bilge of boats. So lots of times, boats will come somewhere empty, pick up materials, and then leave.
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But when you're sailing, you need a bit of weight in the boat, and a lot of places they'll actually
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suck up water from the area that they're coming from, and they'll use that in their bilge to give
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them weight when they cross the ocean, and then when they get to where they're going, they'll
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dispel it. And that means that it can carry a lot of larval stages of species that just don't really
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belong here that we call invasive species. And so these invasive species can come in, and then they
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can come in, and then they out-compete a lot of the native species in an area. The science name is
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called competitive exclusion, so this is a belief that two animals can't occupy the same niche in an
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ecosystem. So for example, with green crab, they'll out-compete a lot of lobster, juvenile lobster,
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and a lot of the native crab species in the area, so rock crab, spider crab, species like that,
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and they'll... green crab are significantly more aggressive than a lot of the native species that
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we have here, and they eat a lot of the same food. So what that means is the green crab takes a lot
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of the food source from native species, and it kind of makes them migrate over time to less desirable
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areas. And what I like to say is the big beef between green crab and eelgrass is that green
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crab is looking for food, and the way it looks for food is it digs up in sediment, so we call that
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bioturbation. And unfortunately, this means that it digs up a lot of the roots of the eelgrass that
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we have in the sheltered bays here, and you'll find just... when the tide goes out after green crab
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have been in an eelgrass meadow, just blankets of green washed up on shore, because they're digging
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for clams or digging for crustaceans, things to eat, and in that process they just rip up everything
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around them. And it's devastating to be in any place that has been affected by green crab,
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because it's desolate is the only word that I could use.
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So it's not that the green crab themselves are eating the eelgrass, but they're digging it up
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so the eelgrass is just kind of dying. Am I getting that right? Yeah, they come in and it's
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just like when you go weed your garden, you're digging at the roots of a lot of those weeds.
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The green crab are doing that exact type of thing, but to the eelgrass, because they're looking for
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sources of food in the sediment underneath them. Nice. Well, not nice, bad. And competitive
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exclusion. That makes me think of, you know, me and my brother when we were growing up, we couldn't
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watch the two different TV shows at the same time. So there'd be competitive exclusion if one of us
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is stronger than the other to wrestle the TV remote away. So it sounds like the green crabs
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are wrestling the TV remote away from our native rock crabs. Yeah, they are. And they're very,
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very good at it. Like they're extremely, extremely aggressive. Like I cannot, as someone who works
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with a lot of them all the time, they are extremely aggressive. And there's nothing really that native
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species can do to combat that. The only thing that scientific studies have found is if native
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species are bigger than the invasive species, and even then lots of times native species just try to
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avoid them altogether. It's like avoiding a really aggressive person at work. You're kind of just like,
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I just don't want to work with them. So you're kind of working around them and that doesn't work
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because you can't work together, then it's just difficult all around. And so that's what they do.
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The green crab kind of like bully the native species out of the way to get what they need.
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And that means that native species are moving to places that are not nearly as desirable,
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which means that they aren't reproducing as much. So let's say I'm out walking on the beach, maybe
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I'm going for a surf or I'm just like strolling and I see two crabs. How would I tell the difference
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between a green crab and a rock crab? I love this question because it's really interesting to find
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the different care paces on the beach, so the shells of the crab. And lots of times you can
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do this without even having to interact with the crab, which is what my preferred way of doing it.
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So a green crab, they have a bias. They're just, everything about them is hostile. They have a
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shell that's like sometimes green, can be orange. I typically don't go by the color, but they have
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five really sharp spikes on either side of their eyes. And I mean, they are razor sharp. They are
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so sharp and they have almost like velvety legs. And then say a rock crab, which is the most common
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crab we have here in Newfoundland and Labrador, they have nine bumps on either side of their eyes
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and they're like scalloped edges. They're so soft and kind. So you can really see the difference
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there. The coloring can be different. Some rock crabs can be purplish, but they can be
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purpleish. But again, lots of times if you're seeing something that's been left out for a while,
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color is really not a great option to go on. If you flip them over on their belly, their bellies
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are often different as well. Green crabs are almost shorter and more squat when it comes to
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their tail flap on the inside, whereas rock crabs are much more elongated. But mostly we'd go by
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the actual points on the shell itself. If it's pointy and there's five points on either side,
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it's a green crab. And that's when you take a photo, you would note where you did it. If
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you have the coordinates, you could write down the coordinates, the date and the time that you
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found the invasive species. And then depending on where you are, you can Google, it's basically
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just like report invasive species. And then DFO will provide you with the appropriate email and
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you can send that information to them and then they'll make a note. And then that usually will
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get, a lot of times gets communicated to people like me who don't work directly for DFO, but
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they're working on projects funded by DFO. And then that kind of helps shape where we're doing
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these targeted green crab fisheries. That's really cool. So I like to use something called
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iNaturalist. And I know that sometimes iNaturalist, this app, the research can be graded as research
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grade. Do you ever receive that kind of research or is that just citizen science?
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I find this really interesting because I actually didn't know what iNaturalist was
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until I just got back from an ocean-wise trip and we did a whole session on iNaturalist.
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And so I'm trying to incorporate that now with different presentations that I'm giving. And I
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have to inquire actually on how I can use this information to help as well because New Zealand
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Labrador doesn't have very many iNaturalist observations, but it is like an invaluable
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database for things, especially like invasive species, which we're having more and more issues
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with here. So citizen science, if you don't know for any listeners, it's when you contribute to
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science on your own. So let's say you're out looking at crabs and you find a green crab,
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you take your phone, upload it, and bada boom, bada bing, there's data in the cloud for anybody
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to see and use. So I kind of want to hop back to eelgrass again. So you mentioned that you
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monitor eelgrass and you've talked a little bit about some of the different technology you use.
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Can you tell me what it's like to monitor eelgrass and what kind of technology or
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science processes you use? It's very wet is what I would say, first of all. The project that I'm
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working on now through the Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Fund at the Marine Institute,
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we are transitioning over into using a bit more technology for monitoring. So historically a lot
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of eelgrass monitoring is done by snorkeling. So you're wearing a wetsuit with a mask and fins
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and you swim and you pick a heading for a weighted line and every five meters of that weighted line,
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you'll drop down a one meter by one meter square that has a hundred tinier squares in it. You'll
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drop that on the bottom every five meters and you count how many of those squares have eelgrass in
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them. So as you can imagine, that introduces a lot of human error and some error is fine because you
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build that into your experiment. But if we can avoid that in any way, shape or form where we try
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to do that. So you can imagine you're on your tenth line of the day, you're cold, you're tired,
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you're wet. I often can't remember what number comes after seven, so it gets really difficult
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to properly assess eelgrass then. So what we're trying to do is actually do this
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process but do it with a remotely operated vehicle. So we use a pivot deep tracker. We're
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in the middle right now of trying to figure out how to accurately do this. So what this is, is it's
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difficult to explain. I would say it's about the size of a medium dog. It has two sets of
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propellers on it. It has a camera with a laser and what it does is it lets us comfortably sit in a
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boat and operate the ROV, remotely operated vehicle, from the comfort and the warmth and the
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dryness of a boat. So it'll putter around on the bottom and take live video and we sit and we
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record it on a tablet that we use to control it and then afterwards we would process that information
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in the lab so you don't actually have anyone in the water. Another thing that we do is we use drones.
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So we have a drone that we use. We can program a flight path and what it does is it will go up in
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the air and it flies over the site probably around 400 feet above and then we put that information
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into a computer. It builds what we call an orthomosaic image. So it takes say 700 photos as it
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flies over an eelgrass meadow and then we stitch them together and then we use GIS to look and see
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how much of the coloring of the photo actually is eelgrass and then we actually will, we call it
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ground truthing this data so we'll put a GoPro in the water at different coordinates to make sure
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that what we're looking at from the sky is eelgrass and it's not say a green kelp or green
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seaweed. We look at it that way and that lets us use sometimes AI to process these images and we're
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also using a new thing called environmental DNA now to monitor the biodiversity that we're seeing
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in eelgrass which is super exciting and I can definitely talk more about that if no one knows
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what environmental DNA is. So yeah of course so environmental DNA, when you walk around your house,
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when you walk around work you're shedding hair, you're shedding skin cells, the world is just full
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of DNA and the ocean is no different so as fish live and grow, reproduce, excrete anything, they're
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releasing DNA. So do crustaceans, so do even some bacteria. They all have markers in the area that
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they're in so this DNA kind of floats in the water. My team and I go in, we scoop up 1.5 liters of
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water in triplicate so that means we we scoop up three different samples of water. We take that
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back to our lab and we have a special filter so we put the water through a filter and this filter
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will catch really really small DNA particles and then we take that and a special lab here in St.
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John's processes it for us and we look for, we have markers for fish, we have markers for crustaceans
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that they'll actually put in the lab to look for the species that we're interested in and then we
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get a lovely report with a really really cool tree of all the different classes and families of animals
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in the area. So we're seeing much more diversity through using eDMA than we would through regular
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like saving or trawling because we don't actually have to see the animals to know that they're there.
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So it's very very excited and it's something that we call really non-invasive so it means that we're
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not actually plucking a fish out of the water, terrifying it by measuring it and touching it and
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handling it. We're just scooping its DNA out of the water and it's very cool and very exciting
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and it's really really exciting for me if you can't tell. I've heard a lot about eDNA lately
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and it seems like it can really just change the way that we do a lot of ecology and conservation.
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It's very exciting.
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So Lindsay, if you had a billboard that you could put across the planet, it was Lindsay's billboard,
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what would you want your billboard to say? I would love it to say the future of the ocean
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lies with local stewardship and so that's just all fancy words for the people who are living in the
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areas that your research impacts. They should have the tools to be able to save and preserve
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the environment around them. I work a lot with harvesters in Placentia Bay and the amount of
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knowledge that these people have is just incomprehensible. They're spending almost
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every day of their lives on the water. Some people I work with are 70, 80 years old and they've spent
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every hour of the day, as long as the sun is up, on the water interacting with the natural world
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around them. There's a curiosity there that is so untapped and the future of a lot of these rural
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and local ecosystems, it is with the individual people in the area. Like there is so much potential
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and people just need the tools to care and steward for the land around them and the ocean around them
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and it's just something so special and I learn so much from local people and I really think it's
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important that research that I do and that most people do is accessible to the people that it's
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directly impacting. So I think a lot of this, a lot of academia is kind of very straight-backed
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and inaccessible to someone who doesn't have a high-level degree and I think the whole point
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of what we do is to give power to the people in the areas that it impacts and to have people grow
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up with a vast respect and knowledge of the world around them and they can only do that if we're
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communicating in a way that makes sense to them and I think it's the coolest part of my job is to get
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to actively empower people in the areas where they are to make a difference in the natural world
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around them. I can imagine that would be just so fulfilling to work with people that know the most
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about the land or the people that live on the land and work on the land and have been for generations.
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What do scientists do is a podcast produced by Supernova at Dalhousie, a network member of
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ACTUA. For more information about Supernova and our workshops, summer camps, and high school
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programming, you can check us out at supernova.dalhousie.ca. A huge thank you to Lindsay Clark
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for today's interview. Super fun learning all about that kind of stuff and we will see you next episode.
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Bye for now!
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Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Do Scientists Do? a podcast
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from Supernova at Dalhousie. Today's episode we talked to Lindsee Clark. She
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does ocean conservation in Newfoundland and Labrador using a bunch of cool
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different technologies to figure out how the oceans are and what we can do to
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help protect them. She talks to us about invasive species like the green crab and
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how to tell them apart. So keep on listening to find out more. So hello and
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welcome to What Do Scientists Do? This is a podcast where I interview a wickedly
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smart sciencey guest and learn all about what they do and what they know. Today
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we're going to be learning about ocean conservation. So conservation is the
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science of maintaining, protecting, and restoring ecosystems from destruction
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and a lot of the destruction is unfortunately caused by human activity.
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So our guest today works specifically in the field called ocean conservation. So
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if you can piece those words together you'd figure it out that we're working
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or our guest is working to protect the ocean from all the things that are
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changing it. So here to tell us all about ocean conservation is our very special
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guest. Can you introduce yourself with your name and pronouns? Awesome, yes I can
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and good day to everyone. My name is Lindsay Clark and I use the pronouns
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she, her. And what kind of scientist are you Lindsay? I am a fisheries research
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technologist. So it's a really cool branch of science where I actually get
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to work to support someone who has a PhD, so another research scientist. I
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basically work under their guidance to carry out the field logistics, some data
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analysis, and different stats for whatever scientific project is within
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this PhD's field. I basically work under a framework of other people and
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collaboratively with other scientists who do work in the ocean
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sector. Awesome, so what would a typical day look like for you? I love this
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question because I asked this in my job interview for this job and it varies so
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greatly, depends on the time of year, which is something that I really
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enjoy. We work in almost like a boom and bust cycle, so we have a really heavy
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field schedule whenever the weather is nice. So typically late spring, summer,
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and fall, especially here in Newfoundland and Labrador, the window is fairly small,
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so we work when we can. During field season I mostly will be actually in a
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boat on the ocean doing eelgrass planting, monitoring that eelgrass that
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I've planted, and doing different techniques to see if how we're
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replanting is working. And field season means that we're collecting data and
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then during the off season, so the cold season now, I actually will process that
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data. So in the off season you typically start as regular office hours, so from
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like 830 to 430, and I do stats, I look at scientific video, I essentially I
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process all the data that I have collected during the field season. And
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field season is not during office hours, field season is essentially whenever the
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tides and the weather are working, so lots of times I'll be working from 4 or
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5 o'clock in the morning until late at night to get done what we have to do to
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fulfill our goals. So it's very variable and it's very high-paced, which is
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something that I really enjoy. So you really like having all of these different
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kinds of things on the move and the go. Absolutely I do. I have ADHD, so it is
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something that really captures my interest to constantly be, I guess,
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adapting to different situations, whether it be equipment malfunction, weather
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malfunction, tide malfunction. There's lots of different things that happen and
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no one day is the same, and that kind of sounds cheesy, but it's very true when it
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comes to any sort of field work. You're constantly taking in information and
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then tweaking your methods to suit the weather, the equipment that you have, and
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the personnel that you have. So that's something that I really enjoy because
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every day is like a puzzle that I have to solve, and I can kind of come home
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and physically look at what I've done during the day and be proud of that.
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That's so cool. So you mentioned you have ADHD, and I wonder if you just want to
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talk about what your experience is like having ADHD and working in
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academia. Absolutely. It's something that I really enjoy talking about because I
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find there's lack of representation specifically of women with ADHD in
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academia. I always kind of felt out of place in the time that I've spent in
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academia because you're surrounded by people who are very, very, just it feels
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like they're very on top of everything. They're very organized, and sometimes as
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a person with ADHD that can feel like you have some sort of moral feeling that
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you're not as organized as everyone else, or you might not be on top of emails
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like everyone else is, but it's been really a really great journey for me to
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kind of harness the positive aspects of ADHD so I can hyper focus and I can get
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things done quickly. I can make decisions quickly, more quickly than a lot of
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people can, or I can do multiple tasks at once. In fact, I need to do multiple tasks
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at once in order to get anything done, and I get to take that and kind of shape
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my project around things that I like to do and things that I'm good at, and it
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also enables me to reach out and ask for help when I need it, and it's been really
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powerful to be surrounded by people who are so supportive and so uplifting and a
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community that is just very, very excited about my strengths and not my weaknesses,
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and it's been really nice actually to form a community around myself and to
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just be open to talking about this with people because I think more people have
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ADHD than we know of, and it's kind of nice to know that you're not alone in
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such a vast and sometimes very structured field. It's nice to know that
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there are other people out there and that you can work together to basically
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play against each other's strengths, so I find that really, really fun.
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That's awesome. I love framing it as, you know, as someone with ADHD. There are a
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lot of strengths that come with that, and even if there are like, you know, if
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answering emails is the vein of your existence and something that your brain
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just can't do, that's okay. Like everybody has different things that
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they're good at and things that they're bad at, and it's so important to talk to
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scientists like you working in this field and doing like a super cool job
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with ADHD, so thank you, Lindsay. That's very cool.
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So what got you into this kind of work in the first place? What got you into the ocean?
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So I grew up on the ocean. I come from a harvester family, so my dad's a
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harvester. Both of my grandfathers on both sides of my family were working
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with the ocean or with the forest, and my dad comes from southern Labrador, so I
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have Inuit ancestry as well. It's in my blood, is what I always like to say, and I
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grew up on a boat. Like I learned how to walk on a boat. I've been fishing with my
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dad since I can remember, and it just seemed like a natural step to have a job
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on the ocean. Like there didn't seem to be any other answer for what I wanted to
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do with my life. I didn't want to be a harvester because I saw how difficult it
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was for my dad to be away all the time, but I knew I wanted to do something
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where I got to interact with harvesters almost every day, and that's something
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that I feel really lucky that I get to do. It has been a driving force because
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this is kind of a difficult field to be in. Sometimes conservation, and
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specifically ocean conservation, can be really like emotionally taxing because
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you're doing all this work and you're really optimistic about the work that
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you're doing, and sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes what you do gets upended
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by a storm, or sometimes all the work that you've put into a place, it just
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gets ripped up by an ATV, and those things are real, and they can be really a
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really big inhibitor to people wanting to be involved in this, but I knew there
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was no other choice for me. I know how I feel when I'm on the ocean, and I can't
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replicate that feeling anywhere else. The feeling of connectedness with
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everything around me. It's a real privilege, I think, to be able to help the
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ocean, but also to learn more about it.
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I love that. So you use the term harvester a couple times. Do you want to explain what that is?
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Yes, of course. Basically, fishing people. So my dad is a shrimp harvester.
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A lot of the people and harvesters that I work with, they harvest crab, they'll
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harvest cod, they'll harvest whelk, which is a type of sea snail. There are a lot
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of different fisheries here in Newfoundland and Labrador, and when I say
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harvester, I'm referring to people who make their livelihood by taking animals
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out of the ocean to sell.
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Okay, cool. So it's not just like fisher, it's also like maybe someone that works in aquaculture and crabbers or lobsters.
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Yeah, exactly, and I also find it's a little bit more of a gender neutral term,
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because a lot of people don't say fisher, they say fisherman, and the
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fishing sector has become a lot more diverse now than when I was growing up,
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so I like to try to use as much gender neutral language as possible, and it's
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much easier to say harvester than for me to forget and say fisherman. So it's just
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a much friendlier term, I find.
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So hopping back a little bit, you mentioned eelgrass, and I know that you work a lot with eelgrass.
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Do you want to explain what eelgrass is and why it's so important?
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I absolutely do. Full disclosure, before I started this job about a year ago, I had no idea what eelgrass was,
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and so as I explain this, I think you're going to be surprised at how important eelgrass is
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and how little we talk about it. So eelgrass is a type of underwater flowering plant,
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is my favorite way to describe it. Lots of times when we think about ocean plants,
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we think about what we really think about is algae, so seaweeds. So seaweeds are fairly simple,
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they only have, they only, they don't have any roots, they only hold onto rocks through a hold fast
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at the bottom, it's almost sticky, and they transport nutrients in their body by diffusion,
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which is a very, very simple way, it's this very simple organism. Whereas eelgrass is an actual
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vascular plant and it does flower. So it has a root system, which is different from algae,
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and it also uses vascular systems to bring nutrients through the body when it performs photosynthesis.
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So there's around 72 species worldwide. Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, we have one,
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and it's just common eelgrass. So the scientific name is Zostera marina, which is a very pretty
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scientific name that I really like. They are considered ecosystem engineers. So essentially,
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wherever there's eelgrass meadows, they modify the environment around it. So they make water
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quality better because they really hold sediment in their roots. They sequester carbon, which is
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really important on a global scale. And they also decrease wave action in coastal areas, which helps
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with coastal erosion, because these are really long and skinny, almost blades of grass is how
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I would describe them. And they grow in meadows, and they decrease hydrodynamic energy in the area,
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which just means that the waves and the sea in that area are a little bit calmer than they would be
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in a place that doesn't have eelgrass. They are also very important nurseries for juvenile fish
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and juvenile crustaceans in the area. So they act as almost like a protection for these young
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species while they grow until they can get to a point where they can swim out to the ocean and
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kind of live out the rest of their adult life cycle. They, seagrasses are actually disappearing
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at a really alarming rate right now, so about 7% per year globally, which is terrifying.
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But that's exactly what I do, is I replace eelgrass loss in areas specifically around
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Placentia Bay, more of the southern part of Newfoundland and Labrador, where we have experienced
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a lot of eelgrass loss because of green crab in the area. So they're very, very important,
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and I love to look at them. They're beautiful, they're a vibrant green, and they're really
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helpful for basically everything in the area. So you mentioned the green crabs, and we're losing
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eelgrass because of the green crabs. Where did the green crabs come from, and how common are they?
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They are a particularly nasty species of invasive species, so they are believed to be introduced
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in Atlantic Canada in the 1950s, and most people think that this was through bilge water in the
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bilge of boats. So lots of times, boats will come somewhere empty, pick up materials, and then leave.
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But when you're sailing, you need a bit of weight in the boat, and a lot of places they'll actually
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suck up water from the area that they're coming from, and they'll use that in their bilge to give
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them weight when they cross the ocean, and then when they get to where they're going, they'll
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dispel it. And that means that it can carry a lot of larval stages of species that just don't really
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belong here that we call invasive species. And so these invasive species can come in, and then they
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can come in, and then they out-compete a lot of the native species in an area. The science name is
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called competitive exclusion, so this is a belief that two animals can't occupy the same niche in an
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ecosystem. So for example, with green crab, they'll out-compete a lot of lobster, juvenile lobster,
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and a lot of the native crab species in the area, so rock crab, spider crab, species like that,
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and they'll... green crab are significantly more aggressive than a lot of the native species that
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we have here, and they eat a lot of the same food. So what that means is the green crab takes a lot
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of the food source from native species, and it kind of makes them migrate over time to less desirable
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areas. And what I like to say is the big beef between green crab and eelgrass is that green
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crab is looking for food, and the way it looks for food is it digs up in sediment, so we call that
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bioturbation. And unfortunately, this means that it digs up a lot of the roots of the eelgrass that
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we have in the sheltered bays here, and you'll find just... when the tide goes out after green crab
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have been in an eelgrass meadow, just blankets of green washed up on shore, because they're digging
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for clams or digging for crustaceans, things to eat, and in that process they just rip up everything
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around them. And it's devastating to be in any place that has been affected by green crab,
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because it's desolate is the only word that I could use.
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So it's not that the green crab themselves are eating the eelgrass, but they're digging it up
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so the eelgrass is just kind of dying. Am I getting that right? Yeah, they come in and it's
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just like when you go weed your garden, you're digging at the roots of a lot of those weeds.
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The green crab are doing that exact type of thing, but to the eelgrass, because they're looking for
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sources of food in the sediment underneath them. Nice. Well, not nice, bad. And competitive
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exclusion. That makes me think of, you know, me and my brother when we were growing up, we couldn't
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watch the two different TV shows at the same time. So there'd be competitive exclusion if one of us
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is stronger than the other to wrestle the TV remote away. So it sounds like the green crabs
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are wrestling the TV remote away from our native rock crabs. Yeah, they are. And they're very,
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very good at it. Like they're extremely, extremely aggressive. Like I cannot, as someone who works
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with a lot of them all the time, they are extremely aggressive. And there's nothing really that native
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species can do to combat that. The only thing that scientific studies have found is if native
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species are bigger than the invasive species, and even then lots of times native species just try to
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avoid them altogether. It's like avoiding a really aggressive person at work. You're kind of just like,
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I just don't want to work with them. So you're kind of working around them and that doesn't work
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because you can't work together, then it's just difficult all around. And so that's what they do.
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The green crab kind of like bully the native species out of the way to get what they need.
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And that means that native species are moving to places that are not nearly as desirable,
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which means that they aren't reproducing as much. So let's say I'm out walking on the beach, maybe
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I'm going for a surf or I'm just like strolling and I see two crabs. How would I tell the difference
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between a green crab and a rock crab? I love this question because it's really interesting to find
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the different care paces on the beach, so the shells of the crab. And lots of times you can
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do this without even having to interact with the crab, which is what my preferred way of doing it.
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So a green crab, they have a bias. They're just, everything about them is hostile. They have a
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shell that's like sometimes green, can be orange. I typically don't go by the color, but they have
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five really sharp spikes on either side of their eyes. And I mean, they are razor sharp. They are
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so sharp and they have almost like velvety legs. And then say a rock crab, which is the most common
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crab we have here in Newfoundland and Labrador, they have nine bumps on either side of their eyes
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and they're like scalloped edges. They're so soft and kind. So you can really see the difference
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there. The coloring can be different. Some rock crabs can be purplish, but they can be
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purpleish. But again, lots of times if you're seeing something that's been left out for a while,
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color is really not a great option to go on. If you flip them over on their belly, their bellies
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are often different as well. Green crabs are almost shorter and more squat when it comes to
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their tail flap on the inside, whereas rock crabs are much more elongated. But mostly we'd go by
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the actual points on the shell itself. If it's pointy and there's five points on either side,
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it's a green crab. And that's when you take a photo, you would note where you did it. If
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you have the coordinates, you could write down the coordinates, the date and the time that you
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found the invasive species. And then depending on where you are, you can Google, it's basically
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just like report invasive species. And then DFO will provide you with the appropriate email and
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you can send that information to them and then they'll make a note. And then that usually will
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get, a lot of times gets communicated to people like me who don't work directly for DFO, but
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they're working on projects funded by DFO. And then that kind of helps shape where we're doing
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these targeted green crab fisheries. That's really cool. So I like to use something called
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iNaturalist. And I know that sometimes iNaturalist, this app, the research can be graded as research
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grade. Do you ever receive that kind of research or is that just citizen science?
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I find this really interesting because I actually didn't know what iNaturalist was
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until I just got back from an ocean-wise trip and we did a whole session on iNaturalist.
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And so I'm trying to incorporate that now with different presentations that I'm giving. And I
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have to inquire actually on how I can use this information to help as well because New Zealand
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Labrador doesn't have very many iNaturalist observations, but it is like an invaluable
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database for things, especially like invasive species, which we're having more and more issues
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with here. So citizen science, if you don't know for any listeners, it's when you contribute to
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science on your own. So let's say you're out looking at crabs and you find a green crab,
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you take your phone, upload it, and bada boom, bada bing, there's data in the cloud for anybody
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to see and use. So I kind of want to hop back to eelgrass again. So you mentioned that you
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monitor eelgrass and you've talked a little bit about some of the different technology you use.
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Can you tell me what it's like to monitor eelgrass and what kind of technology or
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science processes you use? It's very wet is what I would say, first of all. The project that I'm
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working on now through the Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Fund at the Marine Institute,
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we are transitioning over into using a bit more technology for monitoring. So historically a lot
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of eelgrass monitoring is done by snorkeling. So you're wearing a wetsuit with a mask and fins
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and you swim and you pick a heading for a weighted line and every five meters of that weighted line,
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you'll drop down a one meter by one meter square that has a hundred tinier squares in it. You'll
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drop that on the bottom every five meters and you count how many of those squares have eelgrass in
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them. So as you can imagine, that introduces a lot of human error and some error is fine because you
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build that into your experiment. But if we can avoid that in any way, shape or form where we try
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to do that. So you can imagine you're on your tenth line of the day, you're cold, you're tired,
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you're wet. I often can't remember what number comes after seven, so it gets really difficult
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to properly assess eelgrass then. So what we're trying to do is actually do this
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process but do it with a remotely operated vehicle. So we use a pivot deep tracker. We're
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in the middle right now of trying to figure out how to accurately do this. So what this is, is it's
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difficult to explain. I would say it's about the size of a medium dog. It has two sets of
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propellers on it. It has a camera with a laser and what it does is it lets us comfortably sit in a
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boat and operate the ROV, remotely operated vehicle, from the comfort and the warmth and the
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dryness of a boat. So it'll putter around on the bottom and take live video and we sit and we
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record it on a tablet that we use to control it and then afterwards we would process that information
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in the lab so you don't actually have anyone in the water. Another thing that we do is we use drones.
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So we have a drone that we use. We can program a flight path and what it does is it will go up in
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the air and it flies over the site probably around 400 feet above and then we put that information
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into a computer. It builds what we call an orthomosaic image. So it takes say 700 photos as it
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flies over an eelgrass meadow and then we stitch them together and then we use GIS to look and see
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how much of the coloring of the photo actually is eelgrass and then we actually will, we call it
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ground truthing this data so we'll put a GoPro in the water at different coordinates to make sure
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that what we're looking at from the sky is eelgrass and it's not say a green kelp or green
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seaweed. We look at it that way and that lets us use sometimes AI to process these images and we're
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also using a new thing called environmental DNA now to monitor the biodiversity that we're seeing
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in eelgrass which is super exciting and I can definitely talk more about that if no one knows
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what environmental DNA is. So yeah of course so environmental DNA, when you walk around your house,
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when you walk around work you're shedding hair, you're shedding skin cells, the world is just full
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of DNA and the ocean is no different so as fish live and grow, reproduce, excrete anything, they're
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releasing DNA. So do crustaceans, so do even some bacteria. They all have markers in the area that
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they're in so this DNA kind of floats in the water. My team and I go in, we scoop up 1.5 liters of
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water in triplicate so that means we we scoop up three different samples of water. We take that
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back to our lab and we have a special filter so we put the water through a filter and this filter
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will catch really really small DNA particles and then we take that and a special lab here in St.
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John's processes it for us and we look for, we have markers for fish, we have markers for crustaceans
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that they'll actually put in the lab to look for the species that we're interested in and then we
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get a lovely report with a really really cool tree of all the different classes and families of animals
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in the area. So we're seeing much more diversity through using eDMA than we would through regular
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like saving or trawling because we don't actually have to see the animals to know that they're there.
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So it's very very excited and it's something that we call really non-invasive so it means that we're
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not actually plucking a fish out of the water, terrifying it by measuring it and touching it and
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handling it. We're just scooping its DNA out of the water and it's very cool and very exciting
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and it's really really exciting for me if you can't tell. I've heard a lot about eDNA lately
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and it seems like it can really just change the way that we do a lot of ecology and conservation.
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It's very exciting.
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So Lindsay, if you had a billboard that you could put across the planet, it was Lindsay's billboard,
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what would you want your billboard to say? I would love it to say the future of the ocean
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lies with local stewardship and so that's just all fancy words for the people who are living in the
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areas that your research impacts. They should have the tools to be able to save and preserve
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the environment around them. I work a lot with harvesters in Placentia Bay and the amount of
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knowledge that these people have is just incomprehensible. They're spending almost
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every day of their lives on the water. Some people I work with are 70, 80 years old and they've spent
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every hour of the day, as long as the sun is up, on the water interacting with the natural world
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around them. There's a curiosity there that is so untapped and the future of a lot of these rural
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and local ecosystems, it is with the individual people in the area. Like there is so much potential
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and people just need the tools to care and steward for the land around them and the ocean around them
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and it's just something so special and I learn so much from local people and I really think it's
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important that research that I do and that most people do is accessible to the people that it's
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directly impacting. So I think a lot of this, a lot of academia is kind of very straight-backed
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and inaccessible to someone who doesn't have a high-level degree and I think the whole point
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of what we do is to give power to the people in the areas that it impacts and to have people grow
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up with a vast respect and knowledge of the world around them and they can only do that if we're
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communicating in a way that makes sense to them and I think it's the coolest part of my job is to get
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to actively empower people in the areas where they are to make a difference in the natural world
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around them. I can imagine that would be just so fulfilling to work with people that know the most
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about the land or the people that live on the land and work on the land and have been for generations.
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What do scientists do is a podcast produced by Supernova at Dalhousie, a network member of
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ACTUA. For more information about Supernova and our workshops, summer camps, and high school
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programming, you can check us out at supernova.dalhousie.ca. A huge thank you to Lindsay Clark
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for today's interview. Super fun learning all about that kind of stuff and we will see you next episode.
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Bye for now!
