Emily Grason's field assistant

I have five tips for surviving the mud.  I have formalized my personal mud experience into survival tips because, today, I am responsible for a small cadre of motivated students who are helping me count, measure, and collect a few hundred of the estimated 12 billion invasive Asian mud snails (Batillaria attramentaria) in Padilla Bay, WA (O’Connor et al. 2001).  I don’t want to lose any students.

My students and I brave the mud to assess how large the invasive snails are, how many there are, and where they are found throughout Padilla Bay (~60 miles north of Seattle).  These observations will help us understand why there are so freaking many!  These snails ring the bay like soap scum around the bathtub.  It’s not just the number of snails that is astounding.  An estimated 86% of the snails in this bay is infected with a castrating parasite – that is, a worm that gets inside snails, and eats snail gonad tissue to reproduce themselves.  In the process of doing this, the parasite also causes the snail to resume growth.  As a result, 86% of the snails in this bay are both huge and incapable of making baby snails.  And yet there are still so, so many snails. How do they do it?  We must brave the mud to find out.

If there’s one thing I have learned on the mudflats, it’s that mud a great equalizer of humanity.  The mud does not care whether you are rich. The mud does not care whether you are smart. The mud will take the boots and dignity of sinners and saints equally.  The mud is a force of nature, but you do not force the mud.  This philosophy informs:

  EMILY’S SURE-FIRE* TIPS FOR SURVIVING MUDFLATS

1. Keep moving.  The more slowly you move, and the longer you stand, the more you will sink.
2. Don’t walk through wet areas, but do walk across any emergent structure on the mudflat: shells, eelgrass, woody debris.  These things will keep you from sinking.  Don’t worry, the mudflat will recover.
3. Walk on your toes.  Stepping flat-footed actually makes it harder to pull your foot back up, because you create a larger vacuum. The large size of your foot relative to your leg also pulls you down deeper – this is actually how clams bury themselves.
4. If you do get stuck or start to sink, don’t panic.  Grab hold of your boots and try to lift your heel first, at an angle, to break the suction.
5. Once you get unstuck, KEEP MOVING!  If you don’t move, you are standing near or in the same soupy mud that you got stuck in in the first place, and you will sink again.  I know your instinct is to rest, recover, get your bearings, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MOVE, BECAUSE I AM NOT DIGGING YOU OUT OF THE MUD AGAIN!

…

I make it back without losing a single student – not even their boots. A few socks, maybe, but today it is enough to return with booted students.

*Though my record is 100%, I feel compelled to emphasize that these tips are in no way guaranteed to save your life. They have not been evaluated by anyone who actually knows about these things. While I do believe they are helpful, they certainly will not protect your life in every situation.  I cannot be held responsible for damage, injury, or death on mudflats.  Please, people, let’s have some common sense out there.

    By Daniella Pizzurro

In a barn in Grand Isle, Maine, unlabeled containers of unknown chemicals and pesticides line the floor. That barn belongs to the parents of Zach Guerrette, a researcher in the Toxicology program at the UW. The chemicals are the remains of his grandfather’s farming life—one that Guerrette’s mom distinctly remembers to include his grandfather riding atop a tractor, leaving behind a plume of pesticide spray reminiscent of a factory smoke stack. These days, Zach thinks of his grandfather often: he works to estimate the risk of health effects to farmworkers and their children that have been exposed to pesticides.

Guerrette uses techniques of risk assessment to evaluate the relationship between individual genetic variability and biological markers of pesticide poisoning. Using samples taken directly from humans that have been inadvertently exposed to these pesticides, Guerrette investigates their genetic variability in certain metabolic enzymes and how this affects their reaction to such exposures. His work aims to link biomarkers of exposure, like metabolites of pesticides found in urine of exposed people, to biomarkers of effect, such as inhibition of a certain enzyme in the blood.

Connecting environmental exposures to health effects is challenging; there is a large amount of variability in how different people react to the same pesticide exposures. Guerrette likens this to a case of two people with similar smoking patterns and history, where one develops lung cancer and the other does not. Due to variability in other factors, like genetics or diet, different people with the same exposures to chemicals or pollutants can end up with dissimilar health outcomes.

Guerrette notes that using human samples, while valuable, has its cons such as fewer controllable variables as there are in vitro (in a petri dish). For example, the exact amount of pesticides workers were exposed to, or that reach children in the home, have to be determined from a combination of field sampling and mathematical estimates. Other tools, such as surveys attempting to measure dietary exposure to pesticides rely on individual recall of their dietary habits—a source of major variability in exposure estimates. The ability to “work with what you’re given” should benefit Zach in the future, however. He plans to work in environmental consulting, a field that relies heavily on whatever information is available on the amount and types of chemical exposures in order to make a connection to health effects and, ultimately, to make recommendations for the future.

Daniella Pizzurro is pursuing a PhD in Toxicology at the UW, currently investigating the ability of pesticides to impair brain development. Look to her blog Tails of an Angry Lab Rat for more on Toxicology and life in the lab.

By Gabrielle Roesch

“You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.”
- Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

I remember waking up in Zambia to crowing roosters, while my Ba’mama boiled water for our morning cup of overly sweet tea. By the time I was up everyone in the household was already cleaning, milking the cows and digging in the fields. I remember the long hours of digging water retention holes next to young plants. This is a strategy used by farmers, who lack access to irrigation, to help crops survive drought. I remember the blisters, covering my inexperienced hands. Naomi, my Ba’mama, was so worried about me; her concern over my few blisters in comparison to the suffering in her village was surreal.

It was Naomi who first took me to witness food aid distribution. Huge USAID trucks carried large sacks of corn — all products of the USA. Food aid, as Naomi and others would share with me, means short term food security in exchange for long-term dependency. In the U.S., and to a lesser extent Europe, surplus from subsidized agricultural commodities are distributed internationally through the machinations of the aid industry.

On more than one occasion, during a fellowship to study food security in Sub-Saharan Africa, farmers expressed to me a desire for regionally sourced, African produced, food aid. Unfortunately, countries strapped for cash are more likely to keep their own commodities in store for trade rather than use this aid to feed hungry people. Who can blame them when they can get much higher prices in the global freemarket? International food aid depresses the price that farmers get for food crops sold locally.

Additionally, most countries giving international aid have an incentive to get rid of their surplus commodities rather than give money to purchase grain produced in or near the region in need. When you add genetically engineered, patented seeds which must be purchased each year from large agribusiness,  farmers become further divorced from true food sovereignty.

My journey to Zambia opened my eyes to the very real challenge of hunger and poverty, resource management and economics in a way that no classroom could. I would like to see food aid policy focus on building up regional food security in Africa by supporting local production and technologies that don’t rely on expensive agricultural inputs. In the meantime, my Ba’mama and her family is still working the land as their family has for centuries. I miss the early morning tea, watching the young boys milking the cows as the mist rises in the early morning light. In an effort to maintain our American farmland and agribusiness we plant the seeds of global food insecurity.

Photo was taken by author at a food distribution site in Ethiopia.

Gabrielle Roesch, M.S. Candidate School of Forest Resources, is studying environmental economics and sustainable forest management. Her research employs social science methodologies to explore the values people have for forest ecosystem services.

Athena Pantazis

By Athena Pantazis

Research sites can be a world away or in the very town you live in. Mine happened to be both. I took the bus across town on steamy New Orleans mornings or walked the length of the French Quarter at sultry dusks to get to my two research sites. Typically, I was preoccupied with two things: 1) Did my outfit make me seem like I was both serious and approachable?; 2) Had I sweat through said outfit in a way that would be disgusting to my interviewees?

When collecting data from a person, I always think a good deal about how I will be perceived. My research questions are consistently, deeply personal. I ask people things they normally discuss with at most one or two other people, and I seldom look anything like the people I interview. The people seeking reproductive health services at these free clinics were visibly of different economic class and usually of a different race. You have to look like someone they can talk to and who is decidedly not getting cheap thrills from their story. I asked women about their douching practices. It still seems pretty scandalous to me.

I was shocked in every one of the 20 interviews at the openness and frankness with which women discussed their feminine hygiene. Turns out, people love to be listened to. And I listened. I crossed town to listen. I listened actively, recorded what they told me and then transcribed it. I cared about what they said so much that I would keep listening long after they finished speaking.

Probably, the only one who needed me to look professional and approachable was me.

Athena Pantazis is a sociology graduate student who studies HIV and fertility in Africa.

Coming to land

By Mark Mizrahi

Market Research

Hello? Yeah, so, do you have a minute?

Who is this? 

Well, sir, we are conducting a survey on a great new product and we were hoping you could answer a few questions

click, dial-tone’ … You know those guys, right? Cold calls for surveys. Annoying. Rude.

I’m one of them. My product? A hook.

It’s called a circle hook. Small, metal, curved inward tip ­–­­ used to catch fish. It’s a hook that can alleviate thousands of unnecessary turtles deaths that occur while long line fishing (exactly how it sounds, you have a long line filled with hooks trailing you), a standard industry practice used to get fish from the ocean to your plate. And the circle hook works. Significantly well. Only it comes with 2 distinct problems:

Problem 1: it increases the catch of sharks.

Problem 2: Sharks are a taboo, desirable catch that fetch top dollar for their fins in the open market. Something like $880 a pound in the US, even more in Hong Kong where 85% of the catch goes.

That’s a lot of money for a fisherman in a developing country whose average salary is 40 dollars a month. But. The turtle is endangered. Well. The shark is threatened, close to being endangered. The turtle is a significant part of the eco-system, one of the only species helping maintain healthy sea grass beds. Ah. But. The shark is an apex predator, an essential part of how the food chain functions.

We have a difficult choice: promote the circle hook, which can limit turtle death but increase shark death, or continue current practices at the expense of the turtle. It’s not an easy decision. It’s one that organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Worldwide Wildlife Fund, and Inter American Tropical Tuna Commission,  have made in favor of the turtle. Me? I study that decision on a social and economical level. With surveys.

Project Intact, the project I have been working on for nearly a year, examines the way in which NOAA, WWF, and IATTC have promoted the circle hook, and the perceptions of Costa Rican and Ecuadorian fishermen about the hook’s advantages.

I  flew down towards the equator and with a team of researchers, created surveys for long-line fishermen. We surveyed them in Esmeraldas, San Mateo, Manta, Quepos, Playas del Coco, covering as much of the coast line as we could. Science as market research.

It matters why people choose to use a hook, because that affects what they catch. Give me a hook that helps me catch more sharks and, knowing how much I can get for sharks, I just might start catching a few more. Multiply that by the thousands of boats that line the shore, multiplied by the hundreds of shores … that’s a lot more dead sharks.

It’s not an easy decision. We still need to make one. The more knowledge we have – catch statistics, ecological systems, social pressures on fishermen, economical pressures on fishermen, life cycles of turtles and sharks ­­– the better decision we can make. Hopefully this means that the not so little survey I conducted means a lot more than the typical annoying phone call you occasionally get.

Jenna Armstrong

By Jenna Armstrong

Yakima Valley, Washington is one of the most productive and diverse agricultural regions in the country. Tree fruits and vegetables are have been stable crops, but unfortunately, the application of numerous toxic organophosphate pesticides (OPs) has become a common way to combat regional pests like the coddling moth.  Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected this area as one of ten Environmental Justice Showcase Communities due to multiple environmental health concerns of contaminated drinking water and air.  Over the course of the last few years, my own research has been to identify cheap and safe air sampling methods for quantifying residential exposures to aid rural community-based health projects. 

Scientists argue that the amount of OP pesticide use cannot go unnoticed because of the numerous health effects resulting from exposures. Data on residential exposures are important to look as associations with long-term health outcomes such as asthma, cancer and neurological disorders. Young children, genetically susceptible individuals, and farm workers and their families in the region may be particularly vulnerable– even if they are not involved in farm activities.  They can be exposed to pesticides in outdoor and indoor environments if pesticides drift from nearby fields or family members bring home contaminated work clothing or materials.  

During my field work experience, I had the chance to speak with many local residents who rely heavily on agricultural and food manufacturing industries to support jobs and sustain local livelihoods. Farmworkers often dream of transitioning to higher ranks and purchasing their own farmland, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation have been cultivating and leasing farmland for generations.  In fact, the role of a pesticide applicator is usually one of the highest paid jobs on the farm.

Our research team recognized it was difficult to collect good air quality data in rural and remote areas.  There are unstable electricity sources, variable housing quality, free-ranging farm animals and pets, and in homes with high residential density.  Some farmworker families are surrounded by the constant anxieties of legal/non-legal status.  They have busy lives with large families to support.  It is important to develop new air quality measurement methods that are easy to deploy, inexpensive, and inconspicuous. Our prototype air samplers are not that glamorous– they don’t use electricity or high-tech equipment. These are called “passive air sampling” techniques. 

It is our top priority to explain to local farmworkers and their families about their air quality and informing them of simple steps to improve what they are breathing indoors and outdoors. The use of passive air sampling techniques is a great way to cut costs and invasiveness for future air monitoring projects. With time and patience, we can only hope that better data on air quality will be well connected to health outcomes, especially in rural areas.

About Jenna Armstrong:  I have always had a strong interest on the environmental health impacts of agriculture. Currently my research involves designing air monitoring projects to examine rural air quality, including: pesticide use and drift, agricultural occupational health and safety issues, bio-aerosols, and combustion byproducts.  Outside school, I love to run– just qualified for my first Boston Marathon next year.   

By Helen Gerns

Eighty days until my flight leaves for a two month work trip to Kenya. The logistical tasks that need to come together before I leave, which I have no control over, are adding up. Forget the science. Pulling off these organizational feats is what the PhD is awarded for. I haven’t earned mine yet.

First on the list: To perform my assays, I made arrangements to borrow space and equipment in a collaborator’s lab. The collaborator graciously agreed and put me in contact with the human resources department to ensure I had all the access and permissions I would need. Hiring paperwork, biosafety quizzes, lab safety tour, and three and a half hours later, I was badged and ready to work. Unpaid, of course. I should really consider a job here when I graduate, they’ve practically hired me already.

Kits in hand and lab space arranged, I email the lab where the plasma samples are stored to coordinate when I can collect them. The lab technician, and gatekeeper of all things frozen, is on vacation for two weeks. Geez. Didn’t see that coming.

The second project in my dissertation involves collaborators out of state running assays for me. It is stalled again. The plan to send some of the plasma samples to the collaborator’s lab directly was complicated by human subjects’ applications, modifications, and material transfer agreements. “What about your MTA?”, my boss asked me one day. Hmm, what about it indeed.

My boss proposes a new plan: I travel to the collaborator’s lab, conveniently located in the same town as my parents, to learn the lab technique myself over a couple days. Room and board with my parents will be free, sort of. My two week long written general exam is scheduled to start next week. I TA classes on Monday and Wednesday. My plan for Thanksgiving was a car camping trip around Vancouver Island, much to my parent’s displeasure. When exactly is the trip out of state going to occur?

The kits to bring to Kenya still need to be ordered, but only if the assays work here. And the assays here still need to be run. Where and how I will run the assays in Kenya needs to be considered. General exams need to be passed. Mt. Kilimanjaro needs to be climbed before I arrive in Kenya to do work. Work life balance supposedly.

Eighty days is plenty of time my boss reminds me. I am not convinced. PhD still in progress . . .

About Helen: When I am not pursuing my passions for travel, the outdoors, and cooking, I am working on a PhD in epidemiology at the University of Washington. After I graduate, I hope to continue to work on issues related to immunizations globally and domestically.