Tag: marine biology

Ghosts

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

I seem to have a need to keep investigating seastar wasting syndrome (SSWS) and trying to make sense of what I and others see in the field. I think it parallels my morbid fascination with the medieval Black Death. In any case, I’ve devised a plan to continue experimenting with one aspect of the potential recovery of one species, the ochre star, Pisaster ochraceus.

The first step of this plan was to collect a few more stars, which I did back in early March. For the past year or so the stars had been becoming more abundant at certain sites, leading to hope that the populations were beginning to recover and speculation as to whether these individuals were pre-SSWS survivors or post-SSWS recruits. I think they are survivors, because it seems highly unlikely that a star can grow from teensy (a few millimeters in diameter) to hand-sized on a few years. This is what I want to address experimentally in the lab.

The three stars that I collected seemed to adjust well to life in the lab. They all ate well and were crawling around in their tank. Then, last Friday (31 March 2017, to be exact) I checked on the stars as I usually do and was horrified to see this:

Dismembered bits of an ochre star (Pisaster ochraceus)
31 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Knowing from experience how quickly this can happen, I’d guess this star had begun ripping itself into pieces in the previous 24 hours. And meantime, its tankmates had stuck themselves to the underside of the cover of the tank. This is not unusual behavior and once I poked them both to make sure they weren’t getting mush I decided not to worry about them for the time being. The important thing was to remove the not-dead-yet pieces of the exploded star and bleach the tank before returning the apparently healthy stars to it.

One of the most horrific aspects of SSWS is that it is both blindingly fast and agonizingly slow. It appears to strike out of the blue, by which I mean that stars can look absolutely fine one afternoon and be torn to bits the next morning. And it’s slow because the individual pieces can live for hours or even days before finally dying.

31 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

This star broke itself into five pieces. The three pieces of arm had started getting mushy but still responded by sticking harder when I picked them up. That larger section with two arms and the madreporite was actually walking around the bowl. The torn-off pieces were all oozing sperm into the water, so at least I know this individual was a male. Small comfort, that, when I had to bag up the pieces and throw them in the trash.

Being confronted with the specter of SSWS, I wondered exactly what it meant. I’ve never been under the illusion that SSWS goes away entirely. I suspect that it is always present in the wild, possibly at low enough levels that we don’t notice it for decades at a time. Seeing one dead star, which presumably was infected in the field before I brought it into the lab. . . does it mean the plague is rearing its ugly head again? Or is this a one-off that I just happened to catch? There’s only one way to find out, and that is to see if there are more sick stars in the field. So that’s what I did the following two days. I had planned to visit three intertidal sites where I expect Pisaster ochraceus to live, but my concussed brain allowed me to drive to only the two nearest sites.

I went to Natural Bridges on Saturday, where I’d been seeing lots of ochre stars over the past several months. I hadn’t seen a sick star there for years, although at the outbreak of the plague in 2013 the ochre stars disappeared suddenly. In the past couple of years I’d been happy to see lots of healthy hand-sized stars there. Last weekend it seemed I saw fewer stars than I had gotten used to seeing, but none of them were sick. Whew!

Pair of healthy Pisaster ochraceus at Natural Bridges
1 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

The next day I went to Mitchell’s Cove, where I’d collected those three stars back in March. I did see lots of great-looking stars, some as small as ~6 cm in diameter and others bigger than my outstretched hand.

Trio of healthy Pisaster ochraceus at Mitchell’s Cove
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

But I also saw this:

Arm of a P. ochraceus that was killed by SSWS at Mitchell’s Cove
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

This is all that remains of an ochre star that apparently succumbed to SSWS. No other body parts are visible in the vicinity, and this arm bit was barely hanging on to the rock. Given how quickly stars can disintegrate when SSWS hits, this one probably began showing symptoms the previous day, while the tide was in and nobody would have seen it. And who knows how many other stars got sick and died without anybody noticing.

The take-home message is that I need to not let SSWS fall off my mental radar. I hope to god that my six remaining P. ochraceus in the lab remain healthy and that I can spawn them in a couple of weeks. I’ve obtained from a friend some small dishes seeded with food that tiny juvenile stars may be able to eat. I’m not too worried about getting through the larval development stage, although I probably shouldn’t get too cocky about that. In any case, it’s the post-larval juvenile survivorship that I’m really interested in. This year I don’t have Scott to help me with the husbandry and data collection. I will instead be working with another colleague, Betsy. We have a spawning date at the end of April, when the next phase of my ongoing SSWS investigation will begin.

They deserve a prettier name than “rockweed”

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

As spring arrives in full force, the algae are starting to come back in the intertidal. The past two mornings I went out on the low tides to look for something very specific (which I did find–more on that later) and noticed the resurrection of the more common red algae. So early in the season the algal thalli are nice and clean, not yet having been fouled or munched. And, like all babies, they’re pretty dang cute.

Here’s a little clump of Endocladia muricata, a red alga with the common name ‘scouring pad alga.’ I’ve also heard it referred to as ‘pubic hair alga,’ by a former instructor of marine botany who shall remain nameless.

Endocladia muricata growing on the test of the large barnacle Tetraclita rubescens, at Natural Bridges
1 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

What I tried, and failed, to capture in this photo is that the strands have little thornlike extensions that give them the texture of . . . a scouring pad. Here’s a better picture of a larger clump, and if you squint you might be able to see what I’m talking about.

Endocladia muricata
1 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

And here’s another baby red, this gorgeous little piece of Plocamium. When they’re young like this the branching structure is easier to see. And isn’t that color splendid? Especially with the green of the fresh young surfgrass.

A baby Plocamium, growing among the surfgrass Phyllospadix scouleri
1 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

What I was really thinking about this morning were the morphological similarities that can make it very difficult to distinguish between different species. For example, there are three species of rockweeds that are common around here: Fucus distichus, Silvetia compressa, and Pelvetiopsis limitata. Rockweeds are brown algae but are usually olive-green in color, and live in the high mid-intertidal above the mussel zone. In some places all three species occur together. Fucus (see below) is easy to recognize because its blades are wider and somewhat straplike, with prominent midribs. When Fucus is reproductive the tips of the blades become swollen and full of a gooey mucilage, which contains the gametes. There are other interesting things about sex in Fucus, and at some point I may address those in a later post.

Fucus distichus, a rockweed, at Franklin Point
17 July 2017
© Allison J. Gong

The other rockweeds, Silvetia and Pelvetiopsis, are a lot more difficult to distinguish. They both have less straplike blades. They share a generalized dichotomous branching pattern, but in neither is it as consistent as it is in Fucus.

Pelvetiopsis limitata at Mitchell’s Cove
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong
Silvetia compressa at Mitchell’s Cove
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

This morning these two specimens were growing side by side. In terms of scale the overall length of Silvetia is about twice that of Pelvetiopsis. Keeping that in mind, what you can’t tell from these photos is that Silvetia is also coarser and stiffer, like pasta that is about a minute short of being cooked al dente–not hard, but still more firm that you’d probably like it to be. Pelvetiopsis, on the other hand, is rather soft and much more flexible.

If I were to ask you to contrast these organisms based solely on the photos above, you might say that Silvetia looks somewhat less orderly than Pelvetiopsis. And you would be right! The almost-but-not-quite-dichotomous branching in Silvetia doesn’t always occur in the same plane, resulting in a thallus that doesn’t lie flat. Look at this:

Silvetia compressa at Mitchell’s Cove
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

See how those branches, especially the terminal branches, don’t all come off in the same direction? That’s what I mean. A cross-section of Silvetia‘s blades would be somewhere between flat and cylindrical, also contributing to the tendency of this thallus not to lie flat. This means that when you press it it does get a little mashed looking.

Pelvetiopsis, on the other hand, is a much more regular beast. The blades are distinctly linear in cross-section and generally branch in one plane. One other thing to note is that in Pelvetiopsis the terminal branch tips are very short relative to the overall thallus length compared to those of Silvetia.

Blade tips of Pelvetiopsis limitata
2 April 2017
© Allison J. Gong

A fair question to ask is: How can you tell the difference between a baby Silvetia and a full-grown Pelvetiopsis? Absolute size might not be a useful characteristic, but the other morphological traits are. The branching orientations and overall blade shapes are fairly consistent throughout the size range for each species. Consistent enough, at least, to make a good gut-level first ID guess.

I wanted to write about this because I saw the organisms, checked them off in my head, and then backed up a bit. I found myself second-guessing my instincts when it came to identifying these specimens. I mean, I know these organisms. Or, I think I do. It’s frustrating to look at the creatures I see regularly in the intertidal, organisms whose names I learned many years ago (even through the inevitable taxonomic name changes), and say to myself, “Wait a minute; is that right?” This led me to seriously consider these two rockweed species and evaluate what I really know about each of them. How do I know that one specimen is Pelvetiopsis, when it looks a hell of a lot like a baby Silvetia? I think this unusual self-doubt has to do with post-concussion syndrome. For the past several months I’ve known that words fly out of my mind as I’m trying to recall them. Why not names as well? At this stage in my recovery I’m supposed to be slowly challenging my brain as well as continuing to rest it. Finding that balance has been tricky. In a few weeks I will have my early morning low tides back. It will be easier for me to drive to intertidal sites then, and I’m going to use tidepooling as therapy. It has been good for my soul in the past, and I hope that it will also be good for my brain in the near future.

Complexity in small packages

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Last week I went up to Davenport to do some collecting in the intertidal. The tide was low enough to allow access to a particular area with two pools where I have had luck in the past finding hydroids and other cool stuff. These pools are great because they are shallow and surrounded by flat-ish rocks, so I can lie down on my stomach and really get close to where the action is. At this time of year the algae and surfgrasses are starting to regrow; the surface of the pools was covered by leaves of Phyllospadix torreyi, the narrow-leafed surfgrass.

Parting the curtain of Phyllospadix leaves to gaze into the first pool I was pleasantly surprised to find this. What does it look like to you?

Aglaophenia latirostris at Davenport Landing
8 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

There are actually two very different organisms acting as main subjects in this photo. The pink stuff is a coralline alga, a type of red alga that secretes CaCO3 in its cell walls. Coralline algae come in two different forms: one is a crust that grows over surfaces and the other, like this, grows upright and branching. Because they sequester CaCO3, corallines are likely to be affected by the projected increase of the ocean’s acidity due to the continued burning of fossil fuels. Ocean acidification is one of the sexy issues in science these days, and although it is very interesting and pertinent to today’s world it is not the topic for this post. Suffice it to say that changes in ocean chemistry are making it more difficult for any organisms to precipitate CaCO3 out of seawater to build things like shells or calcified cell walls.

It’s the tannish featherlike stuff in the photo that I was particularly interested in. At first glance the tan thing looks like a clump of a very fine, fernlike plant. It is, however, an animal. To be more specific, it is a type of colonial cnidarian called a hydroid. I love hydroids for their hidden beauty, not always visible to the naked eye, and the fact that at first glance they so closely resemble plants. In fact, many hydroid colonies grow in ways very similar to those of plants, which has often made me think that in some cases the differences between plants and animals aren’t as great as you might assume. But that’s a matter for a separate essay.

I collected this piece of hydroid and brought it back to the lab. The next day I took some photos. To give you an idea of how big the colony is, the finger bowl is about 12 cm in diameter and the longest of these fronds is about 3 cm long.

Colony of the hydroid Aglaophenia latirostris
9 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

And here’s a closer view through the dissecting scope.

The colonial hydroid Aglaophenia latirorostris
9 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Each of the fronds has a structure that we describe as pinnate, or featherlike–consisting of a central rachis with smaller branches on each side. This level of complexity can be seen with the naked eye. Zooming in under the scope brings into view more of the intricacy of this body plan:

Close-up view of a single frond of Aglaophenia latirostris, showing feeding polyps and two gonangia
9 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

At this level of magnification you can see the anatomical details that cause us to describe this animal’s structure as modular. In this context the term ‘modular’ refers to a body that is constructed of potentially independent units. A colony like this is built of several different types of modules called zooids, some of which are familiarly referred to as polyps. Each zooid has a specific job and is specialized for that job; for example, gastrozooids are the feeders, while gonozooids take care of the sexual reproduction of the colony. In this colony of Aglaophenia each of these side branches consists of several stacked gastrozooids, which you can see as the very small polyps bearing typical cnidarian feeding tentacles. Aglaophenia is a thecate hydroid; this means that each gastrozooid sits inside a tiny cup, called a theca, into which it can withdraw for protection. Those larger structures with pinkish blobs inside are called gonangia. A gonangium is a modified gonozooid, found in only thecate hydroid colonies, that contains either medusa buds or other reproductive structures called gonophores.

Pretty complicated, isn’t it? Who would expect such a small animal to have this much anatomical complexity?

In the second pool I found an entirely different type of hydroid. At first glance this one looks more animal-like than Aglaophenia does, although it is still a strange kind of animal. This is Sarsia, one of the athecate hydroids whose gastrozooids do not have a protective theca. It might be easier to think of these and other athecate hydroids (such as Ectopleura, which I wrote about here and here) as naked, with the polyps not having anywhere to hide.

Colony of the athecate hydroid Sarsia sp.
9 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Each of these polyps is about 1 cm tall. The mouth is located on the very end of the stalk. The tentacles, not quite conforming to the general rule of cnidarian polyp morphology, do not form a ring around the mouth. Instead, they are scattered over the end of the stalk.

Here’s a closer view:

Colony of the athecate hydroid Sarsia sp.
9 March 2017
© Allison J. Gong

In the hydroid version of Sarsia, the reproductive gonozooids are reduced to small buds that contain medusae. You can see a few round pink blobs in the lower right of the colony above; those are the medusa buds.  The medusae are fairly common in the local plankton, indicating that the hydroid stage is likewise abundant. Here’s a picture of a Sarsia medusa that I found in a plankton tow in May 2015.

Medusa of the genus Sarsia
1 May 2015
© Allison J. Gong

The medusa of Sarsia is about 1 mm in diameter and has four tentacles, which usually get retracted when the animal is dragged into a plankton net. Sometimes, if the medusa isn’t too beat up, it will relax and start swimming. I recorded some swimming behavior in a little medusa that I put into a small drop of water on a depression slide. It refused to let its tentacles down but you might be able to distinguish four tentacle bulbs.

There’s a lot more that I could say about hydroids and other cnidarians. They really are among the most intriguing animals I’ve had the pleasure to observe, both in the field and in the lab. I’ve always been fascinated by their biphasic life cycle, with its implications for the animals’ evolutionary past and ecological present. Perhaps I’ll write about that some time, too.

Metamorphosis

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

It has been a few weeks since I posted about my most recent batches of urchin larvae. Some strange things have been happening, and I’m not yet sure what to make of them. It would be great if animals cooperated and did what I expect; somehow that never seems to be the case. The upshot of all this uncertainty is that there is always something new to learn. I, for one, am not going to complain about that.

One noteworthy thing to report is that my hybrids all died, very quickly and unexpectedly. They had been racing through development and on the dreaded Day 24 they looked great.

Hybrid larvae of purple urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) eggs fertilized by red urchin (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) sperm, age 24 days.
23 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

And the next time I changed their water, they were all dead. So much for the hybrid vigor I had written about earlier. Teach me to get cocky and think I know what’s going on.

Fast forward to Day 52, and some of the cultures are still going strong. I originally set up four matings, and at least some individuals from each are alive. One thing that seems to happen when I start multiple batches of larvae at the same time is that the batch with the fewest numbers does the best. This time my F3xM1 mating was always the least dense culture, but some of them have already begun and completed metamorphosis. And the ones that are metamorphosing are the ones being fed what I expected to be the less desirable food source. As I said, not much of this whole experience is making sense.

The good thing is that I have an opportunity to observe these larveniles in action. As long as they don’t get arrested in this neither-here-nor-there stage, they should soon join their siblings as permanent inhabitants of the benthos.

This video contains short clips of three different larveniles. I’ve arranged the clips from earlier to later stages of metamorphosis. Although these are three separate individuals, you can imagine that each one goes all of these stages.

Having both tube feet (for crawling around the benthos) and ciliated bands (for swimming in the plankton) make these animals unsuited for either habitat. They have gotten very heavy and sink to the bottom, but it doesn’t take much water movement to knock them off their five little tube feet. It always amazes me that teensy critters like this, so fragile and easily killed, manage somehow to stick in the intertidal and survive long enough to be grown-up urchins on their own. And yet some of them will. I’ve seen it happen.

Have a heart

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

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.

Eggs of the bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus)
3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

It wasn’t until this day that I was convinced the eggs were alive. Until then they looked like undifferentiated pink blobs with not a lot going on.

Day 7: Today they had eyes! And they were swimming around inside their eggs!

Eyed larvae of the bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus)
6 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Larvae of the bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus), age 11 days
10 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Larvae of the bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus), age 15 days
14 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

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.

Let me know what you think!

Eggs of a different sort

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Back in mid-December I collected some urchins at Davenport Landing. Some of these urchins are the parents of the larvae that I’m culturing and observing now. Towards the end of the trip I flipped over some surfgrass (Phyllospadix torreyi) and saw two fish, obviously sculpins, huddled together; they had been hiding in the Phyllospadix and waiting to be submerged when the water returned with the high tide. I have a probably inordinate fondness for intertidal fishes, and love catching sculpins. These were too big to be fluffies (Oligocottus snyderi) but I couldn’t pin down an ID any closer than that. I brought them back so I could take a closer look at them in the lab.

Trying to key out the intertidal sculpins in California is an activity fraught with danger. There are about a dozen species that are likely, plus more that are occasionally encountered in the intertidal. When identifying fishes ichthyologists use meristics, or counts of things such as scales along the lateral line or hard spines in the dorsal fin, to differentiate species. Since you can’t very easily count the number of spines in the dorsal fin while observing a fish thrashing around in a ziploc bag, I needed to get them under the dissecting scope.

Here is a picture that I took of the fish this morning. This is the same posture they had when I first saw them in the field. I think the male (paler fish on the right) is guarding the darker female. Oh, and while I’m at it, I should say that skin color is an unreliable characteristic to use when IDing sculpins. Their skin color can and does change very rapidly, depending on the surroundings and the fish’s emotional state.

3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

See those little tufts on the top of the head of the fish on the left? Those are called cirri. When I was keying out these guys I narrowed down the options to either bald sculpin or mosshead sculpin, and the distribution of the cephalic cirri was the final determining factor. Mosshead sculpins (Clinocottus globiceps) have cirri densely scattered over the entire head, while in balds (Clinocottus recalvus) the cirri extend forward only to just behind the eyes; in other words, bald sculpins have no cirri between the eyes or anywhere anterior to the eyes. In my fish the cirri clearly do not extend forward of the eyes, making these bald sculpins.

Bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus) peering at the camera with justifiable suspicion.
3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong
Bald sculpin egg mass
3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

It usually takes animals a week or two to settle in after being collected from the field. After a couple of weeks the fish were eating regularly and hungrily. Sculpins don’t have an air bladder, which helps keep them from getting washed out of their home pools as the tide moves in and out, and tend to sink if they aren’t swimming. They can, however, swim very well. Once they got used to the idea of food coming at them from above they would start looking up when I removed the lid to their tank. When they’re really hungry they will swim up and attack the food, ripping it from my forceps. Otherwise I dangle food in front of their faces and they take it a little more gently. Now they are both eating well.

One of the sculpins went off its feed last week and then surprised me by producing a mass of pink eggs. She had deposited the eggs on the underside of the cover instead of on the surfgrass I have in the tank. No wonder she hadn’t been eating; with all those eggs inside her there would be no room for food! I decided to keep the eggs and see what, if anything, would happen with them.

Eggs of the bald sculpin (Clinocottus recalvus)
3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Each of the eggs is about 1mm in diameter, and they are indeed pink. They are stuck together in a pretty firm mass. I peeled it off the cover of the tank and the whole mass remained intact. I can easily pick up the mass and put it into a bowl for viewing under the dissecting microscope. At first I could see that the eggs contained a large yolk and some smaller oil droplets but I couldn’t tell whether or not they were alive. I cleaned them off to remove any dirt or scuzz, then returned them to the tank, hoping the parents wouldn’t eat them. Over the first several days I couldn’t see any change in the eggs except some of them became opaque and white, obviously dead. And it looked like maybe the stuff inside the eggs was shifting around a bit, but I wasn’t sure if that was something good going on or the beginning of decomposition. The egg mass continued to stick together, though, which I took as a positive sign.

Then yesterday when I looked at the eggs I was able to convince myself that, yes, something is happening inside them. I saw tiny little fish bodies, complete with bulbous rudimentary heads, developing on the yolks!

Developing bald sculpin (C. recalvus) embryos
3 February 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Each egg is a pale pink sphere containing a darker pink yolk. At this early stage of development the yolk takes up most of the interior space of the egg. Lying across the yolk, with a swelling at one end, is the developing fish embryo. The swelling is the head. Even at this stage the three body axes (anterior-posterior, dorsal-ventral, and left-right) have been established for quite a while. The yolk will shrink as the energy stores within it are consumed by the developing embryo. I don’t know if sculpins hatch as larvae (i.e., with a yolk sac still attached) or as juveniles (after the yolk sac has been completely consumed). I hope I get to watch these eggs and see!

Beginnings and leavings

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

A few days ago I was in the intertidal with my friend Brenna. This most recent low tide series followed on the heels of some magnificently large swells and it was iffy whether or not we’d be able to get out to where we wanted to do some collecting. Our first day we went up to Pistachio Beach, just north of Pigeon Point, where the rocky intertidal is bouldery and protected by some large rock outcrops.

Pigeon Point lighthouse, viewed from Pistachio Beach.
27 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong
27 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

So while the swell was indeed really big, we were pretty well protected in the intertidal. The Seymour Center has a standing order for slugs, hermit crabs, and algae. I was easily able to grab my limit (35) of hermit crabs over the course of the afternoon, and while it’s too early in the season for the algae to do much I had my sluggy friend with me to take care of finding nudibranchs, which left me free to let my attention wander as it would.

Codium setchellii at Pistachio Beach.
27 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

The very first thing to catch my eye as we go out there was the coenocytic green alga Codium setchellii, which I wrote about last time. I’ve seen and collected C. setchellii from this site before, but don’t remember seeing it in such large conspicuous patches. I need to review what I learned about the phenology of various intertidal algae, but here’s a thought. Maybe Codium is an early-season species that gets outcompeted by the plethora of fast-growing red algae later in the spring. Red algae were present at Pistachio Beach but not in the lush (and slippery!) abundance that I’ll see in, say, June. I’m willing to bet that Codium will be less abundant in the next few months.

Leptasterias sp. at Pigeon Point.
24 April 2016
© Allison J. Gong

In my experience, the six-armed stars of the genus Leptasterias have always been the most abundant sea stars on the stretch of coastline between Franklin Point and Pescadero. Even though they are small–a monstrously ginormous one would be as large as the palm of my hand–they are very numerous in the low-mid intertidal. I’ve seen them in all sorts of pinks and grays with varying amounts of mottling. Alas, I don’t know of any really reliable marks for identifying them to species in the field.

Unlike other familiar stars, such as the various Pisaster species and the common Patiria miniata (bat stars), which reproduce by broadcast spawning their gametes into the water, Leptasterias is a brooder. Males release sperm that is somehow acquired by neighboring females and used to fertilize their eggs. There isn’t any space inside a star’s body to brood developing embryos, so a Leptasterias female tucks her babies underneath her oral surface and then humps up over them. Leptasterias also humps up when preying on small snails and such, so that particular posture could indicate either feeding or brooding.

Here’s a Leptasterias humped up on a rock, photographed last spring:

Leptasterias sp. at Pigeon Point.
5 May 2016
© Allison J. Gong

The only way to tell if a Leptasterias star is feeding or brooding is to pick it up and look at the underside. I did that the other day and saw this:

Brooding Leptasterias sp. star at Pistachio Beach.
27 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Those little orange roundish things are developing embryos. While the mother is brooding she cannot feed, and can use only the tips of her arms to hang onto rocks. Don’t worry, I replaced this star where I found her and made sure she had attached herself as firmly as possible before I left her. In a few weeks her babies will be big enough to crawl away and she’ll be able to feed again.

Looks like the reproductive season for Leptasterias has begun.

The next day Brenna and I went to Davenport, again hoping to get lucky despite another not-so-low tide and big swell.

Davenport Landing Beach and adjacent rocky areas.
© Google Earth

Davenport Landing Beach is a popular sandy beach, with rocky areas to the north and south. The topography of the north end is quite variable, with some large shallow pools and lots of vertical real estate to make the biota very diverse and interesting. The big rocks also provide shelter from the wind, a big plus for the intrepid marine biologist who insists on going out even when it’s crazy windy. The southern rocky area is very different, consisting of flat benches that slope gently towards the ocean, with comparatively little vertical terrain. The southern end of the beach is always more easily accessible, which is why I almost always go to the north. But this day the north wasn’t going to happen. The winter storms had washed away at least a vertical meter of sand between the rock outcrops. That and the not-so-low tide combined for conditions that made even getting out to the intended collecting site a pretty dodgy affair. So Brenna and I trudged across the beach to the south.

28 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Along the way we saw lots of these thumb-sized objects on the beach. At first glance they look like pieces of plastic, but after you see a few of them you realize that they are clearly (ha!) gelatinous things of biological origin. They are slipper-shaped and you can stick them over the ends of your fingers. They have a bumpy texture on the outside and are smooth on the inside.

Any guesses as to what they are?

Pseudoconch of Corolla spectabilis, washed up on Davenport Landing Beach.
28 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

These funny little things are the pseudoconchs of a pelagic gastropod named Corolla spectabilis. What is a pseudoconch, you ask? If we break down the word into its Greek roots we have ‘pseudo-‘ which means ‘false’ and ‘conch’ which means shell. Thus a pseudoconch is a false shell. In this case, ‘false’ refers to the fact that this shell is both internal (as opposed to external) and uncalcified.

The animal that made these pseudoconchs, Corolla spectabilis, is a type of gastropod called a pteropod (Gk: ‘wing-foot’). Pteropods are pelagic relatives of nudibranchs, sea hares, and other marine slugs. They are indeed entirely pelagic, swimming with the elongated lateral edges of their foot. Like almost all pelagic animals, Corolla has a transparent gelatinous body. Even their shell is gelatinous, rather flimsier than most shells, but it serves to provide support for the animal’s body as it swims.

You can read more about Corolla spectabilis and see pictures and video here.

Why, you may be wondering, do the pseudoconchs of C. spectabilis end up on the beach, and where is the rest of the animal? The body of Corolla and other pteropods is soft and fragile. When strong storms and heavy swells seep through the area, the water gets churned up and pteropods (and other pelagic animals) get tossed about and shredded. This leaves their pseudoconchs to float on currents until they are either themselves demolished by turbulence or cast upon the beach. Corolla is commonly seen in Monterey Bay, and it is not unusual to find their pseudoconchs on the beaches after a series of severe storms.

Brenna and I were wondering if we could preserve the pseudoconchs somehow. I took several back to the lab and tried to dry them, thinking that they might behave like Velella velella does when dried. Unfortunately, the next day they had shriveled into unrecognizable little blobs of dried snot, and the day after that they had disintegrated completely into piles of dust. Maybe drying them more slowly would work. Something to consider the next time I run across pseudoconchs in the sand.

Simply green

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

A few days ago I told my friend Brenna that I’d hunt around in the marine lab for a bit of a green alga that she wants to press. I had a pretty good idea of where to look, only the animals I’d seen it on had been removed from the exhibit hall. I asked for and got permission to examine the animals behind the scenes. And fortunately I had remembered correctly, and I was able to pick off some nice clumps of dark green stuff.

Bryopsis corticulans is a filamentous green alga. It grows to about 10 cm in length and is a dark olive color. When emersed it sometimes looks almost black. I’ve seen it in the intertidal in a few places, where at low tide it resembles nothing so much as a shapeless slime. It’s very difficult to see the beauty of organisms when they’re out of their natural element, which in this case is water.

B. corticulans emersed during low tide at Mitchell’s Cove.
8 June 2016
© Allison J. Gong

But see how pretty it is when submerged?

Bryopsis corticulans
23 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

One of the reasons I love the algae is their very inscrutability. I enjoy discovering the beauty of organisms that, at first glance, don’t look like much. Many of the filamentous algae, both the greens and the reds, have a delicate structure that requires close examination to be appreciated. Fortunately, I have access to microscopes, so close examination is very easy.

The thallus of B. corticulans is relatively simple, consisting of a bipectinate arrangement of filaments.

Apical tip of Bryopsis corticulans.
23 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Here’s a closer view:

Thallus of Bryopsis corticulans.
23 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

This is a shot of the main axis and side filaments. The small green blobs are chloroplasts. One thing to notice is that there are no crosswalls separating any of the filaments. That’s because the thallus is coenocytic, essentially one large cell with a continuous cytoplasm. Coenocytic cells are common in fungi, the red and green filamentous algae, and a few animals. In animals, coenocytic cells are often referred to as syncytial. They can arise in one of two ways: (1) adjacent cells fuse together; or (2) nuclear replication occurs as usual during normal mitosis but cytokinesis (division of the cytoplasm) does not. However the syncytium arises, it can result in very large cells. Even though B. corticulans itself is a small organism, some algae in the Bryopsidales consist of single cells that can be over 1 meter long!

Sometimes things that appear simple at first glance conceal a deeper complexity when you look more closely.

Hope for the future

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

It has been almost three and a half years since I first documented seastar wasting syndrome (SSWS) in the lab. Since then many stars have died, in the field and in the lab, and more recently some species seem to be making a comeback in the intertidal. This circumstantial evidence may not be reason enough to conclude that the epidemic is over, but I think there is reason to be hopeful. Any disease outbreak eventually runs its course, and despite its death toll there are always at least some survivors. And I have an individual star that was very sick but seems to be recovering.

In September of 2015 one of my bat stars (Patiria miniata) developed the first tell-tale lesion of SSWS on its aboral surface. At the time the lesion was small (less than 10 mm in diameter) and superficial. Knowing that SSWS starts with minor symptoms and rapidly progresses to something horrific within a day or so, I wanted to keep an eye on this star. It held the same morbid fascination as a car accident or any other impending catastrophe.

5 September 2015

Bat star (Patiria miniata) with small aboral lesions.
4 September 2015
© Allison J. Gong
Dermal lesion on the aboral surface of a bat star (P. miniata).
5 September 2015
© Allison J. Gong

24 November 2015

By November 2015 the main lesion hadn’t grown much but a few others had developed. The star still wasn’t acting sick and was eating every once in a while, although it occasionally ignored the food that I offered.

Bat star (P. miniata) with aboral lesions.
24 November 2015
© Allison J. Gong

So far, so good. I was thinking that the star doesn’t look too much worse, so maybe it wouldn’t keep getting sicker. I checked on it regularly, offered food a few times a week, and left it alone.

4 May 2016

Several months later I noticed that the first lesion had gotten much deeper. The outer dermal layers had been completely compromised, exposing the animal’s internal organs (gonad and digestive caecum) to the external environment. This was bad, very bad. Even in stars, internal organs are supposed to be internal, except when stars extrude their stomachs to feed.

Bat star (P. miniata) with deep aboral lesion.
4 May 2016
© Allison J. Gong
Lesion on aboral surface of a bat star (P. miniata). Note the internal structures that are exposed to the surrounding seawater.
4 May 2016
© Allison J. Gong

This was the point in time when things started going south. The star lost the ability to maintain its internal turgor pressure and became lethargic and floppy. It stopped eating, or even responding to food. It spent most of its time in a corner of the seawater table where it lives, although a few times I saw it wrapped around one of the hoses that feeds the table. However, its body never started disintegrating the way I’d seen with other SSWS victims.

19 January 2017

Fast-forward another several months. About a month ago the sick bat star began perking up a bit when I placed food near the tip of one of the arms. A week later it actually wrapped its arm around the food, and I assume ate it. It has since been eating about once a week, after fasting for at least eight months. I began to think it would recover.

Today I had some time to photograph the star again, and it really appears to be doing much better!

Bat star (P. miniata) with healing lesions.
19 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

The lesions are apparently healing over; at any rate, the internal organs are no longer exposed to the outside. The body margin between the arms has a few small divots, but they look superficial. Lately the star has been more active, too, cruising around the table instead of hunkering down in a corner. I’m going to keep feeding it to see if it continues to improve.

One of the most remarkable things about many animals with a decentralized nervous system, such as echinoderms and cnidarians, is their ability to regenerate lost parts and repair damage to their bodies. This bat star is a prime example. It has been sick for almost a year and a half now, and for at least half that time it hasn’t eaten. Yet it somehow had the metabolic reserves to heal a major wound to its body wall. That’s some astounding resilience there. I am very impressed, and you should be, too.

The hybrids are winning!

Posted on by Allison J. Gong

Although at this stage it’s a close race. Two and a half weeks ago I spawned sea urchins in the lab, setting up several purple urchin crosses with the hope of re-doing the feeding experiment that I lost this past summer when I was on the DL (that’s Disabled List, for those of you who don’t speak baseball). I was also fortunate enough to set up a hybrid cross, fertilizing purple urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, or “Purp”) eggs with red urchin (Mesocentrotus franciscanus, or “Red”) sperm. I would have done the reciprocal hybrid cross (red eggs by purp sperm) as well if I’d gotten any of female red urchins to spawn. However it wasn’t really spawning season for the reds, and I consider myself lucky to have persuaded that one male to release some sperm for me.

This is the first time that I’ve tried to raise the hybrid larvae, although I know it can be done because my colleagues Betsy and John did it many years ago, before I came to the marine lab. All of my larvae are the exact same age and are being raised side-by-side, so I can make direct comparisons between the Purp by Purp crosses and the Purp by Red hybrids. Incidentally, when speaking or writing about a hybrid cross the convention I’ve adopted is to reference the female parent first, so when I say Purp by Red I mean a Purple eggs fertilized by Red sperm. A Red by Purp hybrid would logically result from red urchin eggs fertilized by purple urchin sperm.

My experience raising sea urchin larvae is that things almost always go well for the first 48 hours or so; most (but not all) of the fertilized eggs develop into embryos and undergo the crucial processes of gastrulation and hatching. In some cultures the hatching rate is close to 100%. After that there’s a window of 3-4 days when cultures can crash for no apparent reason, although food availability or quality may be a factor. If the larvae make it past their first week of post-hatching life they generally cruise along until the next danger period which occurs at about 24 days. I change the water in the culture jars and observe the larvae under the microscope twice a week.

Today the larvae are 18 days old. It’s a little early for that second mortality period, but some of the Purp by Purp cultures never really took off. The larvae don’t seem to be growing or developing as quickly as I’m used to. Perhaps this has to do with lower water temperatures, especially after the prolonged period of high temps in 2014-2015. In any case, two of the four Purp by Purp crosses are doing well and the other two are just hanging in there.

There are two things I can see with the naked eye that give me a heads-up when cultures are crashing: the first sign is an accumulation of debris at the bottom of the jar and the second is an absence of larvae in the water column. The debris can be due to excess food, a build-up of fecal matter (not usually the case, as I’m pretty good at doing the water changes on time), the disintegration of larval bodies, or some combination thereof. If the water column is clear then the culture has already crashed and everybody is dead.

Today one of my jars had crashed. The water column was very clear and there was a lot of fluff at the bottom of the jar. I’d been wondering if I could figure out what the fluff was made of, so I sucked up a bit in a pipet and examined it under the microscope. I thought I’d see dead algal cells or pieces that look like defecated algal cells. This is what I saw:

18 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

Silly me. I had forgotten that the corpses of pluteus larvae would disintegrate pretty quickly, leaving behind only the skeletal rods. The rods get all tangled together and trap the organic stuff, which is probably a mixture of uneaten and defecated algal cells and the soft tissues of the larval bodies. This explains the clear water column in the jar.

While the Purp by Purp larvae have had mixed success so far, the Purp by Red hybrids have been doing well. From the outset they appeared to be more robust than the Purps, and even though the fertilization rate was only about 50% the post-hatching mortality seems low. The hybrid larvae are also larger than the Purps, and are developing more quickly. In the two photos below the scale bar indicates 100 µm.

Pluteus larva of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, age 18 days.
17 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong
Pluteus larva of a hybrid cross between S. purpuratus and Mesocentrotus franciscanus, age 18 days.
17 January 2017
© Allison J. Gong

The hybrid larva is about 10% larger than the Purp larva. Other than that they look similar, but to me the hybrid larva seems farther along the developmental process: its arms are proportionally longer and have a more mature look (although I don’t have any way to describe that to a naive observer). There’s something about the gestalt of the animal that makes me think it’s more robust than the Purp individual.

We’ll see how the pure Purps and the hybrids do from here on. I actually have the Purp larvae divided up into different feeding treatments, which I may discuss in a future blog post. In the meantime I’m trying to baby the hybrid larvae as much as possible, to maximize their probability of successful metamorphosis in six weeks or so.