Fellow spotlight: Angela Korabik

Angela Korabik is an Alaska Sea Grant State Fellow working with the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Kodiak, Alaska. With her supervisor, Dr. Alix Laferriere, Angela is engaged in mariculture research monitoring juvenile fish interactions with wild and cultivated kelp habitats, and improving efficiencies in Pacific oyster husbandry for oceanographic conditions in Alaska. Angela will also participate in a three-week interdisciplinary National Marine Fisheries Service bottom trawl survey assessing Bering Sea crab and groundfish populations, during which she will live and work aboard research vessels.

Originally from Chicago, Angela completed her B.S. in biology and Chinese studies at the University of South Carolina. Just before beginning her fellowship, Angela completed her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis, where her dissertation examined the effects of climate change on kelp reproduction. Much of her work involved culturing the microscopic stages of kelp in a laboratory setting, but as an applied ecologist, Angela wanted to take this experience growing kelp and apply it to aquaculture systems. Angela is currently leading an experiment to understand bull kelp fertility in different locations over time. She and her collaborator in Juneau, Dr. Veronica Farrugia Drakard, are assessing bull kelp canopy quality and spore release every month for a full year.

Angela is interested in how aquaculture species react to environmental change and how they may in turn affect the environment around them. Her current work with Dr. Laferriere examines the impacts of kelp farms on ecological communities in two different ways. By comparing the canopy—the surface to a depth of 6 feet—of both kelp farms and kelp forests, they are hoping to determine whether kelp farms are providing habitat for juvenile salmonids, and if they are, what happens to the juvenile salmonids once the habitat is removed during kelp harvest.

Another one of Angela’s roles is to coordinate and facilitate an interdisciplinary group of bull kelp farmers and researchers, known as the Bull Kelp Research Squad, working to better understand how best to grow bull kelp, a species desirable for human consumption but difficult to grow in an offshore farm. Angela is leading efforts to ensure project participants and partners meet established requirements for implementation, collection, tracking, reporting, and communication and documentation of findings and results. While the work is still in its early stages, they plan to develop strategies for overcoming significant resource and environmental problems for bull kelp farming, helping to grow the industry and reduce the need for wild harvest. 

“I’ve always heard about how great the marine ecology community in Alaska was, and now that I’m up here, it’s more collaborative than I ever could have imagined,” said Angela. “The willingness of farmers, industry members, scientists and agency members to work together so strongly is amazing and is fostering a fantastic research community.”

After completing her fellowship, Angela hopes to continue to do aquaculture research in Alaska.