Students begin observing succession

This week’s field trip for my Ecology class was the first of two visits to the Santa Cruz harbor. The students’ task was to select a site to monitor for a semester-long study of ecological succession. The floating docks at the harbor are the ideal site for this kind of study because I know from experience that the biota changes from season to season throughout the year, on a time scale that can be observed within the confines of a 16-week semester. We will return to the harbor in nine weeks and students will document how their sites have changed in that time.

California is swinging back into the severe drought situation we had before the epic 2016-2017 rainy season. Since the current rainy season began on 1 October 2017, we’ve had hardly any rain at all and very little snow in the Sierra. Fools who thought that one rainy season would get us out of drought are just that–fools. However, one nice thing about drought conditions is that visibility at the harbor is pretty good. Without any significant runoff the water is nice and clear, making it easy for the students to see what’s growing on their section of the docks.

The assignment for this first visit to the harbor was to choose a site, identify what lives on the site, and draw a map of it. I had warned them that all the interesting biology on the docks occurs below the level of their feet, and that they would have to lie or kneel on the dock to get a good look at what’s going on down there. Some of them tried to take a photo of the entire site, but it’s impossible to get far enough away. Unless you’re actually in the water, from where it would be easy. Yeah, you could don a wetsuit and get in the water, but the harbor isn’t the most ideal place to go for a morning swim.

A little back story on the docks at the Santa Cruz harbor

Remember the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred in northern Japan several years ago? That was on 11 March 2011 at 14:46 local time. That morning in Santa Cruz we received a tsunami warning. I didn’t venture down to the harbor (I think I was working at the marine lab that day) but here’s a video shot by a woman who watched the ~0.5 meter tsunami tear through the upper harbor:

Amazing, the destructive power of such a small wave, isn’t it? Boats were wrenched from their moorings and slammed into other boats and harbor infrastructure. I forget the total dollar amount of damage that our harbor sustained, but as a result all of the docks were replaced in the next few years. I did happen to be at the harbor with a group of students on one of the days that the old docks were being removed. It was heartbreaking to see the docks, carrying decades of biological growth on them, dumped in the parking lot to dry out in the afternoon sun. I imagine they were eventually hauled out to the landfill. 

Since then, the biota on the new floating docks seems finally to be stabilizing. If I had been teaching Ecology back in 2013, we would have had pristine habitat in which to observe honest-to-goodness primary succession. As things are, however, I’m giving students the option of scraping all or part of their plot clear, to simulate primary succession. Their other option is to leave the plot as-is, and pick up the succession process somewhere in the middle and see what happens from this point forward.

So, what did they see down there? 

Well, even though the water was relatively clear, a lot of the photos looked like this:

I can identify much of the stuff in this photo, but this isn’t the best shot to showcase the biodiversity on the docks. I decided that the camera would do a better job if I used it to photograph individual organisms instead. Here are some of my favorites.

This shot is looking straight down along the edge of one of the docks. The macroscopic life begins 2-3 cm below the waterline, and even above that the dock surface is covered with microscopic scuzzes.

I had shown the students pictures of organisms they would be likely to see at the harbor. One of the critters that shows up sporadically is the introduced hydroid Ectopleura crocea. Later in the semester we will discuss species introductions and invasions in more detail. Harbors generally tend to be heavily populated by non-native species, and our local harbor is no exception. The species of Ectopleura found in harbors has hydranths that can be 8-10 cm long, and when it occurs it tends to be quite conspicuous. The congeneric species, E. marina, lives in intertidal in some areas on the open coast; I’ve seen it in a few tidepools at Davenport Landing, for example. The intertidal species is much smaller, about 2-3 cm tall and doesn’t form the dense clumps that typifies E. crocea.

The ubiquitous caprellid amphipods were crawling all over everything, as usual. Some of the students really didn’t like these guys and one of them had the same reaction to them that I do, which is a general shudder. They’re sort of cute in still photos, but when they start inchworming around they look sort of creepy. And when there’s a bunch of them writhing around in an oozy mass, they’re REALLY creepy.

One of the most conspicuous worms at the harbor is Eudistylia polymorphora, the so-called feather duster worm. They come in oranges, purples, and yellows. This one was pure white. Lovely animal!

Tube-dwelling polychaete worms, such as Eudistylia, don’t have much in the way of a head but they do have many light-sensitive eyespots on the tentacles. They react very quickly to many stimuli, and even a shadow passing over a worm causes it to yank its tentacles into its tube in the blink of an eye. Usually they’re not too shy, though, and will extend their tentacles soon to resume feeding.

All told we were on the docks for about 2.5 hours. Not a bad way to spend a glorious morning, is it?