Cough guards are up in Sitka’s grocery stores, but with no confirmed cases or community spread most shoppers aren’t wearing masks. Social scientists want to understand how Sitkans perceive risk. (KCAW photo/Berett Wilber)

The longer that relatively isolated communities like Sitka go with few or no cases of the coronavirus, the less threatened they feel by the infection — or not. Social scientists are beginning to wonder what factors inform our perception of risk over the course of a pandemic, and — ultimately — how our perception of risk informs policy decisions for the community.

The Sitka Sound Science Center has published a new survey to find out what you’re thinking.

Ron Heintz is the director of research at the Sitka Sound Science Center. The center has been working hard recently on a landslide warning system, but now it’s pivoted to the coronavirus. Like the rest of us, they’re trying to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation.

“We’re all at home now, because of the pandemic,” he said. “But we wanted to try and get a sense of what’s happening in the community — in Sitka — with respect to people’s impressions of how well they’ve been informed, and how prepared they feel they are for the pandemic, what they’re response is and how they’re preparing for it.”

The Science Center was already partnered with the RAND Corporation (along with the US Geological Survey and the University of Oregon) on the $2 million landslide warning system — and a major component of that project is social science, especially the question of how people perceive and respond to risk. That project isn’t going away; Heintz says that everyone’s nerdy science instinct has just been redirected into developing a survey.

“We’re trying to get a sense of the risk of exposure they feel to the pandemic,” he said. “How they’re going about preparing for that risk, and we’re also interested in how well informed they feel about that risk, and where they’re getting their information from.”

Heintz says that the survey was developed in partnership with the social science team at Rand. In 6 pages it covers a broad range of risk and responses — literally, everything from how likely you think you are to become infected and die from this infection, to how much subsistence food you’re eating. It takes probably less than 10 minutes to complete online, and prompts you to think just a little harder about actions and precautions that are starting to feel routine.

Heintz lives in Juneau and commutes to Sitka about once a month under normal circumstances. He says his own attitude shifted noticeably when the first cases arrived there.

“In Juneau here, I’d been pretty proactive,” said Heintz. “I’d been following the advance of the virus in Wuhan, and watching the news pretty carefully to see what was going on. In late February I decided I wouldn’t be traveling anymore. And I was being pretty proactive I thought — and then when a case actually developed in Juneau, there was another ramping up of concern on my part. And that’s one of the things we wanted to capture: How people’s impressions change when cases become more local, and the whole situation becomes more real to them.”

 Similar surveys are being conducted in other parts of the country, according to Heintz, and the National Science Foundation — which funded the landslide project — is considering throwing its weight behind the effort. People’s behavior changes dramatically based on their perception of risk, and this plays a role as communities — and our state — implement policies like social distancing and shelter-in-place.

“When you realize that you could actually contract it by going to the grocery store or running into somebody on the street,” he said, “suddenly that becomes very different from hearing it on the news and saying ‘Okay, I’m going to be very careful and follow the rules that Dr. Zink (Anne Zink, chief medical officer for the Alaska DHSS) is putting out, and I’ll be okay.’ But once you realize that it’s there in your town, it was a different feeling for me anyway.”

At first, Heintz thought the survey would just sample the views of Sitkans, but he says it has “taken on a life of its own” since it was released about a week ago (4-10-20).  And the initial idea, anyway, was to keep it open until Sitka started seeing its first cases. Now, if the National Science Foundation contributes funding, the goal is to conduct a follow-up survey later in the course of the pandemic. After that, Heintz says the Sitka Sound Science Center will compile the data into a report that should serve as a tool to help policy-makers manage risk in their communities.

The Sitka Sound Science Center has a lot of irons in the fire when it comes to scientific research- in addition to their fisheries work, they’re conducting cutting edge landslide research and running a hatchery. One of the organization’s most recent endeavors may sound a little spooky, but for some of the ocean’s crustiest critters it’s an exciting development.

“This is just a salt water flow through tank, so there’s a little bit of movement to mimic what would be happening in the ocean” Callie Simmons says over the loud hum of pumps and running water behind the Sitka Sound Science Center. She gestures to a nondescript box tucked away in a corner, with holes poked in the sides that allow water to circulate.

“There’s a little bit of movement to mimic what would be happening in the ocean,” she says.

She’s showing me a project she’s monitoring, but the tank isn’t full of fish like you might expect. It’s full of hinges. 

“We have two different types of hinges, kind of suspended in the water,” she says, lifting the lid to the tank to show me the rows of hinges. “We’re just seeing how long it takes them to biodegrade.” 

Why? A research team at the science center wants to see if biodegradable hinges can prevent “ghost fishing” in Alaska. While that may sound a little spooky, it’s actually pretty straightforward. 

“Okay so ghost fishing is when you put a crab pot out, and for some reason the crab pot becomes un-retrievable. So then it can continue to fish,” explains Ron Heintz. He’s the research director at the science center- he’s been on the job since March. He recently retired from NOAA and has done a lot of work with fisheries biology. 

“It was a lot of grinding fish up and setting them on fire to see how many calories were in them,” he laughs.

The science center is doing a wide variety of research- but recently they’ve been studying crab pots- big round, sometimes square, wire traps used for crabbing.

“There’s a funnel that the crab goes into and at the end there’s a little gate. And the crab pushes the gate open and goes inside the pot and gets stuck,” Heintz explains.

And if a crab pot gets lost on the ocean floor, there’s a safety mechanism in place. “There’s a cotton cord that you put on the top of a crab pot, on a big flap, on one of the sides of the crab pot,” Heintz says. “That cotton cord will rot eventually. And then that flap can open up and presumably the crabs can escape.” 

That is unless the pot happens to be sitting flap side down on the bottom of the ocean, or the pot gets heavily fouled with other organisms weighing it down. Then the crabs are stuck and they die of starvation. 

So the center partnered with colleagues at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who have developed crab pots with biodegradable hinges. They’ve been using them for the blue crab fishery in the Chesapeake Bay. 

“The idea is that these hinges would degrade and then the bar that prevents the crab from escaping from the pot would fall to the bottom of the pot and then the crab could run away.”

This isn’t the first time the science center has looked into a solution for ghost fishing. 

“We tried an experiment like this several years ago, where we wanted to sew a biodegradable panel into the side of the pots, and the panels never degraded,” Heintz says.

Why? Southeast Alaska waters are too cold. And this recent experiment hasn’t been without its hang ups. They gave several test crab pots with biodegradable hinges to sports fishermen. 

“The first thing we learned was that the hinges failed almost immediately,” says Heintz.

So the researchers in Virginia sent them new hinges, and Heintz says those seem to be working out well. But then they came up against another problem. 

“The Alaska crabs seem to be a little meaner and more hardcore than the blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay,” he says. “The Dungeness crabs, what they like to do, is when they get stuck is they grab that little gate with their claw and they just yank on it and break the hinges off.” 

Heintz calls this the “crab effect”. Dungies just cannot be contained. 

So what’s the solution? Keep testing the hinges. Those being tested behind science center are different thicknesses. They will be in the water for 120 days. Simmons says the sweet spot is about four months of use before the hinges begin to degrade. She and Heintz hope to walk away from the project with more information on how to reduce ghost fishing in cold Alaska waters where mean crustaceans abound.  

It’s doubtful any crabs will say “boo” to that.