Rockfish & Cabezon Early Life History & Survival
In 2013, with our move to Oregon, we began collaborations with colleagues and local experts to work on fishes in the northern California Current.
Critical nearshore sampling of settlement stage groundfishes is an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Kirsten Grorud-Colvert (Integrative Biology, OSU), the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and the Oregon Coast Aquarium. This sampling involves the bi-weekly deployment/retrieval of replicate SMURF (Standardized Monitoring Units for the Recruitment of Fishes) traps along the Oregon Coast inside and outside of several marine reserves. This recurring summer collaboration is spearheaded each year by one of our graduate students: First, Daniel Ottmann (left) obtained a laCaxia fellowship from Spain to support his M.S. research focused on this fish settlement time-series. He produced three publications from this work (Ottmann 2016, 2018, 2019). Will Fennie collected more data on interannual patterns of rockfish settlement and collaborated with Dr. Ric Brodeur’s NOAA lab to examine the growth and survival of rockfish species as they make the transition from offshore to nearshore reefs (Fennie et al. 2020, 2023, and in prep.). Megan Wilson collaborated with the same group of researchers to examine the early life of another recreationally, commercially, and ecologically important fish, cabezon (Wilson et al. 2023, and forthcoming). PhD student Cameron Royer is currently leading this ongoing SMURFing effort as part of our two-year Oregon Ocean Science Trust (OOST) funding.
Outreach
This collaborative project has resulted in a variety of outreach materials, many of which were created by our collaborators.
- The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife developed this publication about the collaborative rockfish/cabezon research project.
- The Oregon Coast Aquarium wrote this feature story about the same collaboration.
- Oregon Public Broadcasting's television program Oregon Field Guide aired this segment on the sampling research.