Category: General natural history

There’s gold in the forest

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

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 mold
Slime mold, possibly Leocarpus fragilis, at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Life cycle of a slime mold
© Pearson Education, Inc.

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.

One of the golden jelly fungi (Tremella sp.) at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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).

Banana slug (Ariolimax sp.) at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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:

Copulating banana slugs (Ariolimax sp.) at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Winter wildlife

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

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.

Willows
Willows (Salix sp.) starting to leaf out at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Amanita sp. at Rancho del Oso 2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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!

Bracket fungus (Trametes sp.) at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong
Helvella sp. at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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!

Russula sp. at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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:

Witch’s butter (Tremella aurantia) at Rancho del Oso
2019-02-01
© Allison J. Gong

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.



Seasonality

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

People who moved here from other states often say that California doesn’t really have seasons. I think what they mean is that in general we don’t oscillate between frigid winters and hot, humid summers. The Pacific Ocean moderates weather conditions through most of the state, giving us our Mediterranean climate characterized by a short rainy season and a long dry summer. However, California is a very large state with many different climate zones. Here on the coast our summers are cool and foggy, while in the interior of the state summers can be quite hot, upwards of 38° C for weeks at a time. Snow falls in the Sierra Nevada, providing much of the state’s annual water budget, but the rest of the state usually remains snow-free for most of the winter.

That said, California does of course have seasons, even though they may not be as in-your-face as what you’d see in, say, New England. One of the ways to experience the seasons is to observe the comings and goings of migratory wildlife, especially birds. In fact, bird migration patterns make up a significant part of phenology, the study of the timing of biological events in the natural world. California’s position along the Pacific Flyway provides fantastic bird watching opportunities throughout the year. There are many locations within California that are pit stops for birds migrating up and down the coast and overwintering oases for birds that breed much farther north.

The San Luis National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Merced County is one such place. Located in the Central Valley, it represents some of the original habitat in this part of the state. The San Joaquin River winds through the Reserve, providing riparian habitat, although the river is currently a mere ghost of its former glory. Since 2009, federal and state entities have worked to restore the San Joaquin, increasing water flows and cleaning up the surrounding lands. While it would be marvelous to see chinook salmon once again migrating from San Francisco Bay up the San Joaquin, it hasn’t happened yet. The re-establishment of salmon runs up to just below Friant Dam would indicate a healthy San Joaquin River, and I really hope to see it in my lifetime.

Before the era of modern agriculture, much of the Central Valley flooded with the winter rains and spring snowmelt. Only a tiny fraction of these wetlands remain; most have been drained for agriculture and further deprived of water by state and federal water diversion projects. In areas such as these, small pools form during the wet season. These vernal pools–so called because they are often at their deepest during the spring–are ephemeral habitats. They almost always disappear during the long dry summer, but during their short existence they provide living space for a unique biota. A few vernal pools occur in most of the flat areas of California, although there are far fewer of them than before, and they differ biologically throughout the state. It is not uncommon for each vernal pool in a given area to have its own combination of flora and fauna, all of which have adapted to thrive in both desiccated and flooded conditions.

System of vernal pools at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

On our way back to the coast after spending Christmas with my family, we stopped at the San Luis NWR to do some wildlife watching. The visitor center was closed because of the federal government shutdown, but the roads were open. The Refuge has two auto tour routes, one to the tule elk reserve and the other to see resident and visiting aquatic birds. We chose to drive the bird route, because winter is a good time to see birds that spend the rest of the year at much higher latitudes.

2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

Coots (Fulica americana) are ubiquitous in California’s wetland habitats, and because of that they are easily overlooked. When I was little we called them ‘mudhens’ and smirked at them because they weren’t ducks. Of course I now realize that that thinking is entirely unfair, and have come to appreciate coots because they aren’t ducks.

Coots (Fulica americana) at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

In addition to the coots, which weren’t much of a surprise because we expected to see them, we saw large numbers of several species that we weren’t as familiar with. There were ducks and geese, which took us some time to ID because they weren’t mallards and Canada geese. Fortunately I keep a bird field guide and binoculars in the car! My favorite bird ID book is the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America; we keep one of the later editions at home, but my beloved and well battered third edition lives in the glove compartment.

The ducks turned out to be northern shovelers, which I’ve seen at Elkhorn Slough. True to the typical avian way of doing things, the males are strikingly colored, with brilliant green heads, while the females are a dark streaky brown. In the photo below, a female swims with two males.

Northern shovelers (Anas clypeata) at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

The geese were entirely new to us. We first saw them flying overhead in the V-shaped formations that you expect from a gaggle of geese in the air. But they didn’t honk like Canada geese so we knew right away that they were something different.

Geese in flight
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

I wasn’t able to ID these until we got home and I looked at my photos on the computer. iNaturalist helpfully gave me a tentative ID of greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons), which I was happy to go along with.

Greater white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons) at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

In North America, greater white-fronted geese nest in the Arctic of western Canada and through most of Alaska, including out along the Aleutians. They migrate south to spend the winter along the Gulf coast and along the eastern coast of the Sea of Cortez. The winter wetlands of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys host many of these geese, and smaller numbers overwinter in coastal Oregon and Washington.

Living in California, I don’t usually expect to encounter any species whose common name includes the word ‘tundra’, but tundra swans do indeed spend their winters here! They nest in the very high Arctic on tundra, a habitat that is threatened by climate change, and winter is the only time we would see them in the lower 48, when large flocks venture south to overwinter near lakes and estuaries. I’ll keep an eye out for them next time I’m at Elkhorn Slough or Moss Landing.

Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus) at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

We saw hundreds of these swans hanging out with the shovelers. Only a few were within photograph range, as I don’t have a very long telephoto lens (yet!), but there were lots of large white blobs floating, foraging, preening, and sleeping. They were fun to watch through the binoculars. We had hoped to see some sandhill cranes in the Refuge, too. We had seen them off in the distance, much too far to be photographed, but it wasn’t until we were on the last leg of the auto tour that we saw them up close. They were not mingling with the swans and geese, and as far as we could tell tended to gather in single-species flocks. They seemed to be more skittish, too, and would startle and fly away when they heard human noises. I had to move slowly and quietly to get this close to them. Even the sound of the camera shutter caught their attention and made them wary.

Sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) at San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
2018-12-26
© Allison J. Gong

The Central Valley is Ground Zero for sandhill cranes in California, where they can be seen only in the winter. They don’t breed here, of course, but there is a small population of ~460 pairs of sandhill cranes breeding in far northeastern California. There are locations in the Central Valley that are known for hosting large crane populations in the winter, and one of my goals is to witness a big ‘fly-in’ event, when huge flocks come in to roost in the evening. I’ve seen pictures, and it looks like a spectacular sight. I want to see it with my own eyes.

All this is to say that we do indeed have seasons in California. The shifts between summer and winter are perhaps more subtle here than in other states, but an observant eye keeps track of changes in the natural world. And you don’t have to be a trained scientist to track seasonal changes wherever you live, either. We tend to use temperature to tell us which season we’re in, but in reality light is a much more reliable indicator. Just think of how dramatically temperature can fluctuate in a few days, and how much more extreme these fluctuations seem to be in recent years, due to climate change. Day length cycles, however, remain constant over geologic time, as we humans haven’t yet figured out a way to mess with the tilt of the earth’s axis. Everyone notices how the amount and quality of light change with the seasons. It takes just a little more effort to notice the ways that life responds to those changes.


I return to the field

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

For a number of reasons–a lingering injury to my bum knee, scheduling difficulties, and ongoing postconcussion syndrome–I missed the autumn return of the minus tides. At this time of year the lowest tides are in the afternoon, and at the end of the day I just didn’t have the energy to deal with field work. It took until today, the winter solstice, for me to find my way back to the intertidal. An additional motivating factor was a request from both the Seymour Center and Seacliff State Beach for critters to populate their displays. So off I went!

Davenport Landing beach
Davenport Landing Beach
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Over the past day or so a storm system blew through the area. It didn’t drop any rain on us in Santa Cruz, but earlier this week the National Weather service issued a small craft advisory and suggested that people stay off the beach, due to a combination of big swell and high tides. Usually when I go collecting at Davenport I go to the reef on the north end of the beach, which has more varied vertical topography and a similar, but generally richer, biota than the gently sloping benches to the south. However, the big swell had washed away a lot of the sand, leaving the beach steeper than it would be in the summer, and even the -1.0 ft tide didn’t make the reef safely available to someone not clad in a wet suit.

So I trudged across the beach and went to the south instead. It gave me an excuse to poke at the stuff that had been washed up onto the beach and look for nice pieces of algae to take to the Seymour Center. Algal pickings are rather slim in the winter, but I did find several decent small clumps that will do nicely in the touch table. One noteworthy find was a dead gumboot chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri). There were four such corpses washed up on the beach, in varying states of decay and stench.

Cryptochiton stelleri
Dead gumboot chiton (Cryptochiton stelleri)
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Cryptochiton stelleri is the largest of the chitons, routinely growing to length of 20 cm. It’s a hefty beast, too. The chitons as a group have their greatest diversity in the intertidal, but Cryptochiton is a subtidal creature. Unlike the intertidal residents, Cryptochiton‘s sticking power is pretty weak. Living below the worst of the pounding of the waves, it generally doesn’t have to cling tightly to rocks. However, because it doesn’t stick very well, Cryptochiton often gets dislodged by strong surge, especially during spring tides. Then they get tumbled by the waves and wash up dead on the beach. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a live Cryptochiton washed up.

The reef to the south of the beach consists of flat benches that slope down to the ocean. There are some channels and a few pools, but otherwise there is no real topography. Of course, for creatures living in the intertidal, there is topography–the nooks and crannies, as well as vertical faces, provide a variety of microhabitats.

Intertidal benches on the south end of Davenport Landing
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Mopalia lignosa is one of the intertidal chitons that I’m always delighted to find because it’s not as common as some of the others, and it’s a beautiful animal. The species epithet lignosa means ‘wood’ and refers to the patterning on the dorsal shell plates.

Mopalia lignosa
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong

As usual, there were spectacular anemones to be seen. And I saw something new! Anthopleura sola, the sunburst anemone, is one of the large aclonal anemones that is very common. At Natural Bridges there is a brilliant fluorescent A. sola in a pool on one of the benches I visit. I’ve been keeping an eye on this animal for a couple of years now, just to reassure myself that it’s still there and doing well. The animal is hardly hidden, but it feels like a little insiders’ secret that not everybody knows about.

For the first time, I saw fluorescent A. sola at Davenport Landing. Three of them, in fact! And boy, were they all bright!

Fluorescent Anthopleura sola anemone
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong
Another fluorescent Anthopleura sola anemone
21 February 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The third fluorescent anemone was closed up. There were just enough partial tentacles visible to see that it is indeed a fluorescent specimen.

A third fluorescent Anthopleura sola anemone
21 December 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Now, I don’t spend as much time at the south end of the beach as I do on the north side, but until today I had never noticed these fluorescent animals. Could I have missed them all this time? It’s kind of hard to miss a neon green animal the size of a cereal bowl! At any rate, now that I know they exist and hopefully remember where they are, I’ll be able to keep an eye on them, too.

On fragile wings of steel

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

The other day I joined the Cabrillo College Natural History Club (NHC) on a natural journal walk through Natural Bridges State Park and Antonelli Pond here in Santa Cruz. The NHC is a student club at the college where I teach, and I attended one of their meetings early in the semester. It’s a very active club, and although I’m not currently one of the official faculty sponsors I hope to become one in the future. I had a prior commitment and couldn’t meet them when they started their walk, but since they were traveling at what club president described as “a nature journaling pace” I was able to catch up with them.

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) overwinter at Natural Bridges. On warm sunny days they flit about, feeding and warming their bodies in the sun. When it’s cold or raining they huddle together in long, drooping aggregations from the eucalyptus trees. It hasn’t been cold yet this year, but in November of 2017 I went out on a chilly morning and was able to photograph monarchs clustered together.

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) at Natural Bridges State Beach
18 November 2017
© Allison J. Gong
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) at Natural Bridges State Beach
18 November 2017
© Allison J. Gong

These two photographs are the same clump. Notice that the butterflies’ wings look very different when they are closed up. The insects roost with their wings held together over the back, showing the paler, dusty undersides. I think this posture minimizes risk of damage to the fragile wings as the butterflies huddle close together to retain as much warmth as possible. As the sun warms their bodies the butterflies begin opening and closing their wings to generate additional heat for their flight muscles. The brilliant orange color of the top side of the wings is the hallmark of a monarch butterfly.

The monarchs hanging out at Natural Bridges in 2018 are the great- great- grandchildren of the butterflies that were here last year. It takes four generations to complete one migration cycle. The butterflies in Santa Cruz today emerged from chrysalises up in the Pacific Northwest or on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, and flew thousands of miles to get here. They’ll be here through the winter, departing in February to search for milkweed on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. The eggs they lay there will hatch into caterpillars and eventually metamorphose into the butterflies of Generation 1 in March and April. Generation 1 butterflies migrate further north and east, lay eggs on milkweed, and die after a post-larval life of a few weeks. Generation 2 butterflies, emerging in May and June, continue the northeast migration, lay eggs on milkweed, and die. Their offspring, the Generation 3 butterflies, emerge in July and August and disperse throughout the Pacific Northwest and eastward to the Rockies; they lay eggs on milkweed and die. Generation 4 butterflies emerge in September and October, and almost immediately begin migrating south to where their great- great- grandparents overwintered the previous year. Of the four generations, 1-3 are short-lived, lasting only a few weeks before dying. Only Generation 4 butterflies live long, and their job is to escape the winter and survive elsewhere in a milder climate.

Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) at Natural Bridges State Beach
18 November 2017
© Allison J. Gong

This truly is an extraordinary migration. Given that each individual travels only part of the migration route, how do they all know where they’re supposed to go? Each individual is heading for a location that hasn’t been encountered for four generations. Day length cycles are probably the primary migration trigger for each generation. I imagine that since each generation is born at a different latitude from the others and at different times of the year, day length signals may be generation-specific, at least enough so to tell the butterflies where they should go.

One of the students asked a great question: Other than the fact that they make the long leg of the migration and live longer, are there any differences between Generation 4 butterflies and the others? I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect that there may not be obvious morphological differences, but there certainly are physiological differences. The Generation 4 butterflies have much greater physical stamina than Generations 1-3, and have to fuel flight muscles to travel over 1000 miles. That’s quite a feat for an animal that looks so delicate! Appearances can be deceiving.


Playing in the sand, for science

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

This semester I am teaching a lab for a General Biology course for non-majors. I polled my students on the first day of lab, and their academic plans are quite varied: several want to major in psychology (always a popular major), some want to go into business, a few said they hope to go into politics or public policy, and some haven’t yet selected a field of study. I think only one or two are even considering a STEM field. Which is all just to say that I have a group of students whose academic goals don’t have much in common except to study something other than science. Several of them are the first in their families to go to college, which is very exciting for them and for me.

Most of the activities we do in this class are lab studies. Last week, for example, the students extracted DNA from a strawberry (100% success rate for my class, thank you very much) and then used puzzles and 3-dimensional models to understand the structure of DNA. We do have a couple of field trips scheduled, though, which are the days that students really look forward to. Outside the classroom is where most of the fun stuff happens.

Today I took my class to the beach! We were there to do some monitoring for LiMPETS (Long term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students). For the past few years I’ve taken my Ecology students out to the intertidal to do the rocky intertidal monitoring. The General Bio students don’t have the background needed for the intertidal monitoring and I don’t have the classroom time to train them, so we take them to do sand crab monitoring instead. This is a simpler activity for the students, although the clean-up on my end is a lot more intensive even though I get them to help me.

Dorsal view of Emerita analoga at Franklin Point
15 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Emerita analoga is a small anomuran crab, more closely related to hermit and porcelain crabs than to the more typical brachyuran crabs such as kelp and rock crabs. It lives in the swash zone on sandy beaches and migrates up and down the beach with the tide. Its ovoid body is perfectly shaped to burrow into the sand, which this crab does with much alacrity. The crabs use their big thoracic legs to push sand forward and burrow backwards into the sand until they are entirely covered. They feed on outgoing waves, sticking out their long second antennae (which can be almost as long as the entire body) and swivel them around to capture suspended particles.

Emerita analoga feeding in an aquarium

We went out to Seacliff State Beach to count, measure, and sex sand crabs. The protocol is to lay out a 50 m transect along the beach, roughly parallel to the shore where the sand remains wet but isn’t constantly covered by waves. Students draw random numbers to determine their position along the horizontal transect and venture out into the ocean, measuring the distance between the transect and the point where they are getting wet to the knees. Then they divide that distance by 9 to yield a total of 10 evenly spaced sampling points along a line running perpendicular to the transect.

Students collecting sand crabs at Seacliff State Beach
28 September 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The corer is a PVC tube with a handle. It is submerged into the sand to a specified depth and collects a plug of sand that is dumped into a mesh bag. Sand is rinsed out of the bag and the crabs remain behind. Students then have to measure and sex each of the crabs.

Rinsing the bag
28 September 2018
© Allison J. Gong
“What’s in the bag?”
28 September 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Each crab is classified as either a recruit (carapace length ≤9 mm) or a juvenile/adult (carapace length >9 mm). Students get to use calipers to measure carapace length, which they enjoy. Adult crabs are sexed, and females are examined for the presence of eggs.

Students measure a sand crab (Emerita analoga)
28 September 2018
© Allison J. Gong

A sand crab’s sex is determined by the presence or absence of pleopods, abdominal appendages that females use to hold onto eggs. If a female is gravid, the eggs are visible as either bright orange or dull tannish masses tucked underneath the telson (see below):

Ventral view of gravid female Emerita analoga
15 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The pointed structure in the photo above is the telson. You can see the tan eggs beneath the telson. They look like they would fall off, but they adhere together in a sticky mass until they are ready to be released. Adult females have pleopods whether or not they are gravid, making it easy to sex the crabs even when they are not reproductive.

Most of the larger crabs today were gravid females and could be sexed with a quick glance at the ventral surface. Sexing the smaller individuals requires a lot more effort. The crab’s telson has to be gently pulled back to expose the abdomen, which isn’t easy because the crab doesn’t like having its parts messed with. In fact, one of the ways to determine whether or not a crab playing dead is really dead is to pry up its telson–a dead crab will let you without making a fuss, while a live one will start thrashing about.

Students sexing a sand crab (Emerita analoga)
28 September 2018
© Allison J. Gong

It was a good day to spend time at the beach. The weather got better as we worked and the water wasn’t very cold. The students had a good time splashing around in the waves, and they all fell in love with the crabs. There were a few sad moments when crabs got chopped in half by the edge of the corer, but the vast majority were released back to the ocean unharmed. From a teaching perspective, I was happy to give the students an opportunity to do some outdoor learning. After all, the world is our biggest and best classroom. Most students learn best when they get to actually ‘do’ science, and even though most of this group will not go on to complete a science major, they hopefully have a better appreciation of what it is like to collect real data as citizen scientists.

The other side of the Bay

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Monterey Bay is shaped like a backwards letter ‘C’, with Santa Cruz on the north end and the Monterey Peninsula on the south end. The top of the ‘C’ is comparatively smooth, while the bottom is punctuated by the Monterey Peninsula, which juts north from the city of Monterey. The most striking geologic feature is the Monterey Submarine Canyon, but of course you can’t see that from land. It is crazy to realize that the canyon starts right off the jetty at Moss Landing. It is this proximity to deep water that makes the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) so ideally situated.

Monterey Bay, California
© Google Maps

Separated by 40.2 km (= approximately 25 statute miles) as measured harbor to harbor, Santa Cruz and Monterey represent both the same and slightly different marine habitats. On a large scale they are both part of the California Current system, strongly affected and biologically defined by seasonal upwelling in the spring and summer months. On a finer scale they differ in a few ways, primarily geologic. The rock on the Santa Cruz end of the bay is a soft sand- or mudstone, and at sites like Natural Bridges can be easily eroded; you can scratch it with your thumbnail, and falling on it might give you a bruise but probably won’t beat you up more than that. The rock of the Monterey Peninsula is much less forgiving: granite with large quartz crystals. Falling on that stuff can leave you with bruises and a bad case of rock rash; I usually end up bleeding from at least one laceration when I’m in the intertidal there.

Limpet on granite on the Monterey Peninsula
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong
Barnacles on mudstone in Santa Cruz
17 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The difference in rock type between the north and south ends of Monterey Bay also manifests in the tidepools themselves. The soft mud stone of the Santa Cruz erodes into small particles, which form nice soft sandy beaches. Small particles also remain suspended in water more so than larger ones, which affects water clarity. Larger and heavier particles, on the other hand, sink out of the water, so that the water column itself tends to be less murky. Clear water has some marked advantages over murky water. For example, light transmission is directly proportional to water clarity. Thus, all other factors being equal, photosynthetic organisms such as algae have access to more light, in waters above large-grained sand than those above finer sediments.

That being said, it is not always the case that clearer water is better. Remember Phragmatopoma californica, one of the worms I wrote about recently? They build tubes out of sand grains. However, it turns out that they are particular about the sand grains they use. If you were to examine a Phragmatopoma tube under a dissecting scope you’d see that all of the sand grains are the same size. Just how they select and sort the sand grains isn’t understood, but somehow they manage to choose the particles they want and cement them together underwater. Phragmatopoma is one of the most conspicuous animals at Natural Bridges on the north side of Monterey Bay, forming large mounds of hundreds of individuals, yet very few live on the Monterey Peninsula. There are likely several reasons for this, but part of the explanation is that the sand grains are too big to be used in the worms’ tubes.

I live in Santa Cruz, on the north end of the bay, and most of my intertidal excursions these days are to locations in Santa Cruz and north along the coast. I haven’t spent nearly as much time as I’d like to in the tidepools on the Monterey Peninsula and locations further south. It’s tough getting to a site an hour away, when the low tide is at dawn. And with my post-concussion syndrome I don’t yet feel comfortable driving myself that far away and back. Fortunately for me, I am currently mentoring a student working on an independent study project, and she was willing to drive down to Asilomar last weekend. So I tagged along with her.

Monterey Peninsula
© Google Maps

Asilomar State Reserve is one of California’s no-take marine protected areas (MPAs), where people can look and take pictures but are not allowed to remove anything, dead or alive. It is a glorious site. The water is clear and blue, and the biota is both similar to and different from that on the north side of the bay. I want to highlight some of the organisms that I see there, that are less common here on the north side.

Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Abalone (Haliotis sp.) are not unheard of here. In fact, there is a black ab (H. cracherodii) at Natural Bridges that I’ve been keeping an eye on since 2015, tucked into a crevice and generally not visible except on a minus tide. And further north at Pigeon Point I have seen red abalone (H. rufescens), both living and empty shells. But I’ve never seen as many black abs as I saw at Asilomar. Standing in a depression about as big as my kitchen table, well above the water level, I easily counted at least 20 black abs. Some of them were as big as my hand. How many can you see in the photo above?

Black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Abalone are large herbivorous snails. They feed on macroalgae, both reds and browns. If they venture from the safety of their nooks and crannies they can chase (at a snail’s pace) down algae, but then they are vulnerable to predators such as cabezons and sea otters. Abs that live in crevices, like these, have to rely on drift algae to come to them; they don’t have the luxury of choosing what to eat. It’s the age-old compromise between safety and food, one of the driving forces in foraging behavior.

While we have four species of anemones in the genus Anthopleura at the Santa Cruz end of the bay, as well as other anemones such as Epiactis, we don’t have any in the genus Urticina–not intertidally, at least. I have seen Urticina anemones at Carmel, and last weekend saw what I think was U. coriacea. It was in a pool, and partially obscured by sand and its own pharynx.

The anemone Urticina coriacea at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

It’s own pharynx, you ask? Yes! Anemones are cnidarians, and as such have a two-way gut. This means that food is ingested and wastes are expelled via a single opening, which for politeness’ sake we call a mouth even though it also functions as an anus. Sometimes, when an anemone is expelling wastes, it also turns out the top part of its pharynx. This is a temporary condition, and the pharynx will be returned to normal soon. The anemone in the picture above appears to be in the process of spitting out something fairly large and undigestible.

Here’s another example of an anemone eating a big meal, this time of mussels.

Giant green anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica) snacking on a clump of mussels (Mytilus californianus) at Natural Bridges
17 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

What do you think this thing (below) is?

Pista elongata at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

I had at first misidentified these as something else, but have since been told that they are the tubes of another of those strange terebellid polychaete worms. This one is Pista elongata. As with many terebellids, P. elongata lives in a tube, the opening end of which is elaborated into a sort of basket. They reportedly range from British Columbia to San Diego. I think I’ve seen them at Carmel Point, but not at Point Piños, which I’ve visited more often. And I’m positive I’ve never seen it at Natural Bridges.

At Asilomar I saw some large clusters of P. elongata in the low intertidal. They are not clonal, to my knowledge, so these aggregations would form by gregarious settlement of competent larvae when they return to shore.

Cluster of Pista elongata at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2018
© Allison J. Gong

One solitary ascidian that I saw at Asilomar is Clavelina huntsmani, the appropriately called lightbulb tunicate:

The “lightbulb tunicate” Clavelina huntsmani at Asilomar State Beach
16 June 2017
© Allison J. Gong

For people too young to remember what an incandescent light bulb looks like, they were made of clear or frosted glass. Inside the glass bulb were tungsten filaments, through which electricity flowed; the filaments heated up enough to emit light. In Clavelina, the two pink structures running down the length of each zooid resemble the filaments of an incandescent light bulb, but are in fact parts of the pharyngeal basket, the structure used for filter feeding.

We have neither Pista nor Clavelina in Santa Cruz–at least, I’ve never seen them. They remind me that although Santa Cruz and Monterey are part of the same ecosystem, they do not represent the same microhabitat. I’m pretty familiar with the intertidal floral and fauna in Santa Cruz, but I absolutely love exploring the intertidal along the Monterey Peninsula. There’s something exciting about spending time a place I don’t know as well as the back of my hand. I hope that as my brain continues to heal I’ll eventually regain the stamina to travel so far for a low tide.

Things strange and beautiful

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

This weekend I was supposed to take a photographer and his assistant into the field to hunt for staurozoans. I mean a real photographer, one who has worked for National Geographic. He also wrote the book One Cubic Foot. You may have heard of the guy. His name is David Liittschwager. Anyway, his assistant contacted me back in March, saying that he was working on something jellyfish-related for Nat Geo and hoped to include staurozoans in the story, and did I know anything about them? As in, maybe know where to find them? It just so happens that I do indeed know where to find staurozoans, at least sometimes, and we made a date to go hunting on a low tide. Then early in May the assistant contacted me to let me know that David’s schedule had changed and he couldn’t meet me today, and she hoped they’d be able to work with me in the future, and so on.

None of which means that I wouldn’t go look for them anyways. I’d made the plans, the tide would still be fantastic, and so I went. And besides, these are staurozoans we’re talking about! I will go out of my way to look for them as often as I can. Not only that, but I hadn’t been to Franklin Point at all in 2018 and that certainly needed to be remedied.

Pigeon Point, viewed from Franklin Point trail
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The sand has definitely returned. The beach is a lot less steep than it was in the winter, and some of the rocks are completely covered again. This meant that the channels where staurozoans would likely be found are shallower and easier to search. But you still have to know where to look.

Tidal area at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

See that large pool? That’s where the staurozoans live. They like areas where the water constantly moves back and forth, which makes them difficult to photograph in situ. And given that the big ones are about 2 cm in diameter and most of them are the same color as the algae they’re attached to, they’re a challenge to find in the first place. I looked for a long time and was about to give up on my search image when I found a single small staurozoan, about 10 mm in diameter, quite by accident. It was a golden-brown color, quite happily living in a surge channel. I took several very lousy pictures of it before coming up with the bright idea of moving it up the beach a bit to an area where the water wasn’t moving quite as much. I sloshed up a few steps and found a likely spot, then placed my staurozoan where the water was deep enough for me to submerge the camera and take pictures.

Staurozoan (Haliclystus sp.) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong
Staurozoan (Haliclystus sp.) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Cute little thing, isn’t it? I had my head down taking pictures of this animal, congratulating myself on having found it. When I looked around me I saw that I had inadvertently discovered a whole neighborhood of staurozoans. They were all around me! And some of them were quite large, a little over 2 cm in diameter. All of a sudden I couldn’t not see them.

Staurozoan (Haliclystus sp.) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

I know I’ve seen staurozoans in the same bottle green color as the Ulva, but this time I saw only brown ones. As you can see even the animals attached to Ulva were brown. Staurozoans seem to be solitary creatures. They are not permanently attached but do not aggregate and are not clonal. Most of the ones I found were as singles, although I did find a few loose clusters of 3-4 animals that just happened to be gathered in the same general vicinity.

Trio of staurozoans (Haliclystus sp.) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Not much is known about the biology of Haliclystus, or any of the staurozoans. I collected some one time many years ago, and brought them back to the lab for closer observation. They seemed to eat Artemia nauplii very readily, and I did get to observe some interesting behaviors, but they all died within a week or so. Given that I can find them only in certain places at Franklin Point, they must be picky about their living conditions. Obviously I can’t provide what they need at the marine lab. The surging water movement, for example, is something that I can’t easily replicate. I need to think about that. The mid-June low tides look extremely promising, and my collecting permit does allow me to collect staurozoans at Franklin Point. Maybe I’ll be able to rig up something that better approximates their natural living conditions in the lab.

In the meantime, I just want to look at them.

Staurozoan (Haliclystus sp.) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong
Pair of staurozoans (Haliclystus sp) at Franklin Point
19 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Squidlets

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Every once in a while some random person drops off a creature at the marine lab.  Sometimes the creature is a goldfish that had been a take-home prize at a wedding over the weekend (now weddings taking place at the Seymour Center are not allowed to include live animals in centerpieces). Once it was a spiny lobster that spent the long drive up from the Channel Islands in a cooler, and became the Exhibit Hall favorite, Fluffy. This time the objects had been collected off the beach and brought in by somebody who thought they might still be alive.

16 April 2018
© Allison J. Gong

These white objects are egg masses of the California market squid, Doryteuthis opalescens, that had been cast onto the beach at Davenport. Sometimes the masses are called fingers or candles, because they’re about finger-sized. Each contains dozens of large eggs. Squids, like all cephalopods, are copulators, and after mating the female deposits a few of these fingers onto the sea floor. Many females will lay their eggs in the same spot, so the eggs in this photo represent the reproductive output of several individuals. The cephalopods as a group are semelparous, meaning that they reproduce only once at the end of their natural life; salmons are also semelparous. After mating, the squids die. Not coincidentally, the squid fishing season is open right now, the idea being that as long as the squids have reproduced before being caught in seines, little harm is done to the population. Most of the time the squids are dispersed throughout the ocean, and the only time it is feasible to catch them in large numbers is when they gather to mate.

These egg masses look vulnerable, but they’re very well protected. The outer coating is tough and leathery, and the eggs must taste bad because nothing eats them. I’ve fed them to anemones, which will eat just about anything, and they were spat out immediately.

The eggs were brought to the Seymour Center because the person who brought them in thought they might make a good exhibit. I happened to be there that day and got permission to take a small subset of the bunch so I could keep an eye on them. And they did and still do make a good exhibit.

16 April 2018: I obtain squid eggs!

Egg mass, or ‘finger, of the California market squid Doryteuthis opalescens
16 April 2018
© Allison J. Gong

At this stage it is impossible to tell whether or not the eggs are alive. The only thing to do was wait and see.

30 April 2018: After waiting two weeks with apparently no change, I decided it was time to look at the egg fingers more closely again. Lo and behold, they are indeed alive! Look at the pink spots in the individual eggs–those are eyes. And if you can see the smaller pink spots, those are chromatophores, the ‘color bodies’ in the squids’ skin that allow them to perform their remarkable color changes.

Developing embryos of Doryteuthis opalescens
30 April 2018
© Allison J. Gong

9 May 2018: A week and a half later, the embryos definitely look more like squids! Their eyes and chromatophores have darkened to black now. The embryos are also more active, swimming around inside their egg capsules. You can see the alternating contraction and relaxation of the mantle, which irrigates the gills. Squids have two gills. More on that below.

At this point the squid fingers began to disintegrate and look ragged. They became flaccid and lightly fouled with sediment.

14 May 2018 (today): Almost a month after they arrived, my squid eggs look like they’re going to hatch soon! I didn’t see any chromatophore flashing, though.

In the meantime, some of the eggs on exhibit in the Seymour Center have already started hatching. The first hatchlings appeared on Friday 11 May 2018. The hatchlings of cephalopods are called paralarvae; they aren’t true larvae in the sense that instead of having to metamorphose into the adult form, they are miniature versions of their parents.

Peter, the aquarium curator at the Seymour Center, allowed me to take a few of the paralarvae in his exhibit and look at them under the scope. The squidlets are about 3mm long and swim around quite vigorously. Trying to suck them up in a turkey baster was more difficult than I anticipated. But I prevailed!

Paralarva of Doryteuthis opalescens
14 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

You can actually see more of what’s going on in a video:

The cup-shaped layer of muscular tissue that surrounds the squid’s innards is the mantle. When you eat a calamari steak, you are eating the mantle of a large squid.The space enclosed by the mantle is called the mantle cavity. Because the paralarvae are transparent you can see the internal organs. Each of those featherlike structures is a ctenidium, which is the term for a mollusk’s gill. The ventilating motions of the mantle flush water in and out of the mantle cavity, ensuring that the gill is always surrounded by clean water.

And now we get to the hearts of the matter. At the base of each gill is a small pulsating structure called a branchial heart (‘branch’ = Gk: ‘gill’). It performs the same function as the right atrium of our own four-chambered heart; that is, boosting the flow of blood to the gas-exchange structure. So that’s two hearts. Between the pair of branchial hearts is the systemic heart, which pumps the oxygenated blood from the gills to the rest of the squid’s body. This arrangement of multiple hearts, combined with a closed circulatory system, allows cephalopods to be much more active swimmers and hunters than the rest of their molluscan kin.

I expect that my fingers will hatch very soon. If and when they do, it will be a challenge getting them to eat. I’ve never tried it myself, and cephalopods are known to be difficult to rear in captivity. But I’m willing to give it a shot!

Blitzing an old military base

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

This weekend a subset of my students and I spent a day at the Fort Ord Natural Reserve (FONR) to participate in the 2018 spring Bioblitz. We were supposed to visit FONR for a class field trip in early March to do some vegetation studies, but that trip was rained out. Today’s visit was sort of a make-up for that missed lab; because it’s a Saturday I couldn’t compel the students to attend, but I offered a little extra-credit for those who did. It just so happened that Joe Miller, the field manager at FONR, had organized a Bioblitz for another group of students, and he welcomed my Ecology class as well.

Map of communities surrounding Monterey Bay
© Google Maps

Located adjacent to the city of Marina in Monterey County, FONR is one of five natural reserves administered by the campus of UC Santa Cruz. The other four are the Campus Reserve (on the main campus of UCSC), Younger Lagoon Reserve (on UCSC’s Coastal Science Campus), Año Nuevo Natural Reserve (up the coast in San Mateo County), and Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve (along the Big Sur coast). FONR occupies some 600 acres of a former military base that was closed in 1994. The reserve opened in 1996. As with all the other UC natural reserves, FONR exists to provide students, teachers, and researchers with natural lands to be used as outdoor classrooms and laboratories. Field courses at UC Santa Cruz and CSU Monterey Bay make extensive use of FONR, and students carry out independent studies and internships there.

After all of the participants arrived at the Reserve, Joe described the activities he had planned for the day. He told us that we could wander around the Reserve on our own if we wanted, but there were several hikes we could choose to join:

  • One to where some people were finishing up the day’s bird banding activities
  • One to collect samples of environmental DNA
  • One to ID various tracks in the sand
  • One to the different habitats and vegetation types
  • One to check out some pitfall traps for small rodents and reptiles

Because my knowledge of the local flora is sorely lacking, I went on the plant hike with Joe. Many of the spring wildflowers had either finished or were finishing up their yearly bloom. The poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) is looking amazing this year; I think it has been able to take advantage of two consecutive wet seasons with a decent amount of rain. There were many poison oak plantlets scattered around all over the place, and the established bushes are lush and green. There is no way I didn’t come into contact with the stuff at least once on this hike, so today is going to be the true test of whether or not I am allergic to it.

One of many poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) plants at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Much of the terrain at FONR is a maritime chaparral. The soil is extremely sandy (Pleistocene sand dunes, Joe says) with a poor nutrient load and water content. It’s not a desert, because we do get a fair amount of precipitation along the Monterey Bay, but the plants have adapted to thrive with low soil moisture levels. It’s also often very windy, and there are no trees. Even the coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), which can be magnificently massive and meandering, are stunted here. Much of the foliage is low-growing perennial shrubs or annual plants.

Coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) growing above coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Joe led us through the habitats of the Reserve, mostly on trails but also along narrow-to-nonexistent tracks that we called Poison Oak Lane, Rattlesnake Drive, and Tick Alley. And yes, we did see a rattlesnake! My husband spotted it, right about where he was going to put his foot. It wasn’t a big snake, maybe half a meter long, and was sunning itself in a narrow opening between manzanita bushes. I didn’t stop to take a picture because there wasn’t a good space to do so, and I wanted to let other hikers pass the snake quickly. The snake didn’t seem to react to us, but it’s always a good idea to leave them alone.

Just beyond where we saw the rattler, Joe had found a pair of southern alligator lizards (Elgaria multicarinata) mating. When Joe picked them up the male had grabbed the female with a bite behind her head; he does this to keep her from running away, and it also shows his strength and suitability as a father for the female’s offspring. The lizards didn’t like being interrupted in copulo, so to speak, and the male released the female and escaped back to the ground, leaving his lady love behind in Joe’s hand. Hopefully they were able to find each other again once they were both let go.

Joe Miller (left) holding a female southern alligator lizard (Elgaria multicarinata) in his left hand
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

To me, the picture above exemplifies what a Bioblitz is all about. We have two people examining a natural phenomenon, and one of them is taking a picture that he will presumably upload to iNaturalist. People learn a lot when they participate in a Bioblitz–they usually see things they’ve never paid attention to before, and when their observations are ID’d or corroborated by the community of iNat experts, they get to put a name to the thing they saw. True, it’s a better learning experience to sit down with a specimen, hand lens, and book to figure out what an organism is, but most people don’t have either the inclination or the luxury of time and the necessary books. And while I’d rather have people look at the real thing with their eyes instead of their phones, getting people to go outdoors and pay any attention at all to their surroundings is a minor victory. I find Bioblitzes to be a little unsettling sometimes. My preferred method for observation is to examine fewer things in greater depth; this is what my graduate advisor Todd Newberry referred to as “varsity” observations. I don’t think a Bioblitz has any place in varsity studies, because of its very raison d’être–to record as many observations as possible–means to some degree that instead of taking a deep look you have to glance-and-go. Still, it does have its place in natural history, and I value it as a way to get more people involved in science.

I was on the plant hike, so many of the organisms I photographed and uploaded to iNat are new to me. Some are California endemics and all have adapted to survive in the difficult conditions of a maritime chaparral.

Eriastrum sp., a plant with delicate blue-purple flowers, at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

And I did see one of the California native thistles. Invasive thistles are such a problem that the knee-jerk response is to stomp on them or yank them out of the ground. This one, for which I’m still waiting on an ID confirmation, is silvery and sort of looks like cobwebs. Joe said that its blossom is a bright pink.

A California native thistle, possibly Cirsium occidentale, at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

And one of my newish old favorite wildflowers, Castilleja exserta, was there. The purple owl’s clover occurs throughout California; in 2017 I saw a lot of it on my wildflower excursion to the southern part of the state. It varies in color from purple to pink to white and thus has multiple common names.

Castilleja exserta, the purple owl’s clover, at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

We also saw a lot of the peak rushrose, Helianthemum scoparium. It is a California native species that does well in dry, sandy areas, such as throughout most of Fort Ord.

Peak rushrose (Helianthemum scoparium) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

While I was leaning down to photograph this plant, one of the Reserve volunteers pointed out a much paler version nearby. He told me that most of the time the peak rushrose has brilliant yellow flowers, but there are always a few that have this much more delicate color.

Pale form of peak rushrose (Helianthemum scoparium) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

And speaking of yellow, I discovered another new-to-me organism! What at first glance looked like a blotch of spray paint on a tree trunk turned out to be something much more interesting–a gold dust lichen in the genus Chrysothrix.

Gold dust lichen (Chrysothrix sp.) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

The lichen book1 that I have describes two species of Chrysothrix, both of which can be found in coastal regions of California. The species have some overlap in habitat, with C. granulosa usually living on bark and occasionally on wood or rock, while C. xanthina can regularly be found on bark, wood, and rock. Nor is color by itself an entirely useful characteristic: C. granulosa is described as brilliant yellow, and C. xanthina can be brilliant yellow, yellow-green, or yellow-orange. There are certain tests that would be able to distinguish between the species, but field ID when the lichen is ‘brilliant yellow’ remains problematic. So while I’d guess that this specimen is Chrysothrix granulosa (based on a combination of color, location, habitat, and good old-fashioned gut feeling) I can’t be at all certain.

The discussion of lichens brings us around to the animals. Did you know that fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants? Well they are, despite being included in more botany than zoology courses. And of course we did see animals on our plant hike. Hawks and turkey vultures soared overhead, song birds and hummingbirds flitted among the trees and shrubs, alligator lizards mated, and there was that one rattlesnake, which even the people on the herps walk didn’t get to see. As we hiked through the various plant communities in the Reserve, Joe occasionally called out “If you see a horned lizard, catch it!” A woman in our group, Yvonne, managed to do so, despite being loaded down with a backpack and a camera. She pounced on it and held it up for us to photograph.

Horned lizard (Phyronosoma sp.) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong
Horned lizard (Phrynosoma sp.) at Fort Ord Natural Reserve
12 May 2018
© Allison J. Gong

Cute little thing, isn’t it?

The last critter we saw as we were walking back to the gate after lunch was a juvenile gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer). By the time I got there the snake was resting in the road. It was a very pretty snake. I wanted to take it home and release it into my yard, where there are enough gophers to feed an entire family of snakes, but alas, collecting is not allowed at the Reserve. I do wish that a gopher snake would move into my yard, though.

It is now about 24 hours since we got home. We did our tick checks and didn’t find anything, thank goodness, then showered and scrubbed. There’s no doubt that we were both exposed to poison oak; it is impossible NOT to be, this time of year. This is the real test for whether or not I am allergic to it. I haven’t been so far, but there’s a first time for everything and I will never say that I will never get it. My husband, who gets poison oak very easily and very badly, says it could take up to two days to be sure. I’m not itchy today. Tomorrow may be a different story, though.

1Sharnoff, S. 2014. A Field Guide to California Lichens, Yale University Press