The first ever Kodiak Area Marine Science Symposium (KAMSS) took place April 9th – 12th and included presentations, workshops, and posters about research around Kodiak. Over 200 people attended the symposium including students from the local schools. Dr. Tom Weingartner and Dr. John Piatt helped get everything started at the Kodiak Harbor Convention Center on Saturday with talks about the physical settings of the Gulf of Alaska Continental shelf and local upwelling and marine hotspots around the Kodiak Archipelago. The next three days were filled with presentations ranging from physical and biological oceanography to marine mammals.
A total of nineteen posters were presented on Sunday night during
the symposium. Posters were submitted by researchers from Alaska, California, and Washington with some posters from students at the local High School too. The posters were put together nicely and the speakers were excited to share their research.
On Monday night the Fishery Industrial Technology Center (FITC) held an open house with lots of delicious food and tours of the facility. FITC, which is a division of the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, primary mission is to increase the value of Alaska's fishing industry and marine resources through research, technological development, education and service. The tour was exceptionally informative and even allowed visitors to walk away with samples from one of FITC’s projects, freeze-dried salmon cubes.
There also were a number of workshops held on Saturday and Tuesday. Saturday included workshops on seabird mortality monitoring, communicating ocean science, and teaching the Alaska Seas and Rivers Curriculum. On Tuesday Kate Wynn, the person who put this wonderful symposium together, lead a roundtable discussion on what future research needs to be done in the Kodiak area while Gary Freitag did a monitoring marine invasive species workshop.
I was fortunate enough to join Gary out in the harbor earlier that morning to collect
a tunicate plate for the workshop that has been in the water since September. Numerous tunicates, barnacles, and other little organism were on ten plates placed through out the harbor however no invasive tunicates have been found in Kodiak! These plates will continue to be monitored by locals to keep track of any invasive tunicates that may make it to the Kodiak area.
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