Month: July 2015

The necessity for solitude

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Some people are energized by constant activity, feeding on and drawing strength from the buzz of never-ending stimulation. Although I sometimes wish I were, I am not one of them. I am, according to any personality test I’ve ever taken, the quintessential introvert. I am much more comfortable in small groups than large crowds, prefer not to be the center of attention, and (most importantly, I think) need to spend time alone to recharge my emotional and psychological batteries.

This is especially true when I’ve been doing a lot of teaching. I love teaching and gladly give every bit of my energy and passion to my students, but it takes a lot out of me. All of the time spent being “on” in a classroom needs to be balanced with time away from people. Sometimes this takes the form of holing up in the lab and preparing for the next day’s class, but when I’m lucky it means me going off into the outdoors by myself.

Alone time with Nature is balm to my soul. So far this year I’ve made 25 trips to the intertidal, most of them by myself. The spring and summer low tides which occur in the early mornings, are the ones I love the most. There’s something magical about being in the field as the sun appears over the horizon, when the ocean is calm and the winds haven’t picked up yet. One of the things I like most about the early morning low tides is that most people are still in bed and I get the intertidal to myself, where I can poke around at my own pace and allow my attention to wander to whatever catches my eye.

The other morning I was up the coast a bit and this is what caught my eye:

Hemigrapsus nudus, missing a left cheliped, at Pistachio Beach. 4 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Hemigrapsus nudus, missing a left cheliped, at Pistachio Beach
4 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one of these crabs, but the name popped right into my head. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my gut instinct when an animal’s name just shows up like that, especially with the marine invertebrates. So when I got back to the lab I looked it up and, yep, that was it. But in the meantime I was woolgathering, following mental threads of images of these crabs from books, as the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that I never had actually seen one in the field. I still think that this individual may be the first one I’ve ever seen alive in its natural habitat.

All in all it was a glorious morning, warm even. I had to shed a couple of layers when the sun came out. See how flat the water is?

Rocky intertidal habitat at Pistachio Beach, 4 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Rocky intertidal habitat at Pistachio Beach
4 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

All of this isn’t to say that I don’t like sharing the intertidal with friends. I do enjoy taking people with me, and there are a few people whose company I would welcome any time. They know who they are, I think. But for the most part I don’t mind going out by myself (except for the one time there was a guy, obviously digging illegally for clams, who gave me a longer-than-necessary look as I walked past him on the beach) and actually enjoy it. So don’t feel too sorry for me when I can’t find someone to go with me, and realize that if I invite you to join me then it’s because I really want to spend time with you.

Got ’em!

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

When I moved to the coast these many years ago and started poking around in the local intertidal, I became entranced with little animals called staurozoans. I can’t claim to have been to every intertidal site in the area, but I’ve been to several of them and I personally know the staurozoans to occur at only two sites: Carmel Point (I’ve seen them there once) and Franklin Point (I used to see them there fairly regularly). In 2007 I went out to Franklin Point every month that had a negative low tide during daylight hours to monitor the abundance and size of the staurozoans; heck, once I even went out in the dark armed with a headlamp and a friend who was supposed to watch my back but instead fell asleep against the cliff. The staurozoans were easy to find that year and occurred in large numbers.

I used to be able to find the staurozoans in one particular area on the north side of Franklin Point where the water continually swashes back and forth.

Intertidal at Franklin Point, 3 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Intertidal at Franklin Point
3 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

The staurozoans would always be attached to algae, often perfectly matching the color of their substrate. I remember seeing two versions, one a reddish brown and the other a vibrant bottle green color, of the same species of Haliclystus.

In March of this year I saw a lot of small staurozoans when I braved the afternoon winds at Franklin Point. The conditions were pretty horrid, with the water all churned up and murky so I couldn’t take any pictures, but I was happy to see my little guys because it meant they were there. I hadn’t seen them for a few years before this past spring and was beginning to doubt my search image. Huzzah for validating my gut feeling! I may have whooped and done the happy dance in my hip boots that afternoon.

Fast forward almost three months and three additional trips out to Franklin Point before I found a staurozoan this morning. One. And it was only about 0.5 cm tall, the same size that they were in March. And it was brown, the same color as most of the algae out there. Because they live where the water is constantly moving it’s really hard to photograph them in situ. This is the best I could do:

Haliclystus sp. in situ at Franklin Point, 3 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Haliclystus sp. at Franklin Point
3 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

It’s hard to appreciate from this photo just how beautiful these animals are. They are very animated, swaying in the current and although they are attached they can slowly creep over surfaces or even detach, somersault around, and re-attach. Back in the day when I used to find them frequently I brought some back to the lab to observe them more closely. I could get them to feed, but they never lasted more than about a week in captivity.

So, what exactly are staurozoans? They are cnidarians, kin to sea anemones, hydroids, Velella velella, and jellies. Their common name is stalked jellies, and for a long time biologists considered them to be closely related to the jellies in the cnidarian class Scyphozoa. However, recent studies of the genetics of staurozoans have caused taxonomists to elevate these creatures to their own class, the Staurozoa.

Not much is known about the ecology of Haliclystus in California, probably because they are so damn difficult to find in the field. I have one or maybe two more trips out to Franklin Point this summer before we lose the minus tides for the season; hopefully they will still be there. I’d love to get some better pictures of them to show my students this fall. Wish me luck!

Constellations

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

I did a quick search, and there doesn’t seem to be a collective noun for sea stars. I’m going to remedy that by declaring “constellation” to be the official term for a group of sea stars. And by “official” I mean that’s the term I’m going to use. Who knows, maybe it’ll take.

In any case, I certainly have a constellation of sea star larvae in each of my jars. Today I pipetted a lot of them into a bowl, and they look pretty cool all swimming together, like strange alien spaceships. What do you think?

The largest of the larvae are over 2 mm long now, and the brachiolar arms have grown much longer. They have three adhesive papillae on the ventral side of the anterior projection and well-formed juvenile rudiments, where the water vascular system is forming. They’re much too big to fit under the compound scope, so the only way to get pictures of the entire body is through the dissecting scope:

Brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days. 3 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days
3 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

In the above photo you are looking at the larva’s ventral surface, so the animal’s left side on the right side of the photo, and vice versa. If you squint you might be able to convince yourself that you see a small whitish bleb on the left side of the stomach; that’s the rudiment. Since it doesn’t make much sense under this magnification, I removed this individual to a slide and put it under the compound scope. It doesn’t fit in the field of view, so I took pictures of each half of the body. If I were clever with photo editing software I’d be able to mesh these photos into a single image. Alas….

Ventral view of the anterior end of a brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days. 3 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Ventral view of the anterior end of a brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days
3 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong
Ventral view of the posterior end of a brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days. 3 July 2015. © Allison J. Gong
Ventral view of the posterior end of a brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days
3 July 2015
© Allison J. Gong

This gives you a better view of the juvenile rudiment on the animal’s left. Those three roundish blobs are tube feet! I think it’s likely that at some point in the not-too-distant future the larvae will be competent, which means they’d be physiologically and anatomically capable of metamorphosis. It seems to me that they are still developing very quickly, and with seawater temperatures consistent at 15-16°C I don’t expect that to change. So far, so good!

Edit 4 July 2015:  Look at what my online friend Becca can do! She was able to merge my photos into a single image. Now you can see the entire body! Thanks, Becca!

Composite image of brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days. 3 July 2015.
Composite image of brachiolaria larva of Pisaster ochraceus, age 31 days
3 July 2015