Category: Kiersten Newtoff

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Kiersten Newtoff: I Got on a Boat! Just, Not my Boat, June 7, 2023

NOAA Teacher at Sea on Land

Kiersten Newtoff

Hanging Out In: Biloxi & Pascagoula, Mississippi

June 1 – June 7, 2023

Date: June 7, 2023

So, here was the plan:

  1. Fly in to Gulfport, MS on Thursday, June 1. Stay the night.
  2. Head to the Oregon II in Pascagoula, MS on Friday, June 2 and stay the night aboard.
  3. Sail out on Saturday, June 3 and be at sea for 2 weeks working on a groundfish survey.

And here’s what really happened:

  1. Fly in to Gulfport, MS on Thursday, June 1. Stay the night.
  2. Get an email on Friday that essential personnel were unable to sail and that we were in a “holding pattern” until the staffing shortage was resolved.
  3. Hang out in Biloxi, MS until Tuesday, June 6 waiting to hear if there is any good news (unfortunately not).
  4. Fly out of Mobile, AL on Tuesday night, with a layover in Atlanta. However, my first flight was delayed, which made me miss my connection, so I spent the night in Atlanta until flying back to the DC area on Wednesday, June 7.
Picture of a scenic overlook over the Gulf of Mexico. Two sailboats are in the distance.
Picture off the Gulf Coast, directly across the street from my hotel.

I have to say, the MVP in this was Emily Susko, the Program Support Specialist for NOAA’s Teacher at Sea Program. She was pulling in her connections, rebooking flights, walking me through different options at ALL hours of the day. Emily was feeling bad for the whole situation and shared that she has never had a vessel delayed for this precise reason before. But I reassured her, I am the poster child for Murphy’s Law when it comes to traveling. For example, last summer I did a 3 week camping trip to the National Parks out west. Here’s a sampling of the things that want wrong:

  • Flight out there was cancelled, had to fly out the next day
  • About 4 days in, our campsite in Glacier (which was the ending of the trip) had been cancelled due to bad flooding. We weren’t able to rebook due to full campsites.
  • Spent 2 out of 5 nights in Yellowstone, as we got kicked out because the park was shut down due to insane flooding.
  • Got COVID and spent quarantine in a hotel.
  • Rearranged entire trip and went to Bryce Canyon, which had a thick layer of smoke because of nearby wildfires .
  • Went to Capital Reef NP, where I was stuck in a flash flood in a small overhang for over 4 hours.

So needless to say, a delay on when I will get to ship out is no problem. Plus, the Teacher at Sea Program really stressed being flexible , so while the situation wasn’t ideal, I know to expect the unexpected! While admittedly, I did spend a good chunk of time in the hotel as I needed the cooldown from the end of the semester, I did some exploring and learned a lot as well!

Photograph of an osprey nest as seen through the trees. One osprey sits on top of the nest and another osprey is below the nest on a pole. Both osprey are looking out over the landscape.
A male and female osprey guarding their nest.

My first couple days were spent in the Biloxi area, trying to soak in as much sun, wildlife, and food as possible. The hotel I was staying at was right across the street from the beach. When walking on the beach, I heard an incessant screeching and birds were dive bombing me! This is when I realized I was in a Least Tern colony. Terns are a shorebird that lay their eggs right on the sand. This colony had over 300 adults and was cordoned off by the Audubon Society to protect the nest (and probably, the passersby from the tern attacks). Also along the beach was an Osprey nest . Many conservation societies will purposefully create artificial platforms for Osprey to use, but these guys were nested atop the USS Biloxi memorial.

Picture of a small pond. There is dense vegetation that is mirrored in the water. The top of an alligator can be seen floating in the water.
Can you spot the alligator in this “alligator pond”?

I spent a morning in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, which is protected by the National Park Service. Here I contributed to citizen science by completing three eBird checklists. eBird is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and is a way for anyone, anywhere around the world to submit a checklist of all the birds they saw and heard. Then, scientists globally can use the data to answer ecological questions. To give you the scale of eBird, in May 2023, over 2 million checklists were submitted worldwide! One of the ponds that went through the marsh land was named “Alligator Pond”, and after looking in, I understand why!

On my last day in the area, I headed to the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Pascagoula, MS. Here I met Brandi Noble who is the Vessel/Environmental Compliance Coordinator for the Southeast fleet. While she stays on land, she has been with NOAA for over two decades and has done every type of cruise NOAA conducts! Brandi was also instrumental in juggling me around. She was also kind enough to give me a tour of the Gordon Gunter so that I at least got on some sort of boat and also a tour of the Science Center. The Science Center houses scientists in many different fields (ecologists, microbiologists, chemists) who analyze water and organismal samples when cruises return. They also have an engineering department who creates technologies to be used by fisherman in the US (and around the world) that helps conservation efforts. It’s said that the engineering team at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center is the reason why sea turtle populations have bounced back as much as they have — they are the ones who invented the turtle exclusion devices for fishing nets!

A photograph of a close-up of a trawl net that has a turtle exclusion device installed.
This is a medium-sized trawl net, mainly used for catching shrimp. On the left, where the white buoy is, is the TED — a turtle exclusion device. The metal bars allow smaller organisms to go through, but turtles (and other organisms like sharks) hit the bars and are pushed downwards out of the net through the green mesh at the bottom. The next section to the right, in green, has some pockets where fish can swim out (but shrimp likely wouldn’t). The blue mesh at the far right also helps to “push” undesirable fish out because they are afraid of it and will swim backwards (towards the pockets). Some fish, like menhaden, try to escape by swimming upwards. The orange mesh at the far right end allows them to do so. Meanwhile, all the shrimp are being pushed into a mesh bag at the far right end (not attached in this picture).

With my trip to the Science Center, I learned about the importance of the commanding officer (CO) role. While all roles on a vessel are important, the CO is essentially the captain. Now, captain is an official rank, so a CO may not actually be a captain, but to the layman, they are. In the NOAA corps, a CO is assigned to a ship for a two year post. They direct every cruise, which can be hundreds of days at sea each year. I attended the Change of Command Ceremony for the Gordon Gunter. During this ceremony, the current CO is recognized for their hard work during their tour and a new CO is welcomed aboard. COs have a pin on their uniform recognizing their command. It’s interesting as they pin the new CO first, then change the position of the pin on the old CO so that there is never a moment that the vessel lacks a commanding officer.

Well, this is goodbye for now! I hope I will be able to be placed in another cruise this summer, but if not, I’ll be back next year!

Kiersten stands in front of a large white NOAA boat. Though not shown in the photo directly, it is the Gordon Gunter.
I at least got to check out and board the Gordon Gunter!
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Kiersten Newtoff: How My College Choice Led Me Here, May 26, 2023

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Kiersten Newtoff

Aboard NOAA Ship Oregon II

June 3 – June 16, 2023

Mission: Groundfish Survey

Geographic Area of Cruise: Gulf of Mexico

Departure Port: Pascagoula, MS

Arrival Port: Galveston, TX

Date: May 26, 2023

The inner marine biologist in me is EXCITED. I shouldn’t say inner, as I do have a master’s degree in marine biology! But I definitely feel like a phony as I studied birds… on land… and never once needed to snorkel or SCUBA dive. I am embarrassed to admit it given my educational background and the fact that I grew up in a coastal town, but I cannot even swim. So sure, sign me up to live on a boat for two weeks!

A life-sized dolphin statue, mounted on a black post in a rock bed lining a brick building. The dolphin is painted with images of dolphins and other marine life (fish, seahorses) swimming in a deep blue background.
One of the hundreds of dolphin statues that dot the Virginia Beach, VA landscape. Photo by Mechelle Hankerson.

If I were to trace back the threads to how I ended up in NOAA’s Teacher at Sea program, it would likely have started in 2007, when I was a junior in high school. Like other juniors, we were all feverishly searching College Board on universities to attend, majors to study, and regions to live in. Growing up in a coastal town and like many girls my age, I was obsessed with dolphins. To be fair, we literally have statues of dolphins all over my hometown, so how can you not be intrigued by them?! In Virginia at the time, there was only one university that offered a degree in marine biology: Old Dominion University. Unfortunately, ODU was only 15 minutes from where I grew up and I was ready to spread my wings and fly a little further from the nest. A great school I found for marine biology was the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), where I applied and was accepted, but the out-of-state tuition was too great for me to financially handle. After conducting more searches on College Board, I applied to Radford University, which is in the mountains of Virginia. Here, I settled into a degree program in Biology, with a concentration of Environmental Biology.

One of the requirements of the Environmental Biology concentration is to take a GIS course. GIS stands for geographic information systems and is a growing technology that has unlimited applications. The intro class I took focused on how to use ArcGIS, the software that is used in the industry. I elected to take an intermediate class where I got to practice my skills more and learn about the applications of the tool. I was the only biology major (and woman!) taking the intermediate course, which is surprising given how much GIS is used in the field now.

As my years at Radford came to an end, I knew that I wanted to teach. I had earned countless opportunities in various teaching or tutoring roles at the college and enjoyed every minute. Well, not every minute. I would get incredibly nervous before each class period and that… processed itself… in different ways… Anyway, if I wanted to pursue a career as a professor, I needed to at least get my master’s degree. With the help of my college professors, they reviewed my materials and shared the expectations of grad school, how to apply, and how to find a research mentor. Since funding was less of an issue as a graduate student, I was not worried about staying within the confines of Virginia. With this boundary lifted, I also set my eyes back on marine biology.

With my environmental background, I was able to shift my mindset away from dolphins to focusing on how humans impact marine organisms. I sent emails to over 50 different professors across 20+ schools and maybe only heard back from about half. I interviewed at 5 different schools, got a verbal offer to study sharks, but was rescinded when their funding fell through. One of the last people I emailed was Dr. Steve Emslie, whose lab at UNCW focused on mercury toxicology in marine birds. I had no interest in birds, and I think they are cheating at being considered a marine animal, but I was starting to realize I needed to expand my scope more because marine biology is a competitive field. And opportunities to study marine organisms larger than an oyster are even more competitive. Steve brought me on to his lab where I shifted my previous dolphin obsession to birds.

I definitely… terned…  

Dozens (hundreds?) of two species of terns crowd a beach area. Most are standing, though a few have their wings outstretched. ALl of the terns are white, with black legs, andblack, tufted crowns. The sandwich terns have black bills, while the royal terns have vibrant orange bills.
Colony of Sandwich (foreground) and Royal Terns (background). Photo by Kiersten during graduate school research in the Cape Fear Estuary, North Carolina.
Kiersten, wearing shorts, a t-shirt, a hat, and sunglasses on a sunny day, poses for a photo while gripping a brown pelican carefully with two hands. Her left hand hoists the bird's back, between two semi-outstretched wings, while her left hand holds its bill closed. The pelican braces itself against her middle with its left foot. The right ankle sports a metal band. In the background, we see upland marsh plants, water in the distance, more shoreline beyond the water, and birds flying in the air.
Picture of Kiersten holding a Brown Pelican that she just banded. Taken at Ferry Slip Island in the Cape Fear Estuary, NC.

While I could drone on and on about my research on Brown Pelicans and their mercury loads, we need to focus on the GIS, which is the thread that led me to NOAA. With my fundamental GIS background, I added a spatial variability component to my research to analyze how mercury concentration in Brown Pelican tissues in their breeding colonies varies over space. At UNCW, I took a higher level GIS course entitled Environmental GIS. In this course, I was able to learn about the ecological applications of GIS and about the exciting world of remote sensing. When you think of satellites, you likely think of sensors looking for alien life or GPS or Starlink. And while that is true, NASA has a series of satellites that point back at Earth that remotely sense various parameters, such as particulate matter in our atmosphere, the amount of chlorophyll a on a surface, water temperature, soil moisture, and so much more.

Near the end of the semester, a student in this course shared about an internship she completed and passed out flyers around the room. I took one, but it wasn’t related to teaching so I didn’t immediately jump on it. At this point, I was nearing graduation and was starting my search for a full-time faculty role. Looking back, it was quite ambitious to think I was just going to land a full-time faculty position directly out of my master’s degree. But I did try! I was able to get a couple interviews but was always outcompeted by someone with far more experience than me. Panicking that I need an income after I finished school, I applied for the internship.

a graphic depicting illustrations of satellites on orbits around earth. there are fifteen in this illustration, orbiting earth on three arcs.
Graphic of a subset of NASA’s Earth Observing Satellites. Created by NASA.

In the summer of 2014, I started my internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the DEVELOP program. This program utilizes Earth remote sensing to answer ecological questions for organizations around the world. The project that I had worked on that summer was using satellite imagery to measure forest fragmentation. We then compared it to bird presence data, which we collected from the Breeding Bird Survey, a yearly bird count through the U.S. Geological Survey. There were 7 other interns working together in a windowless office that was probably 150 sq ft in size. I would not be surprised if this was originally a storage room, given the wires, pipes, and electrical boxes found in the room.  

Let’s do a quick speed run through parts that do not matter too much to this story: I worked at NASA Goddard for about 1.5 years before transitioning to teaching. I had been teaching part-time at a local community college for some of that time and received another part-time role, leading me to leave NASA. I worked at two institutions for a year, before getting the opportunity to move to China to teach the sciences at an international high school. I was there for 6 months before moving back in January 2017 to the United States after landing a full-time professorship at Montgomery College, a community college in Maryland. I have been with MC since then teaching ecology, evolution, and environmental biology.

Flash forward to 2019, and I see a post by one of my friends on social media. This friend was one of the other interns at NASA, whom I literally shared a desk with (it was a very small office space), who went on to work with the U.S. National Weather Service. And, if you did not already know, they are a part of NOAA! Jamie had shared about the Teacher at Sea program on his social media and after I read through the stories of educators on board, I knew I needed to apply. Add in four years while the world sorted itself, and here I am!

screenshot of a Facebook post from October 24, 2019 announcing NOAA's Teacher at Sea Program's application.

I am incredibly excited for this opportunity. The groundfish survey measures population size structures of the species caught and characterizes the water column at the sampling locations. I look forward to creating data driven lessons for my students to use statistics to measure diversity between stations and to compare that diversity with water quality samples. Our world is changing, and if we are to do something about it, we need to understand it.