Saturday Sunshine will have to Wait!

Mussel Biomarkers
Mussel Methylation
Monthly Goals
Published

May 2, 2026

Plan of the Week: April 27 - May 3, 2026

High- level outline for the week. Adjusted daily to reflect progress of the day before

  • This week is all about making progress in my writing deliverables.

Monday - UW-RUA

Tuesday - Finishing my Annual Evals

Wednesday - Methylation & Biomarkers

Thursday - Methylation

Friday - Methylation and Biomarkers

Saturday - No Science

Sunday - Methylation

Plan of the Day

Granular level task list to accomplish the high- level goal outlined above

  • My primary goals for today are as follows:
    • Work on biomarker visualizations and results
    • Define May goals and strategy to complete them
    • Methylation results and discussion points

Projects Touched Today

  • Mussel Biomarkers
  • Yellow Island

Progress Notes

  • The first thing I did was to brain dump the tasks related to the mussel work - biomarkers and methylation.
    • One of my goals for May is to get the biomarker manuscript out to my committee and WDFW
    • Another May goal is to have a complete, semi-polished draft of the methylation work
    • My last goal for May is to frame Chapters 3 & 4 for my proposal and build those with Steven as the other work progresses. The point here is logical, doable, chapters that build on the first two while (1) creating new knowledge with what we already have, and (2) validating that new knowledge.
    • My point here, of veering toward my May goals, is to help me define my weekly and then daily tasks to complete what is in front of my while maximizing my efforts (in lit review especially) to keep my focus forward. This helps me not get stuck in trying to perfect what I cannot perfect alone.
    • My non-science May goal is to share the crappy drafts, share the messy plan, share before I feel like I am ready. This has always been a problem for me, I want things to be the best I can make them before asking for feedback, but it has proven (repeatedly) to be an unnecessary time suck. I do not have the time to fork over - I need it to sit with the lit, the analysis results, the thoughts need room to breathe - they can’t do that if I’m always trying to put a shine on $h1+…
  • Back to Biomarkers.
    • I am ignoring the exploratory plots for this exercise.
      • The only ones that may illustrate the biomarker- only values and the IBR scores are the radars for the reference site and any other site for comparison.
      • All others are designed with the supplementary information in mind.
    • The main figures should illustrate where we worked, what we found, how what we found relates (or doesn’t) contaminant concentrations and mussel response.
      • Map of the sampling sites color coded by reporting area.
      • A 2 panel plot that shows the site-level P450 values in one panel and the SOD values in the next. Color coded by reporting area, symbol size = activity level.
      • A 3 panel box plot of the IBR scores, biomarkers only, morphometrics only, and then the combined. For a clean plot, it will have to be at reporting area level, maybe a site-level one can be in the supplement to show the intra-site variability.
      • A 3 panel map of the contaminant class spatial analysis (likely PAH and PCB) next to the combined IBR scores. All color coded by reporting area with symbol size = magnitude

I think the plots below illustrate what I outlined above, noting that polishing the viz will come during edits/ writing revisions.

Figure 1. Sample Sites (will update colors to match R-based plots)

Figure 2. Measured metric values before IBR creation.

Figure 3. IBR Score by Reporting Area.

Table 1. Significant Spearman’s (will remove IBRs and combine with Kendall’s results)

Table 2. Kendall’s Tau significant correlations (same note as table 1)

Outcomes: Products & Word Count

  • Biomarker visualization and justification & captions: 150 words
    • 5 plots, maps or tables produced

Today’s total: 0 words

Monthly total to date: 0 words

Annual total to date: 41,162 words

Annual target total to date: 59,000 words

Next Up: Tomorrow’s Plan

  • Yellow eDNA sampling.
  • Map out bench work schedule to send to Cole for the DNA extractions and QC.