FBL goes to ORAFS!

We just wrapped up an awesome week at the Oregon American Fisheries Society in Bend, OR. We collectively presented 4 student talks, 1 OHRC staff talk, and 2 undergraduate posters this year. Plus, our own Emily Treadway was awarded the Masters Scholarship and Kasey Ingram won the Best Student Poster Award, which includes a free trip to regional AFS in Colorado later this year! It was great to see such a strong representation from our lab and connect our research with practitioners and other researcher groups working on similar topics and motivated by the same mission.

One thing I took away from this year’s meeting is how important it is to use this time to connect to people who are experts in new techniques and technologies. From the sessions I attended, I learned about new eDNA techniques that could potentially change the way Kasey and I process our fish pathogen samples, and in the same session, I learned about the JSOES marine survey that produces amazing data on juvenile fish survival in the ocean, which has historically been a black box in my mind. The availability of those data could be an interesting link to the Coos River Hatchbox Study we are working on with the Coquille Tribe to monitor survival or phenotype at another time stamp. We (at least I) always assume that all knowledge we need is available on the internet these days, but I realized that connecting to other people is the best way to explore what is out there while saving your time and brain space. Advanced techniques seem so overwhelming from a publication, while a 5 min explanation from the author can provide all the clarity necessary to understand how it could be useful for something you’re working on. From this point forward I am going to challenge myself to expand my social network at meetings to broaden my understanding of new techniques, which will ultimately change the way I approach new research questions.