A naturalist goes in the field

This morning I took a small group of Seymour Center volunteers on a tidepooling trip to Point Piños (see red arrow in the photo below). Point Piños is a very interesting site. It marks the boundary between Monterey Bay to the right (east) of the point and the mighty Pacific Ocean to the left (west).

As is my usual habit, we began our exploration on the Pacific side of the point. Almost immediately, Victoria found an octopus! And a couple of meters away, she found another one!

As we approach the summer solstice, the algae and seagrasses are at their most lush. Point Piños is a fantastic site for algal diversity; every time I come here I want to take some back with me so I can study it at the lab. Alas, collecting at Point Piños is not allowed even for someone (like me) who holds a valid scientific collecting permit.

And yes, that log-like object towards the upper-left corner is a harbor seal (Phoca vitulina). A handful of seals were hauled out on the rocks.

However, I was much more interested in the invertebrates. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, but in the back of my mind I was keeping track of certain nudibranchs and looking for small stars.

We did see many Patiria miniata (bat stars) in the 1-2 cm size range. Most of them were a bright orange-red color, but some were beige, yellow, or blotchy. There was one large (bigger than my outstretched hand) Pisaster ochraceus that was intensely orange. And Point Piños is always a good spot to see many of the six-armed stars in the genus Leptasterias.

In terms of nudibranchs there were many Doriopsilla albopunctata, a yellow dorid with tiny white spots. We saw quite a few of them crawling around on the emersed surf grass, as well as in pools. And of course Okenia rosacea (Hopkins’ rose) was there, although not in the huge numbers I was expecting.

In the low zone I saw a few thalli of the intertidal form of Macrocystis pyrifera, the giant kelp that forms the forests that the California coast is famous for. I’d seen this intertidal form named Macrocystis integrifolia, but it appears that now the two forms (intertidal and subtidal) are both considered to be M. pyrifera. To my eye, the intertidal form differs morphologically by having rounder pneumatocysts (floats) and a holdfast that is less dense than the subtidal form.

Hermit crabs are diverse and abundant at Point Piños. Here’s an example of Pagurus samuelis, the blue-banded hermit crab; even when you can’t see the blue bands on the legs, the bright red antennae are a major clue to this crab’s identity.

When we climbed over the point to the Monterey Bay side, I found two of these little gastropod molluscs, which I didn’t recognize. They are about 1 cm long, with a brown lumpy mantle that can covers the shell, which is pinkish in color. After putting it out on Facebook that I needed help with the ID, a bunch of friends and friends of friends chimed in (thanks John, Rebecca, Barry, and David!) and I was able to determine that these little guys are Hespererato vitellina:

On our way back up the beach we noticed long windrows of Velella velella, the by-the-wind sailors, washed up. While most of them were faded and desiccated, there were enough freshly dead ones that were still blue, which may have washed up on the previous high tide.

All in all, a very satisfactory morning. I saw things I expected to see, some things I didn’t quite expect but wasn’t surprised to see, and some things I’d never seen before. That Hespererato vitellina was completely new to me, which is always exciting.

Next up:  What kinds of things live in white calcareous tubes?