Six months, and a big return

Next week I will be six months beyond a total replacement of my right knee. The rehab has been long and tough, and I’m nowhere near the end yet. I’ve been told by my surgeon to expect a 12- to 18-month recovery to get back to whatever my new normal will be. By that estimate I’m either 1/3 or 1/2 of the way there; given the way things are going I suspect it’s the smaller fraction, so I’m looking at another year of ongoing, slow improvement.

I’ve finally gotten strong enough that I felt ready to return to the intertidal. And yesterday being the first day of a new year, it seemed fitting to venture out into my old life again. I chose a site that didn’t involve any cliff-climbing (not quite up to that yet), but did have stairs so I could challenge the knee. Down is still hard, but up is a piece of cake now.

It was great getting out to the intertidal and seeing some of my old friends again! January isn’t the best month to find happy algae, but the rockweeds were already recruiting and growing. Here’s a baby rockweed, probably Pelvetiopsis limitata (they can be hard to ID as youngsters):

And there were some lovely stands of Fucus:

Note that the tips of the Fucus branches are flattened. These are young thalli. In the summer, mature thalli will have swollen tips full of gametes. Fucus, and the rockweeds in general, have what we call an “animal-like” life cycle instead of the alternation of generations that is more typical of seaweeds. And we won’t even get into the complexity of the alternation of three generations in some of the reds! So yes, Fucus thalli come in male and female forms that produce sperm and eggs, respectively. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

We saw several ochre stars, none of which were ochre in color. And now that I think about it, I see many more P. ochraceus that are purple, red, or orange than are ochre.

And lest we forget, Sea Star Wasting Syndrome (SSWS) hasn’t been banished from the world. I suspect it will always be around but won’t always be as prominent as it was 10 years ago. Yesterday we saw two disembodied arms of a purple Pisaster ochraceus. The rest of the body was nowhere to be found, and I guess this star dismembered itself a couple of days ago.

On a much more pleasant topic, I noticed a pattern of different organisms lined up in rows.

Row 1: Limpet scars. These ovoid blotches are the scars made by a limpet, Discurria (formerly Lottia) insessa. The limpet lives on the stipe of feather boa kelp (Egregia menziesii), shown below. It eats the algal film that accumulates on the kelp but eventually ends up chewing through the stipe, which then breaks. They literally eat themselves out of house and home, poor guys.

Row 2: Anemones. Many intertidal animals (and algae, for that matter) settle preferentially in cracks and crevices. These are the places that hold water the longest at low tide, giving the organisms a slight bit of protection against desiccation. For the same reason many organisms prefer to settle on vertical rather than horizontal surfaces. I found this group of anemones in an almost-straight line in a shallow indentation in the rock.

Row 3: Anemones. In geometry, two points define a line. So I can claim that these two anemones make a row! You may have to look carefully to see the second anemone.

These are the same species. Anthopleura artemisia is highly variable, more so than the other species in the genus. The tentacles can be a solid opaque color, as in the animal on the left, or transparent/translucent with or without opaque patches, as in the anemone on the right. They tend to live in sandy areas and often have sand covering the oral disc. If disturbed they will retract into the sand and disappear.

All in all it was a fantastic re-entry into the rocky intertidal. My body remembered how to move around, my balance was not entirely shot to hell, and my knee did fine. I was able to forget about it and just use it like a normal person would. When I started physical therapy I told the therapists that one of the things I need to be able to do was work in the rocky intertidal. They were skeptical at first, because they envisioned me jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock. I had to explain that I’m very safety conscious in the field and know all the tricks of an old-timer: Keep your body low (so you have less distance to fall) and keep three of the five points of contact (two hands, two feet, and one butt) with the rock at all times.

I’m calling this a major milestone achieved, even if I still have a long way to go. Yippee!