Undergraduate Research Showcase

A few weeks ago, UAA hosted the annual Undergraduate Student Research Showcase. This event celebrates the excellent academic work of UAA's students across an interdisciplinary spectrum of arts and humanities, social sciences, business, health, education, applied sciences, engineering, and natural sciences.

Three of the Bishop Lab team presented their work as posters:

Emma presented her research on quantifying mercury levels in juvenile northern elephant seal hair. She has spent countless hours in the lab washing hair samples from our Collaborators at UC Santa Cruz, and is just starting to explore the data!

Cat presented on her the findings of her summer project, using drop cameras in Resurrection Bay to look for deep sea Pacific Sleeper sharks and the benthic fish community! A total of 12 detections of sharks were seen across 8 deployments, with an additional 7 species of fish, crab and shrimp identifiable in the footage. This demonstrates that camera traps are an effective, non-extractive method for gathering species presence and other behavioral data for large fish.

After joining the lab in the Spring, Sam has been hard at work organizing and preparing dried fish muscle samples for analysis to better understand foraging ecology and food webs in the Aleutian Islands. Her poster at the showcase was an initial look into the data to see if heavy metals like Mercury had changed over time in 5 key fish species--more to come in the future on this project and she and Nicole start weighing out samples!

The day wrapped up with some pizza and an awards ceremony, where Emma won for Excellence in Research! We are very proud of all of these early-career researchers and I'm so excited to continue to work with them next fall.