We’ve had a good strong wet season this year, resulting in another wildflower superbloom. Over spring break we went to southern California to chase the flowers and, while we were at it, visit some places that I’d never been to. Our first stops were at familiar stomping grounds that we’d visited in 2017: Shell Creek Road, Carrizo Plain, and Antelope Valley. There were significantly more people at all of these places, compared to two years ago. Many of the well known sites for wildflowers have become very popular lately, and we tried to avoid the most crowded areas.
Location 1: Shell Creek Road
Just because I love the California oaks, here’s one that is well festooned with lace lichen (Ramalina menziesii) and moss:
The sky was hazy that day, making for less than ideal picture-taking conditions. The wind certainly didn’t help, as the flowers were moving constantly. This early in the bloom the predominant color was yellow: a soft, buttery yellow due to the tidy tips and a much more brilliant, retina-searing gold due to the goldfields.
Soda Lake Road, which runs through Carrizo Plain, was quite crowded. We stopped at the vista point and then headed off the beaten track onto some less-traveled dirt roads.
To the northeast of Carrizo Plain lie the Temblor Range hills, on which the bloom was just beginning. We saw fiddlenecks and goldfields at lower elevations, and splotches of purple Phacelia and orange poppies higher on the hills.
Antelope Valley was overrun with people, climbing up hillsides with their dogs and selfie sticks. Seems that selfies of people sitting in poppy fields is all the rage these days. We didn’t bother even trying to get into the poppy preserve, as there were lots of flowers to be seen in the surrounding areas.
Compared to what we saw at Antelope Valley in 2017, this year’s bloom was different. This year the poppies were not as widely scattered as in 2017, but where they occurred they were extremely dense. Then again, this year we were early in the bloom, and by now it could be different.
The United States entered World War II in December 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. With Japan now considered an enemy state, part of the U.S. response in 1942 was to order more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast and in Hawaii into forced interment in remote camps operated by the military. The internees were men, women, and children; immigrants and U.S.-born citizens. They were considered a risk to national security, and their removal from society was widely (but not universally) viewed as a justifiable precautionary measure.
Executive Order 9066 was issued and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942. This order authorized the Secretary of War to build and operate military installations where Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans would be imprisoned for the duration of the war. The order doesn’t specify which Americans would be interned, but uses the term ‘alien enemies’; given that at the time the U.S. was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out who the intended prisoners would be. Interestingly, or perhaps not, only Americans of Japanese descent were interned in large camps. A total of about 14,000 people of German or Italian descent were interned.
Of the Japanese Americans interned, about 70% were U.S. citizens. Many more would have been, but for the fact that Japanese-born immigrants to the U.S. (Issei) were by law forbidden to take U.S. citizenship despite having no loyalty to Japan. Their American-born children (Nisei) were, of course, American citizens, eligible to be drafted into the military and fight for the country that had interned their families.
Manzanar is one of the internment camps. Located in the eastern Sierra just off Highway 395 in the Owens Valley in southern California, it sits in a most glorious location. Even today it is hours away from any type of city, but definitely worth the drive to visit. I learned a lot at the visitor center, which is probably the best one I’ve ever been to. We were there for over three hours, learning about the lives of the people interned at Manzanar.
The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Eight guard towers (built, ironically, by Japanese craftsmen) were manned by military police. The fencing and most of the guard towers are gone now. At some point after the camp was dismantled, most of the buildings were removed to other locations. There isn’t much remaining on the site, but what is there is crammed full of information and artifacts from the people who lived there.
Manzanar housed ~10,000 internees, most from California and Washington, plus civilian and military families. Internees were stuffed into 504 barracks organized into 36 blocks. Each block, home to 200-400 internees, contained 14 barracks, a mess hall, men’s and women’s latrines, and a laundry room. There were also school buildings, a Buddhist temple and a Buddhist church, housing for military and civilian residents (built of much better quality than the barracks for internees, with indoor plumbing, solid walls, and insulation). Within the barracks there was no privacy. Seven or eight people, who could be family members or complete strangers, lived in a 20-by-25 foot room, or ‘apartment’. For each room, the government provided cots with straw mattresses, blankets, an oil stove for heat, and a single hanging light bulb. The restored exhibits in Block 14 are much better lit now than they were when people were interned here.
When internees began arriving at Manzanar, the barracks were built of wood covered with tar paper–no insulation or even sealant between the boards of the walls and floor. This construction was woefully inadequate for the frigid winters and blazing hot summers of the high desert, and provided no protection from the wind that blows year-round and the dust that it carries. Dust storms were very common, and internees would hunker down for the worst of the storm and then sweep out the dust. The barracks were eventually reinforced with real walls and some degree of insulation, but linoleum wasn’t installed on the floors until late 1942.
The internees were very resourceful people who did a remarkable job of making an extremely unpleasant situation as bearable as possible. Many were craftsmen, and they built furniture from whatever they could get their hands on. Fruit packing crates provided lumber that was built into tables, chairs, and cabinets.
There’s another bank of five toilets on the opposite side of the white partition. Imagine waiting in line with dozens of people, many suffering from diarrhea due to the unfamiliar diet and stress, for the chance to use a toilet with nine other strangers in such close proximity. This lack of privacy in latrines was cited by many residents as one of the greatest hardships of life at Manzanar.
Internees ate all of their meals in the block mess hall. At first internees would venture from block to block searching for the best chef in the camp, but eventually the authorities cracked down on such wandering and forced internees to eat in their own block.
Meal prep began well before dawn and continued through the evening. Meal times were stringently scheduled throughout the day. Kitchen scraps were used to feed hogs, and an on-site chicken ranch provided eggs. Eventually chefs were provided with the materials to make tofu and miso, which were used to make more palatable meals for the internees. Mess halls also served as social areas and often hosted movies, dances, or meetings.
Japanese craftsmanship is evident in the tools used by the chefs. Internees built this baker’s table, and also the massive steaming basket on the industrial stove.
Exhibits at the Manzanar visitor center include recordings of internees recollecting their experiences in the camp. In many ways the internees tried and succeeded at making life as normal as possible. There were two schools, one for younger children and a high school. An on-site hospital was run by one of the woman internees who was a physician; she was extremely insistent on cleanliness throughout the camp and that all residents receive inoculations against disease. Couples were married and babies were born. Kids played the all-American games of baseball and basketball, even against other high schools that came to Manzanar. The Manzanar teams were never allowed to compete at other schools, though.
The internees at Manzanar must have been fully aware of the irony of their situation. They were prisoners of the U.S. government, their property and businesses seized, their rights stripped away. The worst of the indignities, in my opinion, was the loyalty questionnaire. Its purpose was, ostensibly, to determine who were the ‘loyal’ Japanese Americans who could be safely released from the camp to states in the interior of the country. Questions 27 and 28 were especially problematic. They were worded slightly differently for men and women, but the overall gist is the same.
Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
Question 27 was problematic because if a man answered ‘yes’, he could conceivably be drafted into duty and have to fight against his ancestral homeland, where he may still have family residing. Some men answered ‘no’ for this reason and were deemed disloyal as a result; they were segregated from their families and sent to even more strict camps.
Question 28 was problematic for more subtle and insidious reasons. Many Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants) were insulted by the implication that they had any loyalty to Japan or the Japanese Emperor. For Issei, who were denied U.S. citizenship, a ‘yes’ answer could leave them without a country. Recognizing the difficulty for Issei, the WRA (War Relocation Authority) did revise Question 28 to read as follows: Will you swear to abide by the laws of the United States and to take no action which would in anyway interfere with the war effort of the United States?
As a native Californian, I feel I should have known more about Manzanar and the role it played in our country’s history. The gathering and imprisonment of Japanese Americans for no reason other than their Japanese-ness was misguided and, as it turns out, unnecessary. None of the Japanese American internees at Manzanar were ever found to have committed any act of treason, sabotage, or disloyalty towards the United States. I see similar attitudes in recent attempts to close our borders and separate immigrant children from their parents, and fear that those in power who most need to learn the lessons of Manzanar will choose to remain ignorant. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I leave you with this image of the basketball court at Manzanar. Kids shooting hoops in the afternoon sun–how much more American can you get? But that fence. It gives me the creeps. What does this image say to you?
The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn’t very long, but in its course it has everything a river should have. It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down a while, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against banks where crayfish live. In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in and for fishermen to wander in. . . . It’s everything a river should be.
— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Every Spring semester when I teach my Ecology class, I try to develop a new field trip activity, or modify an existing one. Some activities I’ll probably always keep, either because they are really popular with the students or (more likely ‘and’) because I think they are good learning experiences, but I can also swap out some of the others if better options come along. There’s also some fine-tuning that occurs along the way, as I tweak things to improve what I hope is already a good field trip. As much fun as it is to play outside instead of being stuck in a classroom, the point of the field trips is to learn something about ecology–a new habitat, current research in particular fields of study, challenges to restoration and conservation, and the like. Since citizen science has become the catch phrase du jour in the first fifth of the 21st century, I feel that it is important to give students opportunities to participate in some of the science activities available to the wider community.
All of which explains why the students and I made the hour-long trip down to a location called Garland Ranch, on the Carmel River. Back in the fall I heard of a new project starting up in Monterey County, to monitor water quality along the Carmel River. The project, called Watershed Guardians, is operated from the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. Its goal is to protect steelhead trout in the river by measuring parameters that indicate suitability for the various life history stages of the fish. Like many programs of its kind, Watershed Guardians also has a secondary goal of getting students as young as middle-schoolers out of the classroom and into the field to do some real science. The two goals converge quite nicely, as a big part of the learning experience for the students is developing an understanding ownership of their local river and watershed. Hopefully that sense of ownership evolves into one of responsibility and stewardship. And it is a well-known adage that one way to get adults to care about something is to get their kids to care about it first, so all of these citizen science programs directed at school-age children have the benefit of attracting the attention of people old enough to vote and direct policy decisions. Win-win-win!
Our guide for the day was Matt, who works at the PGMNH and led the teacher training session I attended last fall. He met us at Garland Ranch, where we divided the class into four groups. Matt had arrived with two pairs of backpacks, each pair consisting of one light and one dark. The light and dark backpacks contained equipment and kits for different suites of tests. Each group of students would start with one backpack, either light or dark, and then swap with a different group when finished. That way every group ran all of the tests: pH, temperature, turbidity, DO (dissolved oxygen), alkalinity, and salinity. Some of the tests were quite simple, and others were more complicated.
The four sampling sites at the Garland Ranch location were close together near the vehicle bridge. We’ve had a lot of rain this winter and the river has been running high. As a result a lot of the sand had been washed away, making the beach fairly steep and rather narrow. To make matters even more difficult, the poison oak has been extremely crafty–its bare sticks are everywhere, looking totally innocent, encroaching on trails and twined around trees. It took some attention to make sure I didn’t brush up against any of it while moving up and down the beach.
The final step in the program is for the students to enter their data into the Watershed Guardians database. The whole point of the program is for these data to be shared publicly for all to use. It’s important for students to see the activity through to the end and to know that the work they did will actually be going somewhere. We’ll take care of that task next week!
The other day my students and I lucked out with the weather and managed to get in a full day of exploring a former military base. Fort Ord, on Monterey Bay near the small city of Marina, was an Army base until it was closed in 1994. Since then, most of the land (~14,600 acres) has been designated the Fort Ord National Monument, administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Smaller portions were transferred to the surrounding cities, the campus of CSU Monterey Bay, the state park system, and the University of California’s Natural Reserve system. Our guide for the day, Joe, is the reserve manager for the Fort Ord Natural Reserve, and had arranged for us to meet with researchers working at both sites that we visited. It really was a fantastic learning opportunity for all of us.
The Fort Ord National Monument (FONM) came into being in 2012–thank you, President Obama! Most of the monument is public land, with miles of trails used to hikers, bicyclists, and horseback riders. The monument is also home to the California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense), the central California population of which is federally threatened. The first person we met on our field trip was a guy named Robert, who is a graduate researcher working on conservation of the tiger salamanders. Robert showed us some artificial vernal pools that he’s using in his research.
The 18 pools are about 10 meters in diameter, lined with an impermeable layer, and were allowed to fill with natural rainwater. Robert’s plan is to seed them with salamander larvae and record how they survive and disperse from the pools. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but it’s Robert’s story to tell, not mine.
We did get to help Robert check the pitfall traps, which are arranged in pairs on each side of the fence surrounding each pool. Each trap is a small bucket set into the ground to be level with the surface. The lid is mounted on wooden legs and sits above the trap, to keep it from filling with water. Animals crawling along the fence will fall into the bucket. Robert collects data on the animals trapped and then releases them unharmed.
The tiger salamanders are all underground at this time of year so there were none in the traps. The students did, however, find a pair of western toads (Anaxyrus boreas) in one of the traps. They were in amplexus, which is what herpetologists call the mating position of frogs and toads: the male clasps the female around her body, ideally positioned to fertilize the female’s eggs as she lays them.
The pair of amorous toads were released into one of the ponds, where they swam off together, still in amplexus. Their offspring will be born into the pond as tadpoles, along with those of the chorus frogs, the red-legged frogs, and hopefully not too many bullfrogs. Incidentally, herpetologists use the term ‘tadpole’ to refer only to the larvae of frogs and toads; Robert calls the larvae of his study salamanders just ‘larvae’.
We ventured over to the Fort Ord Natural Reserve (FONR), where we ate our lunch in a clearing surrounded by coast live oaks and coastal scrub. FONR is one of five natural reserves managed by UC Santa Cruz as an outdoor classroom and teaching lab. School groups ranging from elementary school to university levels visit FONR to learn about the natural environment, often for the very first time.
FONR sits on an ancient sand dune, and all of the vegetation has had to adapt to difficult growing conditions. The soil is almost entirely sand and doesn’t hold water at all. The wind picks up just about every afternoon and blows in salt from the ocean; these winds can be quite fierce even without the salt. The sand itself gets blown around, making an unstable substrate. As a result, plants that would otherwise grow tall are stunted here. Take, for example, the coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia). In places that are more sheltered from the wind, they are tall and majestic, even as they continue their meandering growth form. At FONR they are much shorter and more closely resemble the other scrub plants than actual trees.
After lunch we heard from Dani, a UCSC undergraduate student studying horned lizards (Phrynosoma sp.). The lizards are very well adapted to this environment. They live in sand, and have flattened bodies so they can hide on top of the sand and become practically invisible. Like the tiger salamanders the horned lizards are underground now. They should emerge in the next couple of months. This is one that we saw last May, when Joe invited last year’s class to visit the Reserve on a Saturday, after our planned field trip was cancelled due to rain.
In early March the plants were starting to bloom. One of the earliest bloomers is this delightful plant called ‘footsteps of spring’; its real name is Sanicula arctopoides. They look like small blotches of yellow spray paint against the ground. And when you see several of them scattered on the trail, you really understand their common name.
There were, of course, no horned lizards to be seen. We did, however, hike the reserve, and Joe showed us some of the endemic and/or endangered plants that live there. That’s Joe, in the front of the group here:
Fort Ord Natural Reserve 2019-03-08
Our last stop at the end of the field trip was at a location where the Army used to work on fire suppression. They did this by dumping various flammable items and fuels on the ground, lighting them on fire, and putting them out. This activity resulted in groundwater and soil contamination, which Army contractors have been working to clean up for 20 years now. Currently the site is where Robert is raising his tiger salamander larvae in raised ponds; he will eventually release the larvae into the artificial pools that we saw earlier in the day.
Each of those ponds is filled with natural rain water and contains a small screened tub into which Robert placed 10 salamander eggs. The larvae, after they hatch and have used up all of their yolk reserves, feed on whatever zooplankton have sprung up in the ponds–a quick glance showed that copepods, ostracods, and insect larvae had already taken up residence. The idea is that the salamander larvae will escape from their tubs into the pool at large, which will give them lots of room to grow up.
In a very real sense, this field trip ended where it started. Things don’t always work out this nicely, and my Type A personality is pleased at both the symmetry and the closure. Because these field trips are necessarily snapshots of what is happening at a particular moment in a particular place, it can sometimes be difficult to connect them to the real world. This week, though, I feel that my students got the whole story, or at least the entire outline of it. This visit to FONM and FONR may very well be my favorite field trip of the class, because I learned so much about things that are new to me. Thank you, Joe, for arranging such an amazing day for us!
Over the long holiday weekend a little over a week ago we drove up the coast from Morro Bay back to Santa Cruz and stopped at Piedras Blancas to visit the elephant seals. At this time of year the breeding season is over and most of the seals have returned to sea. The adult females gave birth in late December or early January, were mated soon after, fasted for a month while they nursed a growing pup, and then abandoned said pup on the beach to resume the aquatic phase of their life. Same for the adult males, minus the birth and nursing part, of course. Oh, and most of the males didn’t get to breed, either. Suffice it to say that the adult elephant seals have more or less abandoned the beach for now.
Although there were still a lot of seals on the beach, much of the real estate was unoccupied. Contrast this to the same beach in November 2015, as the seals were starting to arrive for that breeding season:
Elephant seal pups have a tough life. They are born in the dead of winter, on exposed coasts. While they are very young, one of the pups’ greatest mortality risks is being run over and trampled to death by the adult males that are fighting for seniority and the right to mate with a harem of females. The moms do their best to fend off rampaging males, but the alphas are so much larger that they just run over anybody in their way. At this point in their life an elephant seal pup’s main priority is to eat. They nurse almost constantly on milk that is about 50% fat. Pups are born wrinkled, with a lot of loose skin, but they soon fill out and take on the stereotypical look of fat sausages.
After four weeks of intensive nursing, a pup’s life changes drastically. Its mother abandons it on the beach and returns to the sea to begin feeding again and restoring its much-depleted body stores. Remember, she has been nursing a pup and fasting for about a month and a half! Her pup is thus forcibly weaned, because she just leaves and doesn’t come back. Researchers refer to these abandoned pups as weaners.
Most of the seals on the beach in late February are weaners. They will stay on the beach for another two months or so. They have to wait until they molt from their soft baby coat into a more adult coat that will better insulate them in the cold water. And after they molt they have to learn how to swim. They’ll make short forays into the surf and paddle around for a bit, learning how to maneuver their bodies in the water, and then return to land to rest. In the meantime they’re not feeding. This is why it is crucial for them to pack on as much weight during the four weeks that they get to nurse. Attaining that ‘sausage’ look is directly related to a weaner’s probability of a success launch into the ocean.
But not everybody is a weaner. There are also some subadults on the beach. They, of course, swim perfectly well and can head back out to sea whenever they want. The subadults will also need to molt, but that doesn’t happen until the early summer.
With the breeding season over, things will be quiet at the seal rookeries at Piedras Blancas and Año Nuevo. Both sites will get frantic again in December, when the adults return to land and the next reproductive cycle begins.
A week ago today, on Valentine’s Day, I accompanied two students from the Natural History Club to Seacliff State Beach. Catie and Ryan, on behalf of the NHC, want to take charge of a now-empty glass display case at the visitor center and turn it into an exhibit of some sort. I became an official faculty sponsor of the NHC this semester. During the meeting as we were filling out the paperwork, I had to undergo an initiation rite: the club officers told me I had to present my 5 best bird calls. This is easy enough to do when I’m relaxed at home watching birds, but having to do it on the spot with no warning effectively drove everything I knew about birds right out of my head. Fortunately I was able to pull myself together and give them a California quail, a golden-crowned sparrow, a flicker, a chickadee, and an Anna’s hummingbird. The easiest one, the acorn woodpecker (‘waka-waka-waka’) never even occurred to me.
A few months ago, Joseph, the head interpretive ranger at Seacliff, showed me the display case and asked if I knew of a group of students who would like to do something with it. I told him I’d ask the NHC if they’d be interested in taking on a project like this. It would be good outreach for the club and get their name and branding out into the greater community. Fortunately they jumped at the chance, and Catie and Ryan volunteered to come to Seacliff with me to meet Joseph and discuss his and their plans for the case.
Shortly after our arrival at the visitor center, a woman burst through the door and said, “We can’t get out! A tree fell across the road!” And sure enough, a tree had indeed fallen across the road:
Catie, Ryan, and I figured it would be a while before the road was cleared and we could leave, so we might as well take a walk on the beach. It had been a very stormy week, with wind, heavy rain, and even snow in the area. Down at sea level we were fortunate to escape much of the really bad stuff, but the pounding rain and big swell had done some erosion damage to the shoreline and moved tons of sand down the coast, resulting in steep beaches. This is a normal phenomenon that happens during winter storms, but the extent of the sand removal was unusual even for winter.
For one thing, this structure was partially exposed:
We didn’t know what this thing was. There were other parts of it poking out of the sand, too. When we got back to the visitor center Joseph told us that this object is part of the original seawall, dating to the 1920s. It was allowed to crumble into disrepair and be reclaimed by the beach, and only rarely ever sees the light of day.
We saw other interesting things on the beach, too. Dead birds are interesting, right? Of course they are!
The removal of so much sand from the beach bared a lot of rocks that had been buried underneath. Many of them were fossil rocks! Catie was pretty excited about them. And she certainly was right, because aren’t these super cool?
In addition to things long dead (fossils) and recently dead (murre), we found the results of recent spawning. The Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is a small schooling fish with a wide geographic distribution in the North Pacific. It had been an important fishery species but in the 1990s the fishery collapsed. Since then, with managed fishing, the species has been making a slow recovery.
Herring may spawn throughout the year, but the major spawning events occur at the beginning of the calendar year, when adults venture to shallow water in protected bays and estuaries. Females prefer to lay their eggs on eelgrass and other vegetation near the shore. According to The Lost Anchovy, the herring had been spawning in various locations in San Francisco Bay throughout January 2019.
We saw several clusters of what I think are herring eggs washed up on the beach at Seacliff. Some of the clusters were still wet, but without access to my dissecting scope I couldn’t determine whether they were alive. Probably not. Herring eggs are heavily preyed on by birds, so in retrospect it was surprisingly to see so many that hadn’t been eaten.
All in all it was a great afternoon for Catie, Ryan, and me. We hadn’t planned on getting stuck behind a fallen tree, but if you’re going to get stuck behind a fallen tree there are many worse places than a state park in California. None of us had to get back to campus at any particular time so we were free to meander as the fancy struck us. While we were at it we also did a mini beach clean-up, picking up as much trash as we could. That is always a depressing endeavor, but every piece picked up is one piece removed from the environment, and that can’t be a bad thing. Some leavings were never meant to wind up on the beach.
Over the holiday weekend I was in Morro Bay for a surprise 80th birthday party–not mine! The party on Friday evening was a huge success (none of the guests let the cat out of the bag), the birthday girl was completely taken by surprise, and a good time was had by all. The weather was cold and sporadically stormy the entire weekend, but the clear spells between storm squalls were gorgeous and almost a little warm.
Since it wasn’t raining on Saturday morning, we went out to Morro Rock to look for peregrine falcons. There are two (I think) pairs of falcons nesting on the Rock, one of which nests on the side of the rock that is visible to people. This is nesting season, and Morro Rock has a lot of ledges that make good nesting platforms. Peregrines don’t make a nest, really. They lay eggs and incubate them on ledge high up on structures–rock cliffs, buildings, bridges–that dominate the landscape. We did see one peregrine way up on the rock, identifiable through binoculars but far enough away that I couldn’t get a decent photo. This is the best I could do:
So not much success with the falcons, although I could at least document that they were there. Turning away from the Rock I was able to watch a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) go after and catch and eat a juvenile rockfish! The photos tell the story, so I’ll just post them.
And there you have it! On a day when it was too blustery for human fishers to venture out of the bay, one avian predator had a successful morning. Way to go, bird!
Combine the words “gold” and “California” and you automatically come up with the Gold Rush, don’t you? After all, California is the Golden State. And while that nickname may be to honor the golden hills of summer or the poppies that are the state flower, it may also be a tribute to the discovery of gold in 1848. For better or worse, the Gold Rush initiated rapid development of this area, and California eventually became the 31st state in 1850.
For me, and I suspect for many people, gold is one of the quintessential colors of autumn. Yet here we are in the middle of winter heading towards spring, and I saw a lot of gold in the forest the other day. I had taken my Ecology students to Rancho del Oso for the first field trip of the semester and set them loose to saunter through the woods and practice noticing (and recording) patterns in nature. Incidentally, I have adopted the word ‘saunter’ as a replacement for ‘hike’ for most of my own outdoor adventures. I have always been a slow hiker, and felt that in order to keep up with other people I had to miss seeing what was going on around me. Not to mention the fact that I’m always stopping to take pictures or examine some weird thing on the ground, or in the trees, or wherever. By giving myself permission to saunter along at the pace at which nature occurs, I have time to slow down and observe more carefully, and come away with a much better understanding of the world I’ve passed through. It certainly doesn’t work for everybody, but I’ve learned that the journey is as important as the final destination, and that has made hiking sauntering much more enjoyable for me.
So, back to the gold. One of the very first thing I noticed when we hit the trail was this brilliant yellow-orange slime mold growing on twigs on the forest floor. This area is a mixed forest of hardwoods (mostly oaks) and various pines. I can’t be certain what these sticks hosting the slime mold are, but they may be some kind of pine.
Slime molds are very strange organisms that don’t fit into any of the major eukaryotic kingdoms of life (Animalia, Plantae, or Fungi). The current taxonomic position of slime molds is up for debate and far from settled, so I won’t go into it here. Like fungi, slime molds feed on dead and decaying plant matter and are part of the decomposer niche of organisms. Also like fungi, most of a slime mold’s life is microscopic. In the case of fungi most of the body, called a mycelium, is a network of extremely thin threads called hyphae. The mycelium for most fungi is underground and thus invisible to the casual observer. What we call a mushroom is only the reproductive fruiting body, which pushes to the surface so that spores can be released into the air.
For most of the time, or at least as long as food is plentiful, a slime mold exists as single amoeba-like or flagellated cells that feed on bacteria. These cells are haploid, containing only one set of chromosomes. Sexual reproduction (labelled SYNGAMY in the figure below) occurs when an amoeba-like cell encounters a compatible flagellated cell. I would also be willing to bet that the amoeboid and flagellated cells are triggered to find each other and initiate syngamy when food is scarce, as is the case with many animals.
The result of syngamy in a slime mold is a zygote which develops into a macroscopic stage called the plasmodium. The plasmodium undergoes nuclear division multiple times but cytokinesis doesn’t occur, resulting in a large cell bounded by a single plasma membrane and containing many nuclei. In animal tissues we describe this condition as syncytial; I don’t know if the same word is used by slime mold specialists, but the concept applies.
One of the things that makes slime molds truly bizarre is their method of locomotion. Using time-lapse videography, you can actually see how the contents of the cell swash back and forth in a process called cytoplasmic streaming. The net result of all this cytoplasmic streaming is the physical movement of the plasmodium into new territory. It’s a process much easier to understand if you can see it, so here’s a video from KQED’s Deep Look series:
As with many fungi, slime molds are difficult to identify if you don’t see the fruiting body. The slime mold that we encountered the other day was an immature plasmodium that hadn’t yet produced fruiting bodies. The experts who took a look at my observation on iNaturalist agreed that it is likely Leocarpus fragilis, based on location and time of year, but they cannot be certain.
Continuing with our theme of gold, we saw several small blotches of golden jelly growing on tree trunks. These were the Tremella fungi. There are two species of golden Tremella in our region, T. mesenterica and T. aurantia. It seems that differentiation between the species depends on examination of microscopic structures, so I am unable to tell which species this little blob is. However, I will point out that the species epithet aurantia means ‘gold’, so I really hope that’s the name for this blob.
Saving the best for last! Moving away from the creek and into the more enclosed forest we entered the realm of everybody’s favorite terrestrial pulmonate gastropod, the banana slug. They were out in full force, chowing down on mushrooms and sliming up the foliage. One of my students picked up a banana slug and let it crawl on her hand for a while, but to my knowledge nobody licked one. All of the banana slugs that I saw were bright yellow with no brown or gray blotches, so I conclude that they were either Ariolimax californicus (the so-called Peninsula banana slug) or A. dolichophallus (the Santa Cruz banana slug, also the school mascot for UC Santa Cruz).
But this is where things get interesting. According to their mitochondrial DNA these two species, A. californicus and A. dolichophallus, do not have overlapping ranges. And the dividing line between them is Rancho del Oso, with A. californicus occurring to the north and A. dolichophallus occurring to the south. So, if Rancho del Oso is the magic line defining the ranges of these two species, what species are the slugs at Rancho del Oso? I think that answering this question will require a much finer scale study. For now, I’m just going to call them Ariolimax sp., because that seems to be the safest option until things get sorted out.
I’ve written about banana slugs before, but I’ve never had a chance to photograph them doing the actual nasty. Luckily for me and the students, banana slugs have no shame. I think the entire class got to get a close look and photos of this copulating pair:
This perfect yin-yang symbol is the result of how banana slugs align themselves during copulation. Each hermaphroditic slug has a genital open behind the head on the right side of the body. There’s a lot of kinky stuff that happens during banana slug sex, including the chewing off of one partner’s penis, but suffice to say that one animal’s penis is inserted into the vagina of the other and, well, we don’t know how quickly sperm is transferred, but the animals remain locked together for several hours. Yes, HOURS. Ahem. The penis chewing thing doesn’t happen every time slugs mate, and biologists are still trying to figure out the function for this unusual behavior.
We have another several weeks (hopefully!) of rainy weather, so there will be lots of time to explore the world of fungi, slime molds, and banana slugs. The combination of rain and lengthening days creates great conditions to revel in the gold of a California winter in the forest.
The spring semester started this week, which means that every Friday I’ll be taking my Ecology students on field trips. Yesterday’s field trip, the first of the class, was to Rancho del Oso and Waddell Beach. Every year I’ve taken the students to these sites to visit two different habitats: forest and beach. And all we have to do to get from one to the other is cross the highway. The beauty of this particular field trip is that it is almost entirely unstructured. My goal is to give the students a chance to spend time outdoors and slow down enough to really observe what’s going on around them. They get to crack open their brand new notebooks and work on their first entries, which can be a little intimidating for them. One suggestion I made was to find a spot to sit quietly, close their eyes, and observe the world using their other senses. Since we humans are such visual creatures, people are always surprised to discover how much they can perceive with their eyes closed.
Getting to do yesterday’s field trip at all wasn’t something to be taken for granted. There are some storm systems working their way through the area. They’re nothing like the polar vortex that has been subjecting the midwest and now the east coast to well-below-freezing temperatures, but are projected to dump a lot of rain and blow like crazy. I’d been keeping an eye on the weather forecast all week, hoping that the rain on Friday would at least hold off until the afternoon so we could do the forest part of our field trip. I figured that if we got to any of the beach stuff after lunch that would be gravy.
Here we are, in the midst of winter, and already there are signs of spring. The willows are starting to leaf out and there was a lot of poison oak putting out leaves, all shiny and dangerous. Fortunately the poison oak is easy to recognize–and avoid–when it has leaves, and hopefully nobody who is allergic was exposed to it.
Of course, one of the best things about the forest in winter is the mycoflora. Rancho del Oso is a good place to see mushrooms and slime molds, and yesterday I saw things that I’d never seen before. Now, I’m not a mycologist by any stretch of the imagination. But I did my best, with the help of Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast and iNaturalist, to identify the ones I saw and managed to take decent photos of. And some remain unidentified. I simply don’t know enough to make more than a very rough guess, which isn’t at all likely to be correct.
When people think of the genus Amanita they think of things like the death cap mushroom (A. phalloides) or A. muscaria, with its iconic white-spotted red cap. But Amanita is a large genus, with many species categorized into several sections. Not all of the Amanita mushrooms are poisonous, and some are edible if prepared properly. This one is a rather nondescript brown, but based on photos in MotRC, Amanita fruiting bodies come in various shades of white, gray, yellow, brown, and russet. It’s going to take me a lot of time and practice to begin getting these mushrooms straight!
I’ve always been drawn to the various shelf or bracket fungi because their morphology is so un-mushroomlike. Most of the bracket fungi we have here are polypores, meaning that the fruiting body releases spores through holes on the bottom surface rather than the more familiar gills you see on mushrooms. The very common and variable turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) grows on many host species is a polypore. Its congener, T. betulina, however, has gills. The rather paradoxical common name of T. betulina is gilled polypore, which of course doesn’t really make sense.
Of course, I forgot to look at the bottom surface of this bracket fungus, so I don’t know which species of Trametes it is. Naturalist fail!
This bizarre mushroom, which looks like a miniature bok choy that is black instead of green, is an elfin saddle in the genus Helvella.
According to MotRC there are two species of Helvella that co-occur in this area and can be difficult to distinguish without genetic analysis. Helvella vespertina (western black elfin saddle) is associated with coniferous trees and fruits in autumn and winter. Helvella dryophila (oak-loving elfin saddle) is usually found in with oaks and produces fruiting bodies in winter and spring. Because we saw this mushroom in a mixed forest in the middle of winter, I’m going to play it safe and stick with Helvella sp.
These red-capped mushrooms are a species of Russula, I think. It looks like they’ve been munched on, perhaps by banana slugs. More on that in the next post!
There are some very bizarre fungi out there! Some of them have fantastic fruiting bodies, and some are much more blobby. The jelly fungi are very aptly named, and are the blobbiest. We saw lots of little bright orange blobs growing on hardwoods. These are called witch’s butter, known to mycologists as Tremella aurantia:
Despite the common name, T. aurantia is edible but apparently not appealing. So eating it won’t make you sick, but you may still wish you hadn’t eaten it. When it comes to mushrooms, that’s definitely not the worst possible outcome. Given my own lack of expertise with mushrooms I’m one of the last people to tell you which ones to eat. But I do know enough not to eat anything that I find in the field. Some day I hope to go mushroom foraging with someone who really knows what he or she is doing, and whose judgment I trust. Until then, I’ll continue to enjoy mushrooms where they grow and not concern myself with issues of edibility. The mushrooms certainly do deserve to be appreciated for their appearance and the ecological relationships they form with the plants and animals of the forest.
Among photographers and those who watch the sky, last night’s lunar eclipse was an event to stay up late for. In much of California the latest storm left the sky cloudy, but I was lucky to have pretty good viewing for most of the eclipse. The moon was behind clouds at the beginning of the eclipse and for most of the period of totality, though, so I didn’t get any pictures of those times.
I did, however, take a series of photos of what I could see. Here they are, in chronological order. All photos were taken with my new camera, a Nikon D750 combined with the Nikkor 300mm f/4 prime lens.
At this point the clouds came back and it started to rain. I didn’t wait for the eclipse to end, as I wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway. When I got up this morning the skies had cleared, and since the moon would still be full I sat on the front porch in my pajamas and bathrobe and took this final shot.
And there you have it–my series of eclipse photos! I learned a lot while shooting and processing these. I am embarrassed at how long it took me to figure out how to create this montage:
