MMT: Not you’re typical internship

By ANDREW MOSES
Special to the Saipan Tribune

This summer has been one unlike no other I have had here on my beautiful island home of Saipan. You may be wondering whether I am talking about the record high temperatures, or the even higher gas prices but no, my friends, I am not. The experience that I am referring to is my summer with the CNMI Marine Monitoring Team. The MMT is an inter-agency effort by officials from the Division of Environmental Quality and the Coastal Resources Management Office dedicated to studying and protecting our CNMI oceans and all of the marine life that inhabits them. My name is Andrew Moses and it is a great honor to be working alongside my mentor, John Starmer, CRM marine biologist, and the rest of the guys on the MMT. As a coral reef intern, there were numerous projects and tasks that I was given to aid the MMT in obtaining all the valuable information needed regarding our precious marine environment.

The first task that I was given was to organize data from our bi-weekly reef-flat surveys that have been conducted over the past two years so that we could make the information available for everyone to read about on the MMT website. This was a fun experience, as it was my first time dealing with HTML website designing. You can check out all of the data and other fun facts about the MMT at http://cnmicoralreef.net/monitoring.htm. Although being behind the desk and in the air conditioning was a great way to beat the summer heat, the field work duties associated with the MMT is what really makes for some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

My favorite part of the internship has been conducting water-quality surveys inside our lagoon. This collaborative project with our MMT partners from DEQ (Peter Houk, John Iguel, Jose Quan and Rodney Camacho) uses a YSI6600 water quality sonde (sensor) to measure several parameters such as the depth, salinity, and chlorophyll content of the water surrounding our island. Although this sounds like a really fancy scientific process, it is kind of like water skiing but without the skis. We simply get thrown in the water with the sensor and get towed behind the boat to take samples from up north in PauPau all the way to San Antonio. Let me assure you that it’s not anything dangerous being dragged in the water like that. In fact I am sure that the underwater view of our lagoon I get through the snorkels beats staring at your plain white office walls all day. The data that we collect will go toward creating a water quality map of the Saipan lagoon, as well as to help identify several changes occurring in our waters.

The last project that I am working on this summer is a population study of the bivalve (clam) Atactodea. This intertidal clam has become more and more rare at local beaches over the years and my project aims to investigate where these clams are found, as well as study the sand composition at these sites. The experiment will also coincide with another study being conducted by Dr. Gary Denton from the University of Guam’s Water and Environmental Research Institute (UOG – WERI). Dr. Denton and I have done some field work digging for Atactodea and other bivalves on the shores surrounding several storm drainages alongside Beach Road. The bivalves that we collect will be dissected to help us analyze the amount of heavy metals and other contaminants that are allowed to flow into our lagoon through the storm drainages.

This fun and exciting summer of mine is about half done and I know that the best part still lies ahead in the analyzing of all the data we will be gathering. When this internship is over, I will continue my studies at Northern Marianas College and hopefully transfer to a school where I can obtain a degree in Marine Biology in the next few years. So for now, I’ll be out on the water, getting sunburn all over my body for the sake of science.

Andrew Moses is one of the coral monitoring interns this summer. He is also a student at Northern Marianas College.