Back in mid-December I collected a couple of small intertidal fishes and brought them back to the lab for observation and identification. Then the female laid a batch of eggs, which I’ve been watching ever since. Today the eggs are 15 days old. They are developing pretty quickly, I think, at ambient seawater temperatures of 12-13.5°C. Some of the changes can be seen with the naked eye, while others are visible only with some magnification.
Here’s a timeline of development for the first couple of weeks in the earliest life of bald sculpins.
Day 4: The egg mass is clean and the eggs are clear and pink. The very young embryo can be faintly seen as a paler pink strip lying on top of the darker pink yolk, which fills most of the internal volume of the egg. There are also some oil droplets associated with but not part of the yolk.
Day 10: Today the eyes look more like fish eyes and are taking on a silvery sheen. Black pigment spots are forming along the dorsal surface of the embryos, and the yolk is noticeably smaller. The eggs are starting to look dirty to the naked eye, due to the darkening eyes and pigment spots.
Today was the first day I could see their heartbeats! It was surprisingly difficult to capture the beating hearts with the camera.
Day 15: Some of the eggs have died, becoming opaque and hard. A few have broken open and are empty. The overall color of the egg mass is paler, as the larvae are consuming their yolks. The black pigment spots are becoming more prominent and seem to be concentrated on the top of the head.
They look like baby fish now! They’re still flipping around inside their eggs and I think may be responding to light. They don’t seem to like it when I shine the light on them.
I’ve put together a short video of the eggs at various stages of development so far.
Northern California is currently being pummeled by a meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river. The storms produced by these “rivers” tend to be warm and can be very wet, such as the Pineapple Express storms that carry atmospheric moisture from Hawai’i to California. The weather station on the roof of our house has recorded 4.26 inches of rain over the past three days, and more will come in the next few days. In addition to the rain, the atmospheric river has brought very strong winds, gusting to 40+ mph. Combined with the saturated ground, winds like this can uproot trees and utility poles. So far we haven’t lost power, but are prepared with candles, firewood, and extra water. . . just in case.
Data from our weather station in Santa Cruz, CA. 8 January 2017
I am not a meteorologist, and this is not a blog about weather. I mention all the rain because it brought out the worms. Earthworms, to be more precise.
Earthworms are oligochaete worms in the phylum Annelida, which also contains the polychaetes (marine segmented worms) and hirudineans (leeches). The body plan for annelids is based on segmentation, or metamerism. Let me explain what that means.
Imagine a round water balloon. Now imagine two sets of rubber bands encircling the balloon along perpendicular axes. You’d have something like this:
where the green and red lines indicate different muscle types. Remember that we’re discussing a three-dimensional object here. We’ll call the red lines circular muscles, and the green lines longitudinal muscles. Now picture in your mind what happens when the circular muscles contract; how does this change the shape of the water balloon? What happens when the longitudinal muscles contract?
An annelid’s body consists of many fluid-filled segments, each with its own set of circular and longitudinal muscles. The segments are arranged along the anterior-posterior axis, with the head being located at the anterior end.
Adjacent segments are separated by a layer of tissue called a septum (anatomically speaking, a septum is any tissue that divides a cavity into two or more smaller spaces; think of the septum that divides your nasal cavity into left and right nostrils). An incidental amount of fluid may escape from one segment into the next, but for the most part they function as separate water balloons. Water isn’t compressible but is deformable, so contracting muscles around one part of the water balloon simply displaces that water to another part, and the balloon’s shape changes. Because each segment in our worm has its own complement of body wall musculature, its shape can be modified independently from that of its neighbors.
Rather than draw up another pedagogical worm, I’ll show you a real one. As I mentioned earlier all the recent rains have brought the earthworms out from their burrows. I was out and about myself this afternoon, and took pictures. This is the anterior (front) end of a worm. Not much of a head, is there? Earthworms are poorly cephalized, which makes sense when you consider that they live underground: an animal that spends almost all of its time in complete darkness has no need for eyes, and having sensory organs hanging off the body would impede its burrowing activities.
That pale pink apparently unsegmented bit of worm is the clitellum, a glandular structure used in reproduction. Another feature you can see is the difference in size among all the segments. Some of them are much wider than others. These are the localized deformations. The anterior-most segments are the widest; which type of muscle is contracted in this part of the worm? Which muscles are contracted in the segments immediately in front of the clitellum?
The annelid body plan originally evolved to facilitate burrowing through soft substrates. The fluid in each segment provides a stiffness against which the body wall muscles can contract, and the separation of adjacent segments allows the aforementioned localized deformations. An earthworm burrows by making its front end long and pointy (by contracting the circular muscles), jabbing it into the soil, swelling those anteriormost segments (by relaxing circular muscles and contracting longitudinal muscles), and pulling the rest of the body along. Next time you have a live earthworm at your disposal, watch how it moves either on top of or through the ground.
As you may imagine, while an earthworm’s body volume remains constant, its shape varies greatly. This has consequences for internal anatomy as well. For example, an earthworm’s gut is essentially a straight tube within a tube; it doesn’t have distinct compartments or side chambers as ours does. But it can’t really be straight, can it? If the overall body shape of an individual worm can change as much as we see in a burrowing earthworm, it follows that the internal morphology must be equally plastic. This means that the blood vessels and major nerve cord remain functional whether the worm is stretched out or scrunched up. Kinda hard to imagine that in the body of any vertebrates.
I am fortunate to live in a place of great natural beauty. While the Pacific Ocean dominates much of the landscape, we are also partially surrounded by mountains. I grew up in the flatness of the San Joaquin Valley, a couple hours’ drive from both the sea and the Sierra Nevada but not near enough for either to have any appreciable effect on daily life. When I first moved here from the Sacramento area to start graduate school, I felt claustrophobic because I had been used to looking out in any direction and being able to see for miles around. I’ve long since grown accustomed to the fact that the only miles-long vistas we get are over the ocean and have come to appreciate the proximity of the mountains.
Here we are ideally situated so that ocean and mountain forest are close enough that both can be explored in a single day. And in fact, I did just that the other day, on Boxing Day. The elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) breeding season has started, and I wanted to go up to Año Nuevo State Park to see them. Alas, this idea didn’t occur to me soon enough to purchase tickets for the docent-led tour to the elephant seal reserve area, so we didn’t get close to the seals. But it was a gorgeously clear day and the scenery was every bit as spectacular as you’d expect from this part of the coast.
Año Nuevo Island lies a short distance to the southwest off Año Nuevo Point and is reachable only by kayak. The island is a marine wildlife refuge closed to the public, uninhabited by any humans except scientists. Elephant seals, northern fur seals (a type of otariid, or eared seal), rhinoceros auklets, western gulls, and Brandt’s cormorants all breed on the island. California sea lions don’t breed on the island, but several thousand use it as a haul-out site throughout the year. During the elephant seal pupping season white sharks come to the waters around the island to feed on pups as they learn how to swim.
It is not common for the air to be so clear. Usually there is fog or haze that obscures the buildings. There used to be a lighthouse on the island; the dilapidated tower was pulled down in the early 2000s to safeguard the wildlife. Some of the other buildings–a 19th century residence and foghorn station–are currently used as research facilities.
Even without a ticket for docent-led tour of the elephant seal reserve area, you can hike to the staging area from where the tours depart. The trail passes a freshwater pond that is home to two endangered California herps: The red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) and the San Francisco garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis tetrataenia). Years ago I had a colleague in graduate school who studied the elephant seals up at Año Nuevo. I went in the field with him one day and got to wear the special blue research windbreaker. He told me that before being allowed to drive into the reserve area all of the researchers have to take a driving test that involves not running over plastic snakes that are placed in the road. This is to make sure that the endangered snakes won’t be inadvertently killed.
We ate lunch at a lookout point of the tour staging area. Because the air was so clear we could see quite a way down the coast. Highway 1 as it passes under the cliffs immediately north of the Waddell Beach is visible at the far right edge of the photograph.
After lunch we headed away from the coast and drove up Gazos Creek Road a few miles into the forest. It took all of about 15 minutes to go from beach to redwood forest. How cool is that? Two completely different ecosystems to explore easily within a day. Even the weather was different: sunny and warm at the beach, much cooler and damper among the trees.
Although we were up in the redwoods, this day I was fascinated by all of the moss growing on the trees. We’ve had a decent amount of rain so far, and the forests are satisfyingly wet and squishy. The creek we followed had washed out a bit of the road in a couple of places, and was closed to all traffic about 5 miles from the highway.
We didn’t have a lot of time to poke around in the forest, but since we were in the area we stopped at Rancho del Oso on our way home to visit my favorite tree. Rancho del Oso is at the bottom of Big Basin Redwoods State Park. I take my ecology students there for the first field trip of the semester, because there I can introduce them to two of the ecosystems that define the natural history of Santa Cruz.
My favorite tree is a coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) that lives just off the trail at Rancho del Oso. I love its gnarled branches that grow horizontally at ground level. It is an old, wise tree. Looking through its branches you see into the redwood forest of Big Basin. I normally photograph this tree at a different angle, looking into the forest away from the trail. This day I decided to shoot it from an angle parallel to the trail. I don’t think it’s quite as dramatic from this angle but there’s no denying the magnificence of the tree.
Rancho del Oso is also the downhill terminus of the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail. The entire trail is about 30 miles, and most hikers take two or three days to hike the whole thing. I’m not much of a backpacker but one of the things I’d like to do this spring is the day hike from Big Basin down to Rancho del Oso. Doesn’t that sound like great fun?
In recent years the day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday, a day when retailers across the nation offer fantastic sales in order to separate Americans from their hard-earned cash. I hate shopping even under the best of circumstances, and you couldn’t pay me enough to step foot in a shopping mall on Black Friday. Fortunately, a trio of organizations have put together about the most awesome alternative to Black Friday that I could imagine. They call it Green Friday.
The idea behind Green Friday, as I understand it, is to get people to spend the day after Thanksgiving outdoors enjoying nature instead of fighting over $5 t-shirts at some big department store. The three organizations–Save the Redwoods League; the California State Parks Foundation; and the California State Parks–sponsored some number of free parking passes at the state parks. I have a Golden Poppy pass, which gets me into state parks in northern California and we didn’t need one of the free passes, but I’ve been wanting to go hiking up in Big Basin so I rounded up my husband and a few friends and off we went.
Big Basin Redwoods State Park is the oldest state park in California, established in 1902. It has long been my favorite of the state parks I’ve visited.
I have to say, the Green Friday thing seemed to be working. The park was very crowded, with lots of families. We chose to hike the Sequoia Trail, a 4-mile loop that begins at the park headquarters and goes past Sempervirens falls, a monument to the founders of the park, and a treacherous passage called Slippery Rock. The oldest and tallest redwood trees in the park are seen from the Redwood Loop trail, which we didn’t hike this time. But it is impossible to see any redwood forest, and not feel awed.
The oldest of these trees have outlived multiple human civilizations. It’s humbling to be surrounded by such ancient beings.
The forest floor is shaded by the canopy of the redwood and other tall trees. At this time of year, and especially after a rain, the understory is spectacular with greenery and life. It’s all about the mushrooms. California had four dry winters before last year’s El Niño rains, and so far this autumn has been fairly wet. Well, October was wet; we didn’t have rain in November until last weekend. The fungi have been biding their time, waiting for enough water to fall from the sky before sending up their fruiting bodies. Now, I freely admit that mushroom identification is a major weak spot of mine, so take these names with a grain of salt. But I’m learning! The duff on the ground in the area we hiked was a mixture of redwood needles and leaves from tan oak (Notholithocarpus densiflorus) and California bay laurel (Umbellularia californica). Many mushrooms were growing directly through the duff, while others were growing on living or dead trees.
This so-called coral mushroom is, I think, Ramaria formosa. We saw a few clumps of it right at the beginning of the hike, in this pale orange color. The branching at the tips appears to be more or less dichotomous, and the overall shape and size of the body reminded me of the intertidal rockweed Pelvetiopsis limitata.
These really pretty bracket fungi may be turkey tails (Trametes versicolor). We found lots of them on both dead and living trees. The ones that are brilliant orange and brown I do recognize as turkey tails, but when they’re pale and creamy like these I’m not sure whether or not they’re the same thing.
I was able to identify those strange white things as Clavaria fragilis, or fairy fingers. The mycelium of this fungus lives underground in grasslands and wooded areas; it is described as common in this area, especially during the wetter months. The arrangement of these fruiting bodies in a more or less straight line is interesting and makes me wonder if the mycelium is living in a log buried under the duff. I don’t know what else would cause the mycelium to grow in such a linear fashion.
My favorite mushroom photo of the day was of these LBMs (little brown mushrooms) that were growing out of a downed redwood. The mushrooms themselves are extremely cute, but what I really like about this picture is the bokeh. I’ve become intrigued by the practice of composing and exposing photographs so that the the non-subject matter is deliberately blurred and becomes part of the overall aesthetic quality of the image. I think I’ve noticed it before, but never really thought about how to achieve it. Practicing it is a whole lot of fun, and I think there will be many more photos like this in my future.
Where there are mushrooms there are mushroom predators such as banana slugs. I think we counted about 10 of the bright yellow gastropods on our hike. Alas, none of them were copulating. But one of them was eating a mushroom!
What a great afternoon it was! Given how crowded the park was I’d say that Green Friday was a success. I’d so much rather see people hiking or at least spending time outdoors than shopping for material things. I hope that Green Friday is here to stay!
Several people in the past few days have asked me why the ocean stinks. The answer is simple. The red tide that I documented a month ago is back, and worse than ever. The culprit is the same, but now it is present in even higher numbers. I can’t show you how it smells, but this is how it looks:
The brown discoloration is due to the high concentration of the dinoflagellate Akashiwo sanguinea. Since the marine lab brings water directly from right about where the waves are starting to crest, our water is also full of the cells. Water coming straight from the taps is tinged with brown, and filters clog like crazy. Animal care has been redefined as “flush, brush, and refill,” as in flush tables, brush or spray globs of brown slime off the animals, and refill the tanks. Only with the water coming in brown, the Akashiwo cells start settling out almost immediately.
This latest bloom of A. sanguinea coincides with the first storm of the rainy season, which could be either good or bad. The first rain causes a big influx of nutrients from land into the ocean–this is good for the blooming dinoflagellates because nutrients are fertilizers. But rain storms come from clouds, and the reduction of sunlight would be bad for photosynthetic critters such as Akashiwo. So what’s it going to be?
Akashiwo sanguinea isn’t a toxin-forming species. However, it does form surfactants when the water is agitated, and the surfactant can be irritating.
See all that foam? When a strong breeze picks up the foam you can smell it. Imagine the smell of rotting kelp, perhaps not quite that pungent, combined with a vague hint of sewer. That doesn’t look quite right but it’s the best I can do. Since I can’t share it with you here, you’ll have to go to the beach and smell it for yourself.
People who live in other parts of the world often say that California doesn’t have real seasons. I would argue that we do indeed have seasons, they’re just . . . subtle. Certainly here on the coast the Pacific Ocean moderates weather so that we don’t have to deal with temperature extremes. However, in the higher elevations the changes between seasons are more dramatic.
At this time of year the high Sierra becomes a destination for sightseers and photographers looking for fall colors. For a few weeks the aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) change from their green of summer into glorious golds, oranges, and reds. This year I have finally managed to get to the Lake Tahoe area in October. And, since I’m still in the market for a new camera, it was a great opportunity to test drive another candidate. This time it was the Canon EOS 80D, with an 18-200mm lens.
So, let’s see how it did with the brilliant scenery.
While we were up at Ebbetts Pass I took some video of the aspens, hoping to capture the rustling sound of the trembling leaves. A short way down the hill from this location there is a herd of cows, and their bells are also heard in this video. Confession time: I took this video with my phone.
Eh, okay, I guess. I took a lot of pictures with this camera, but relatively few of them really wowed me. It felt to me that the images straight out of this camera weren’t as sharp as those out of the Nikon D7200. And some of the exposures were off, too. Photography is a function of subject, equipment, and user, with the user being the biggest variable. For me, a decision between these two cameras was based on largely on which one I felt most comfortable with. And in terms of both figuring out how to do things with the equipment and getting good images out of the camera, the D7200 wins hands-down.
That said, the Canon 80D did a great job photographing a hawk I spotted in a snag.
After all was said and done, I didn’t feel that this was the camera for me. Even after working with it for a weekend it never became second nature to just pick up the camera and shoot. I found it much easier to figure out how to do stuff on the Nikon. That, combined with the fact that the images straight out of the Canon weren’t as good, sealed the deal. My grown-up camera will be a Nikon.
When the concept of conservation biology was first introduced in the 1970s, it applied to the species that were disappearing due to deforestation in the tropics. Biologists began to realize that species were going extinct as a direct result of human activity. As conservation science evolved over the decades it has become a multidisciplinary melding of population biology and ecology, economics, and sociology. Quite often the decisions about which species and/or habitats should be conserved are based on human exploitation of some resource. Conservation biology, like every other form of science, costs money, and often funding agencies have an implicit or explicit expectation of economic gain from conservation efforts.
There may also be direct conflicts between conservation activities within a habitat or ecosystem. Take, for example, the beaver and the kokanee salmon, two iconic animals of Taylor Creek. I was up at Lake Tahoe this past weekend, finally able to visit Taylor Creek during the spawning season for the salmon.
As I wrote about earlier, the kokanee is a land-locked sockeye salmon (Onchorhynchus nerka) that migrates from Lake Tahoe into Taylor Creek to spawn; it was introduced as a game fish to the Tahoe basin in the 1940s. It has since become a favorite denizen of Taylor Creek and has spawned a festival all of its own.
The kokanee, like other Pacific salmonids, requires cold, clear water to reproduce successfully. This brings it into direct conflict with Taylor Creek’s other iconic animal, the beaver (Castor canadensis). The beaver’s range historically extended into the Sierra Nevada; however, from the late 19th century into the first decades of the 20th century beavers were viewed as pests and systematically exterminated. As biologists began to understand how beavers affect overall riparian ecosystem health, state and federal agencies re-introduced beavers to the Tahoe basin in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether or not you consider beavers to be native to Taylor Creek, there is no disputing that they are there now.
Beavers, of course, are known for the logging and damming activities. They fell trees, strip off the branches, and use the logs to build dams across rivers. This forms a pond of still water above the dam, where the access to the beavers’ lodge is located. Beavers are herbivores, eating the bark and wood of trees in addition to some aquatic plants. They are nocturnal, but although we returned to Taylor Creek at dusk we did not see any. Evidence of their activities was all around. The phrase “busy as a beaver” is very apt; the dam in the photo above is about twice as tall as it was when I was here in August.
The conflict between the kokanee salmon and the beavers arises because these animals live in the same place but have different requirements for water flow. As I mentioned above, the salmon need cold, clear water. Their eggs will suffocate and die if water temperature is too high, because warm water holds less dissolved oxygen than cold water. Flowing water also helps guide the returning adults to their spawning grounds. Beavers, on the other hand, take active measures to stop or severely restrict flow in the creek. The pond that forms above a beaver dam is very calm and the bottom becomes silty or muddy, the exact opposite of what the salmon need.
Balancing the conservation needs of these popular animals has been a challenge at Taylor Creek. Do you promote the non-native salmon by destroying beaver dams? Or let the beavers do their thing, at the probable expense of the salmon? How much of the decision is due to the fact that beavers are probably native to the Tahoe basin, while the kokanee are undeniably not? And what do Tahoe’s human residents and visitors want more, salmon or beavers?
This year, the strategy has been to leave the dams, but install pipes running through them so that water continues to flow. However, you can see from the photo above that the dam is still holding back about half a vertical meter of water. Plus, as of now no salmon have made it up past the dam; rangers have been seining adult salmon from the creek below the dam and putting them into the stream profile chamber so visitors can see them. Perhaps the salmon are able to spawn in the creek below the dam.
The ecosystem of the Tahoe watershed has been severely affected by the introduction of non-native species. Lake trout, brook trout, rainbow trout, largemouth bass, bluegills, and even goldfish have been released (deliberately or inadvertently) into the lake, and have extirpated the Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki henshawi), the only native salmonid in either Lake Tahoe or Fallen Leaf Lake. The kokanee salmon also falls into this category, and likely competes with the Lahontan cutthroats for food. Recent attempts to re-introduce the Lahontan cutthroat trout have had mixed success. Very interestingly, it appears that the Lahontan cutthroat can move back and forth across beaver dams while the kokanee cannot. Co-evolution, anyone? It seems clear to me that the Lahontan cutthroat trout, which after all shares a long ecological relationship with beavers, is the salmonid that is best adapted for the Taylor Creek ecosystem. As charismatic as the kokanee salmon is, from a biological perspective it really doesn’t belong in Taylor Creek. Perhaps one easy way to restore this ecosystem to a more natural state is to stop removing and damaging beaver dams, and let the kokanee go extinct.
Remember how I said that economics plays a part in conservation? There are several charter fishing companies at Lake Tahoe, all of which have an economic interest in the maintenance of several introduced species in the lake. So in addition to balancing the ecological needs of kokanee and beavers in Taylor Creek, conservation efforts must also address the economic needs of local businesses. These are challenges that we will continue to face all over the planet if we want to live more harmoniously with the natural world.
At the marine lab we have many seawater tanks and tables in various shapes sizes. For my purposes the most useful are the tables. The tables are shallow, about 20 cm deep, but what’s nice about them is that water depth can be managed by varying the height of the stand pipe in the drain. I have some critters wandering free within tables and others confined to tanks, colanders, or small screened containers. One of my tables contains the paddle apparatus that stirs jars of babies when I’m raising larvae.
All of these tables are gravity fed from a supply of semi-filtered seawater supply in the ceiling of the building. The seawater flows through some sand filters before being pumped to the top of the building, but is by no means entirely clean. We get all kinds of things recruiting to the surfaces of tables, jars, or anything that sits in a seawater table for more than a few days. Some of the stuff that recruits is a nuisance, such as the spirorbid worms that build tiny calcareous spiral tubes on just about anything and scrape up the knuckles something awful. Other stuff is benign, and more or less ignored until it gets in someone’s way. Or until I decide to take a close look at it.
Last year I finally decided to look at some of the red filamentous stuff growing on the bottom and sides of one of the tables. To the naked eye it doesn’t look like much, which is why I love having access to a good compound scope. Here’s my notebook page from that day:
I am always gratified when I look back at drawings I made in the past, and find that they still hold true and can be corroborated by photographs. The filamentous reds are so pretty! This is not the best time of year to find sexy algae, and I saw no reproductive structures on any of the filaments I examined. Maybe next spring.
In a different table (the table where the paddle apparatus is, actually) there is some brownish fluffy stuff growing on the bottom surface. I took a look at some of it and noticed right away that the threads didn’t have their own inherent structure the way the Antithamnion defectum does. These threads seemed to be sticky, and when I picked up a little piece of the fluff it collapsed into a blob. I had to tease apart the threads in a drop of seawater to make sense of what was going on.
These diatoms are really cool! I have no idea which species they are, though. We do have local diatom genera (Thalasionema and Thalassiothrix) in which adjacent cells stick together at their ends to form this kind of wonky chain, but the cells themselves look different. So for now these are unidentified diatoms.
There’s no doubt that they are diatoms, though. They have the typical diatom color, a golden-brown that I would name Diatom if I got to name colors, and I could see through the microscope that the cells are enclosed in a silica structure called a frustule.
At higher magnification the sculpting on the frustule surfaces becomes visible. Unfortunately, at higher magnification you necessarily have less depth of field, so it’s more difficult to take photos that show this kind of detail.
Some of these cells appear to be doubled. I think one of two things is going here: either the cells simply remain attached to each other by a thin layer of mucilage, or a cell has recently divided and the two cells that are stuck together are the resulting daughter cells. Throughout the growing season diatoms reproduce clonally (each cell divides to produce two genetically identical daughter cells), and their populations can expand very rapidly in response to either natural or artificial nutrient inputs. Because the cells are enclosed by a rigid frustule, however, this clonal replication cannot continue indefinitely. Perhaps diatom reproduction is fodder for another blog post, if people are interested.
Mediterranean climates, such as the one that much of California experiences, are characterized by two distinct seasons: a mild, moderately wet season and a warm/hot dry season. In most of the state the majority of precipitation falls between Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, with very little in the other months. At this time of year the dry season is in full swing. I’ve heard of a few reasons why California is called the Golden State: (1) the Gold Rush that began in 1848; (2) the carpets of California poppies that blanket the state in the spring; and (3) the drying up of the summer grasses, which covers much of the state in a golden mantle dotted with oak trees.
We are definitely in the golden season now. We had a good, colorful spring with a banner crop of wildflowers, thanks to the El Niño rains, and it was green well into July. Given the drought, we hadn’t seen that much green in years. But now the annual vegetation has dried out and most of the state is on high alert for wildfire. Fire is a seasonal event in the arid west, and every year several thousand acres burn in California. July and August are the worst months.
This year the most devastating fire in my region of the state is the so-called Soberanes fire burning near Big Sur. As of today the fire has blazed for 23 days, scorched over 71,000 acres, and is 60% contained. Almost 60 homes have been lost and over 400 other structures are threatened, all because some idiot lit an illegal campfire. Up here in Santa Cruz we are over 60 miles away from the fire, but the entire region has been affected by the smoke. Until recently the typical summer onshore winds have blown most of the smoke eastward and while we’ve smelled smoke here we have been spared the worst of it. This satellite photo was taken two days after the fire started:
This morning when I woke up the smell of smoke seemed stronger. It was foggy, enough so that water had condensed on the ground and cars, but instead of smelling like ocean the fog smelled like fire. The sun came out for about an hour in the mid-afternoon, showing a sky that wasn’t as blue as it is when ordinary fog recedes. Air quality is pretty bad so I’ve been staying indoors with windows and doors closed.
Last week I was in the Lake Tahoe region, on a short vacation with my family in South Lake Tahoe. On our first day there we went on a short hike in the Angora Lakes area. Let me tell you, being at altitude makes a concussion headache worse–I had been weaning myself off the ibuprofen, but had to go back on the full doses for the handful of days we were at altitude.
On 27 June 2007 an illegal campfire ignited a wildfire that eventually burned 3100 acres and destroyed more than 300 homes and commercial structures in a populated area near South Lake Tahoe. The Angora fire was fully contained on 2 July and 100% controlled on 10 July.
On the hike out to Angora Lakes you see a few burnt trees off the trail, but don’t really get a feel for the scope of the area affected by the fire. So on our way out of the Tahoe basin we drove through one of the neighborhoods that had burnt. Almost 10 years after the fire now, all of the burnt homes have been either rebuilt or completely torn down. It was interesting to see that the fire’s damage had been spotty: in a neighborhood of mostly older houses there would be a couple scattered here and there that were obviously new construction, likely post-fire rebuilds.
In the years since the fire there has been a lot of restoration work in the Angora region:
Fire is, or used to be, a significant part of the ecology of much of the western United States. Some plants’ seeds require the heat of fire to germinate, and fire opens up the canopy to allow low-growing plants access to sunlight. When a fire burns through a wilderness region the clock is reset on ecological succession, allowing different species of plants to take their turn thriving in the habitat. We humans experience ecology as a snapshot in time, the duration of our own lifetimes. In the aftermath of a wildfire we have the opportunity to observe the early stages of succession that will likely result, decades down the road, in a mature forest. Even now, only nine years after the fire, it is clear that plants, especially grasses, have been thriving in areas that had been burnt down to charred soil. It will be interesting to watch how succession proceeds over the next several years.
This week saw the last of the good morning low tides of 2016. By “good” I mean a minus tide that hits during daylight hours. There are two more minus tide series in August, with the lows occurring well before dawn. After that the next minus tides don’t happen until mid-October; these will be late in the afternoon so loss of daylight will be an issue. I wasn’t intemperate enough to risk the health of my concussed brain on this week’s low tides but did want to get out if possible. And I’m so glad I tried, because having been out on the past few days’ low tides I feel more myself than I have since the accident. My head hurts a little, but not nearly as much as it would have if I’d done any significant driving two weeks ago. And, I have pictures to share!
Wednesday 22 July 2016—Davenport Landing
I went up to the Landing to collect some animals that I’ll need for my Fall semester class. The full moon was still visible, as the sun hadn’t yet risen above the bluff.
A month after the summer solstice and the algae are still nice and lush. Here’s a nice combination of mostly reds and greens, with some brown kelp thrown into the mix. How many phyla can you spot?
One of the two local species of surfgrass, Phyllospadix torreyi, was blooming. A month ago I’d noticed the congeneric species P. scouleri blooming at Mitchell’s Cove. These surfgrasses are vascular plants rather than algae, and as such they reproduce the way the more familiar land plants do, by pollen transfer from male to female flowers.
In the case of these obligately marine surfgrasses, the pollen is carried by water rather than wind. Not having to attract the attention of animal pollinators, the flowers have not evolved elaborate morphology, color patterns, or nectar rewards. They actually don’t look like much more than swellings near the base of the leaves. Some day I’ll remember to take one of the flowers back to the lab and dissect it to see what it’s like on the inside.
Thursday 21 July 2016—Franklin Point
This was the day I was most worried about. The drive up to Franklin Point takes about 30 minutes, and I hadn’t driven that distance since the accident. To make things even scarier, I couldn’t find someone to go with me. In the end I decided to try getting up there and back on my own, figuring that if my head wasn’t happy with the driving I could always turn around and come home.
When I got there it was cold and very windy, and I was glad I’d worn an extra thermal layer. Up on the exposed coast it is often windy on the road but can be less windy below the bluff on the beach. Yesterday it was windy on the beach, too, more typical of an afternoon than a morning low tide. The wind rippled the surface of the tidepools, making visibility and picture-taking difficult. I tried and didn’t have much success.
Coming over the last dune down to the beach I noticed four or five gulls and a couple of turkey vultures milling about at the mid-tide line. Something must be dead, I figured. And yes, it was very dead.
During last year’s El Niño we saw lots of sea hares in the intertidal up and down the coast. And they were big, heavy football-sized monsters. Yesterday I saw many sea hares, but none of then were larger than my open hand and most were quite a bit smaller. Nor were there any egg masses on the rocks. This guy/gal combo (they’re both, remember?) was about 15 cm long.
By far the most unusual thing I’ve seen in the intertidal this year was a swarm of shrimpy crustaceans. Last year at about this time I witnessed a huge population of small sand crabs (Emerita analoga) in tidepools at Franklin Point. Yesterday the swarmers were swimmers, not burrowers. I think they had gotten trapped in this large pool by the receding tide. Not having any better idea of what they were, I’m going to say they were mysids. Mysids are quite commonly encountered in local plankton tows but I’d never seen them in the intertidal before.
My first, rather idiotic, thought was that these were krill. They’re about the same size as the krill species most common in Monterey Bay, so perhaps the thought wasn’t quite that idiotic. (but krill in the intertidal? yeah, that’s idiotic. although stranger things have happened and the animals is always right even when it does something that seems idiotic) However, it didn’t take me long to realize that these critters didn’t actually look like krill. They didn’t have the feathery gills under the thorax that krill have. I also noticed that some of them were brooding eggs in a ventral pouch on the thorax, making them members of the Peracarida. Okay, then. Definitely not krill, so maybe . . . mysids? They look like mysids and so far nobody has told me that they’re not mysids, so I’m going to call them mysids.
The sun came out as I finished up in the tidepools. I hiked back up the very steep sand dune and looked back at where I had come from. Wow. Talk about stunning vistas!
View of Franklin Point from atop the last (and steepest) sand dune. 21 July 2016
Friday 22 July 2016—Natural Bridges
Today was by far the best day this week for picture taking in the intertidal. However this post is getting long so I’m going to showcase the crabs I saw this morning.
Pachygrapsus crassipes is the common shore crab, ubiquitous in the intertidal and at the harbor. It lives in the mid-tide zone and hangs out among the mussels. It is a shy beast, not aggressive and is more likely to drop into the nearest pool if it detects movement nearby. However, if you sit still for only a few minutes, you’ll find yourself noticing many small crabs coming out to bask in the sun.
Here’s a little tidbit about crab biology. All crustaceans breathe with gills. Any gas exchange structure, even your own lungs, functions by providing a surface across which oxygen can diffuse from the surrounding medium into the animal’s blood. Aquatic animals breathe with gills (if they have any specialized gas exchange structures at all, that is) and air-breathing animals breathe with lungs.
These crabs are often seen out of the water, in the sun. How then, you may reasonably ask, do they breathe with gills? The answer is, they foam. They produce bubbles that keep the gills moist, allowing oxygen first to dissolve into a thin layer of water and then to diffuse into the blood. I’m not entirely certain exactly how the crab forms the foam, but suspect it has to do with manipulating a thin layer of secreted mucus to capture small air bubbles. You do see the crabs massaging the foam over their sides, where the openings to the branchial chambers are.
Hermit crabs are the undisputed clowns of the tidepools. Around here we have four species that are commonly seen in the intertidal, all in the genus Pagurus. Many other species in different genera can be seen subtidally.
The most easily identified hermit crab in these parts is, in my opinion, Pagurus samuelis. They have bright red unbanded antennae, and often have bright blue markings on their legs. This species usually inhabits the shells of the turban snail Tegula funebralis.
The other species that I saw today was the much smaller P. hirsutiusculus. The common name for this animal is “hairy hermit crab” but they don’t seem all that hairy to me. They may be found in small Tegula shells, but I most often see them in shells of smaller snails such as Olivella biplicata.
There’s another P. hirsutiusculus in that other Olivella shell in the right-side of the photo, but it did not want to have its picture taken.
All told it has been a very satisfying week. I may have overtaxed my concussed brain a little bit. My plan for the weekend is to revert back to the rest-and-do-nothing routine to let my brain recover. Totally worth it!
