Leg 4 scientist spotlight on Leif Rasmuson

Welcome back to the blog! We are well into leg 4 (the last leg of our research cruise!) and we have some ‘fresh blood’ that joined us in Cozumel.

Aras and Lief rinse down the Neuston

Today, we meet Leif Rasmuson who joins our survey from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology  at the University of Oregon Lief is a Doctoral candidate who will soon take a postdoc position at our lab! Leif shared with the blog: “As a doctoral candidate I study the dispersal of larval Dungeness crabs, Cancer magister.

I use a combination of [literally] “swimming after larvae” to observe their behavior, traditional oceanographic sampling, and individual based models (IBM).

Crab larvae

We have shown that the fishery is highly dependent on the recruitment of larvae. Further, recruitment is influenced by the day of the year of the spring transition, the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the internal waves. Soon I will be joining the ELH lab and will be working on habitat modeling for Bluefin tuna as well as other aspects of larval transport relating to tunas. Although Leif joined our survey right before he will 'defend' his dissertation, he is “enjoying getting to understand the sampling protocols that are used for this work and to start getting myself oriented to my new job at ELH.

Aras, Sam and Leif deploying the CTD near Santa Fe

I am very excited to be joining the ELH lab and to start learn more about fishes! This is a great opportunity for our lab to gain some larger insights into the community-level interactions of fishes and other zooplankton.

If you want to learn more about the life & fisheries of the Dungeness crab, click here .. for cooking the Dungeness crab: (YUM!)

crab deliciousnesss