Like many (most?) Californians, I was swept up in the 2023 wildflower superbloom, which followed on the record-setting rain and snowfall we saw in the previous winter. The rain caused disruptions in many areas of California; in my area, I had multiple students whose homes were flooded when the levee along the Pajaro River failed. I didn’t have to deal with anything nearly that serious, although I did have to make a lot of schedule adjustments for the field classes that I taught.
In my rather desultory way, I noticed that the flowers seem to be blooming later than usual. In previous years (2017 and 2019) we went flower hunting during my spring break at the end of March, and in some places the peak of the bloom had already finished. This year (2023) we went in mid-April, and the many of the flowers had yet to reach peak bloom. Another thing we did differently this year was to bypass most of the sites at lower elevations such as Carrizo Plain, which were way too crowded to be thoroughly enjoyable, and visit the hills where the roads were less tourist-friendly and thus less traveled. In general, flowers at the higher elevations are always a little behind those at lower elevations.
I took a ton of photos, of course, and the one that most accurately encapsulates the splendiferousness of the views is this one:
This was the typical color palette in these hills. At first I thought all the yellow was due to goldfields, which we had seen at lower elevations, but it turned out to be something entirely different. And note that there are two distinct shades of purple. Who are these? Here’s a key to the different floral colors in this landscape.
Flower A: Common hillside daisy (Monolopia lanceolata)
I remember seeing Castilleja exserta on previous trips, in dry, sandy areas. But I’d never seen dense patches of them, so that was new and fun. They are the flowers that make up the violet purple color. It is a low growing flower and seems to occur in open places among grasses.
The bluer shade of purple is due to Phacelia. I’m not sure which species, and my observation on iNaturalist hasn’t yet been identified. I think it’s P. ciliata, as it looks right and has been found in this area.
Flower D: California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Last, but certainly not least, was our state flower, the California poppy. We did see some dense patches of poppies in the hills but there were more prevalent in the flatlands—Carrizo Plain, Antelope Valley, and the Shell Creek Road area were chock full of poppies.
What the photos don’t depict is the dynamic aspect of these landscapes. At these elevations there was almost always a soft breeze, and the flowers sway with the wind. It’s really very soothing to watch. I had to zoom way in to record this video, but it’s totally worth it.
Just for funsies, I want to show off what might be my favorite photo of the weekend, taken at the end of the day. I encountered these handsome fellows along the Wildflower Loop at Windwolves Preserve. They both stared at me for so long that I had to take their picture. I never thought a bovine portrait would wind up in my portfolio, but there you have it.
With so much emphasis on the wildflower superbloom, one can easily overlook the torrential and destructive rains that were at least partly responsible for it. Ongoing climate change may mean that California oscillates between severe drought and flooding rains for the foreseeable future. It’s more than a little unsettling, but at least the rains bring flowers for us to enjoy.
This summer we finally got to take a trip that had originally been scheduled for 2020. It was an Earthwatch expedition to Acadia National Park in Maine. It was also the first time I’d traveled outside the Pacific time zone, flown, and taken public transit since the COVID-19 pandemic began. All of those were stressful. I get that people are “over” the pandemic and tired of taking precautions, but seriously? During our travels before and after the expedition we saw very few other people wearing masks, despite being packed into subway cars, stations, and restaurants. We avoided indoor attractions and spent our time walking around outside.
This particular Earthwatch expedition is all about climate change. During the week we participated in three different, but related, research projects in the park, mostly on the Schoodic Peninsula. The first was called Refugia. At first I couldn’t tell if that was a place name, a project title, or something else. Turns out that it refers to the actual project. The target of this project is a plant called black crowberry, Empetrum nigrum. Black crowberry is a low-growing tundra plant, living near its southern limit at Acadia. This is possible because the Schoodic Peninsula juts down into the Gulf of Maine, a region where cold water from the Arctic—specifically, the Labrador Current—meets warm water from the Gulf Stream. Thus, the Schoodic Peninsula may be indeed be a climate refuge for E. nigrum.
The Gulf of Maine, however, seems to be warming more quickly than other ocean regions, possibly due to northward extensions of the Gulf Stream1. As a result, plants such as E. nigrum may be a bellwether for how the ecology of Acadia will be affected by climate change.
The Refugia study examines abundance of E. nigrum along the coast of Acadia, as well as phenology of flowering and fruiting. Our Earthwatch group sampled at Schoodic Point and Little Moose Island, which is an actual island only at high tide. We were in Acadia during the mid-June spring tide series, which is always one of the most extreme of the year, so Little Moose Island was easily accessible for several hours.
The study itself involved setting up two perpendicular transects and collecting several sets of data:
Geographic data—GPS location and direction
Photos for iNaturalist
Presence/absence of E. nigrum at 10 cm intervals
Presence/absence of flowers and fruits
Visual estimation of the percent of E. nigrum that is alive vs. dead
We worked in teams of four, with each pair setting up and evaluating one of the transects.
Here’s how E. nigrum appears in its natural habitat:
The crowberry is the red-and-green plant growing low among the rocks. Like all tundra plants, E. nigrum grows low to the ground and doesn’t get more than about 15 cm tall. We were told that the red bits were the parts that died back over the winter, and the green was the new spring growth.
Here’s a close-up look at the carpet of crowberry:
We found E. nigrum mostly in open areas, but also occasionally in the spruce forest where there is much less light at ground level. It seemed not to require much soil, and was often found tucked between rocks on the coast above the high tide line.
Black crowberry fruits are small berries, green when unripe and ripening to a blackish purple. The fruits we saw, ripe and unripe, ranged in size from 2 to 8 mm. We were told that they were unpalatable even when ripe.
The protocol had us setting up a 5-meter transect parallel to the coast, where we saw a patch of E. nigrum, and then a second 5-meter transect perpendicular to the first at its midpoint. The result is a big plus sign draped over or through whatever terrain happened to be there. We had to do quite a bit of climbing up and down rocks and pushing through bushes. If this were in California we’d have to worry about poison oak. Fortunately, they don’t have poison oak in Maine, and there was no poison ivy at any of our study sites.
The last part of the protocol was to estimate the percent of E. nigrum that was alive, in a 1-meter belt that straddles each of the transect lines. This is one of those qualitative evaluations that at first would seem to be all over the place, depending on the observer. However, the study takes into account any variation resulting from data collectors’ individual estimates by pooling the percentages into bins. So instead of having to agree that 22% of the crowberry in a certain belt transect is alive, we only had to agree on a bin of, say, 20-30%. To give you an example, here’s a photo of a patch of crowberry:
What percentage of this crowberry is alive, in your estimation?
I should mention that we had this glorious sunny weather on only one day that we worked on the Refugia project. The first day it was raining, which was fine because we all had brought rain gear with us. But the rain made it difficult to work with the tablets on which we were recording data. The wet screens didn’t want to register our finger taps, but would instead register rain drops as touches. That was incredibly frustrating. We persisted and managed.
Over the summer several other groups of Earthwatch volunteers will collect additional data for the project. I think we set a pretty high standard for the sheer number of transect pairs we completed. I liked working on this project because I got to learn about the ecology of a plant that had been entirely unknown to me. That’s always fun!
1Seidov, Dan, et al. 2021. “Recent warming and decadal variability of Gulf of Maine and Slope Water.” Limnology and Oceanography Vol. 66: 3472-3488.
One year ago today a lightning storm settled over the Santa Cruz Mountains and dry lightning ignited a bunch of wildfires. Given the drier-than-normal conditions at the time the fires took off like crazy and eventually merged into one megablaze that CalFire dubbed the CZU Lightning Complex fire. The CZU Lightning Complex fire burned over 80,000 acres in Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties before being contained by CalFire on 22 September. It raged through Big Basin Redwood State Park and destroyed the buildings at the park headquarters up in the mountains. Several mountain communities were threatened, with over 1400 structures destroyed. I personally know two families whose homes were lost, and many others who evacuated. We were also ready to evacuate, with bags packed and a place to flee to.
To commemorate the first anniversary of the CZU Lightning Complex fire the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History and the Santa Cruz Public Library put together a series of events called “CZU and You” to teach the public about this particular natural disaster. This past weekend we attended a walk through Rancho del Oso, led by Richard Fletcher, who is one of the California State Parks interpretive rangers. Rancho del Oso sits in a little valley that I think of as the “bottom” of Big Basin Redwood State Park. It ends at Highway 1 directly opposite Waddell Beach. In previous years I have taken my Ecology class to Rancho del Oso for the first field trip of the semester. Rancho del Oso was cleared to reopen for visitors on weekends only just a few weeks ago.
The Nature and History Center at Rancho del Oso is housed in the building that was the residence of Hulda Hoover McLean, who was the niece of President Herbert Hoover. Hulda and her husband, Charles, raised a family in the Rancho; Hulda taught her children about the natural history of the area. She sold her 40 acres of land and her home to the Sempervirens Fund in 1985, with the intent to create a place where people could visit and learn about this part of the natural world. There was one ranger on site on August 16, 2020 when dry lightning ignited the fire on the hillside directly across Waddell Creek from the nature center. He managed to flag down a single fire truck and crew. Working through the night this handful of people built a backfire to burn up the hill towards the flames that had sped around the house and were approaching from the other side, and sweeping off the burning embers that landed on the roof
The first things that Ranger Fletcher showed us were some cones from Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) trees. He described this species is being moderately serotinous, meaning that seeds don’t fall out of the cones until they are exposed to the heat of a fire. Heat dries and opens up the cones, allowing the seeds to fall and be dispersed.
Unopened cones of Pinus radiataScorched and opened cones of Pinus radiata
In the area this backfire burned, literally across the driveway from the nature center, we could see some of the fire followers. These are the first plants to show up after a fire. Some of them may have arrived by seed, but many are regrowth from underground roots or bulbs.
The naked lady lilies (Amaryllis belladonna) are non-native ornamental bulbs that have been planted in gardens all over the region. They are called naked ladies because their leaves die back completely before the stalk blooms in late summer; you can see all the brown leaves at the bases of the flower spikes. In this first bloom season after the fire they seem more vibrantly pink than usual. The other foliage in the foreground is a blackberry (Rubus sp.) that could be either native or not. In the background you can see some bracken fern (Pteridium sp.).
After a disturbance such as a fire the process of ecological succession is reset. Given the European colonizers’ habit of suppressing all fire, it had been at least 100 years since the Waddell Valley burnt. In the many decades since the previous fire the homesteaders and ranchers had planted all sorts of non-native ornamental plants in their gardens. The naked ladies and invasive blackberries are examples of plants that are well suited for our Mediterranean climate, and they certainly made a showy return after the CZU Lightning Complex fire.
Fortunately it’s not just the non-natives that are coming back. The ranger was excited to point out that one yellow bush lupine (Lupinus arboreus) had popped up on this same slope. Lupines are good plants to have on burnt slopes because they help stabilize the soil. They are also nitrogen fixers, which makes the soil more hospitable to other, hopefully native, plants.
One plant that I hadn’t expected to see in this location is Equisetum, the horsetail. There is a lot of Equisetum along the Marsh Trail, and I associated this plant with wetlands. So why was it growing on this particular slope, which is measurably drier than the Marsh Trail? It was growing really well, too!
We hiked the Marsh Trail—how could there be so many mosquitos when we’re in such a bad drought??—and crossed Waddell Creek to where the Skyline to the Sea trail ends (or begins, if you were to start at the beach and hike uphill). This is where Ranger Fletcher told us more about the fire itself and its ongoing effects.
We were hiking at Rancho del Oso on a foggy morning. It was so very different last year, when the marine layer abandoned us early in the summer and left us to dry out just in time for the dry lightning in mid-August. But this is the area where the first lightning strikes hit ground:
Once the fire was extinguished this hill was covered with black, burnt vegetation. Anything green is vegetation that has grown since then.
CalFire declared the CZU Lightning Complex fire contained on 22 September 2020 and controlled on 23 December. What nobody knew at the time was that the fire remained burning underground. Considering their great height, redwood trees don’t have deep roots. But they have lateral networks of roots that entwine with those of neighboring trees (which are likely to be clonemates) and form a more or less solid mesh that holds all of the trees up. The fire travelled along this root network and continues to burn. One of our group asked “What is there to burn, if the roots have already burnt?” and Ranger Fletcher explained that now there are tons of charcoal buried in the ground, and we all know how well charcoal burns, right? Not being able to detect where roots are burning underground means it’s difficult to evaluate trails and know when they are safe. Just last week a ranger was working up at Big Basin and stepped into what turned out to be a cavern containing burning embers. CalFire estimates that the fire will continue to burn underground for another four years. Trees that were weakened or killed by the fire will also be falling. It will be several years before the Skyline to the Sea trail opens again. But in the lifespan of a redwood forest, five or even ten years would be a blink of the eye. And I’d just as soon not step into a burning hole while hiking, thank you very much.
On this side of Waddell Creek you can see the meadow that acts as a buffer zone between the mountains and the ocean. When wildfires burn through hilly areas, we worry about winter rains causing mudslides. This past winter we got hardly any rain at all, so at least the mudslides didn’t materialize. But even when there aren’t mudslides, a lot of nutrients wash downhill towards the ocean. The meadow is a biological sponge that soaks up these nutrients and keeps them from creating problems in the marine habitat. This is one of the reasons that wetlands are such important players in the health of coastal ecosystems. I took this photo from the Highway 1 bridge that crosses Waddell Creek. Just on the other side of the highway the creek spills onto Waddell Beach.
From a fire behavior perspective the CZU Lightning Complex fire was unusual. Fires usually burn up hills, but this one burned downhill towards the ocean. Waddell Beach is almost always foggy, and the marine layer can be felt away from the beach, as it was on our most recent visit to Rancho del Oso. This marine influence should have acted to keep the fire from racing downhill as fast as it did. Alas, the marine layer was not doing its job last summer. If it had been, we wouldn’t have seen so many lightning strikes in the first place. The paucity of rain from the previous winter didn’t help things, either. Climate change is coming back to bite us in the ass. Around the world we are seeing extreme weather events, from severe drought to equally devastating floods to heat records tumbling by the wayside. We are living in the era of anthropogenic climate change, and we will not be alive when an equilibrium returns to Earth’s climate. In the timeframe of a human lifespan, however, it is nice to see and document how this small part of the landscape is recovering from last year’s fires. Now that Rancho del Oso is open again I’ll try to get up there every so often to record changes in my nature journal.
The first field trip of the semester for my Ecology class is always a jaunt up the coast to Rancho del Oso and Waddell Beach. It’s a great place to start the practice of observing nature, because we can explore the forest in the morning, have lunch, and then wander along the beach in the afternoon. We really are lucky to have such a wide variety of habitats to study around here, which makes taking students out into the field really fun. My passion and expertise will always belong with the marine invertebrates, but it’s good for me to work outside my comfort zone and immerse myself in habitats I don’t already know very well. During this year’s class trip to Waddell Beach I was struck by some things I had seen before but never paid much heed to. And also one very big thing that caught everybody’s attention.
Depending on how much rain has fallen recently, Waddell Creek may or may not flow all the way into the ocean. Since California has a short rainy season, there are months when the creek is completely cut off from the ocean, due to both a lack of flow and the accumulation of sand on the beach. So far this rainy season, which began on 1 October 2019, we’ve gotten about 93% of our normal rain. However, we had a very wet December, and almost no rain since then. I wasn’t sure whether or not Waddell would be flowing into the ocean. It was.
The students had many questions: What was he doing there? Was he sick? Was it a male? Was he dead? Well, no, he wasn’t dead. And while I guessed from this view that it was a subadult male, I was secretly relieved to be proved right when we walked down the creek (keeping the mandated distance away from him) and looked back to see his big schnozz.
The elephant seal breeding season is coming to an end, but animals will continue to haul out and rest on the beach. This subadult male clearly isn’t going to be dethroning any beachmasters this year, so he has taken the safe route and chosen a beach away from the breeding ground at Año Nuevo, which is ~2 miles up the coast. What I really liked about this particular animal was that we could see the tracks he made getting himself up the beach to the creek.
So that was the big thing. Eye-catching he certainly was, but to my mind not nearly as interesting as the small things we paid more attention to on the beach. It is tempting to think of sandy beaches as relatively lifeless places, compared to something like a rocky intertidal or a redwood forest. But for some reason, this trip I became intrigued by the dune vegetation. At first glance a sand dune seems to be a very inhospitable place for plants, and it is. Sand is unstable and moves around all the time, making it difficult for roots to hang on. Sand also doesn’t hold water, so dune vegetation must be able to withstand very dry conditions. It’s not surprising that dune plants have some of the same adaptations as desert plants.
I love this little sand verbena (Abronia latifolia)! It is native to the west coast of North America, from Santa Barbara County to the Canadian border. It is a sand stabilizer, decreasing the erosion that occurs. The sand verbenas also live in deserts; I saw them at Anza-Borrego and Joshua Tree last year. The beach sand verbena grows low to the ground, probably as a way to shelter from the winds that come screaming down the coast. Cute little plant, isn’t it?
The other yellow beach plant we saw was the beach suncup (Camissoniopsis cheiranthifolia), a member of the primrose family.
Like the yellow sand verbena, the beach suncup is a California native. It grows along the entire coast, including the Channel Islands. Also like the yellow sand verbena, the suncup grows low to the ground. Its leaves are thick and a little waxy, to help the plant resist desiccation.
And now for the non-natives. I must admit, I had given very little thought to the plant life on my local beaches. I’d seen and studied beach wrack, but to be honest most of my attention is usually directed towards the water instead of up high on the beach where the plants live. This day I decided to photograph the plants.
This plant is a little succulent called European sea rocket (Cakile maritma). As the common name implies, its native habitat is dunes in Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia.
Cakile maritima has several life history traits that enable it to be carried around the world. It produces a lot of seeds, more so than the native dune plants. The seeds are dispersed by water and can be transported long distances in the ballast water of ships, which is probably how it got to California in the first place. It tolerates disturbances better than native dune vegetation, which allows it to be a superior competitor. Cakile maritima is considered to be invasive, meaning that it can survive and spread on its own in a non-native habitat, but its effects seem to be restricted to beach dunes. Despite its ability to thrive and outcompete our native beach plants, it appears to be unable to expand away from the sand.
Our surprise of the day was a beach mushroom! None of us had seen them before. This is Psathyrella ammophila, the beach brittlestem mushroom. Like sea rocket, it is also a European invasive. We were perplexed by this mushroom. Most of a fungus’s body (mycelium) is underground. The mycelium spreads through soils as very thin threads called hyphae. Every once in a while the mycelium sends up a fruiting body, which is what we call a mushroom. There is no way to know, from the location of mushrooms, where and how far the mycelium spreads underground.
The presence of a mushroom on the beach means that a fungal mycelium is feeding on something in the sand. There isn’t much plant matter buried on beaches, but we hypothesized that perhaps one of the logs from the forest had washed down the creek and been deposited on the beach. It would then be buried in sand, along with all the mycelium it carried, and a mushroom could have sprouted up through the sand.
Well, it was a good hypothesis.
I posted my photo to a mushroom ID page, and it was identified as Psathyrella ammophila. My submission to iNaturalist came back with the same result. A little research led me to another non-native invasive species, Ammophila arenaria, the European marram grass. Notice that the species epithet of the mushroom is the same as the genus name of the plant? That was my first clue. Marram grass is one of the most noxious weed species on the California coast. It was intentionally introduced to the beaches in the mid-1800s, to provide stability to the dunes. It is very good at that, but also spreads very rapidly, usually growing upwards away from the ocean. That said, marram grass also breaks off chunks that can survive in the ocean and float off to colonize new beaches.
The fungus Psathyrella ammophila grows as a saprobe on the decaying roots of Ammophila arenaria. No doubt the fungus was introduced along with the marram grass as an inadvertent hitchhiker. Since there is so much marram grass on our beaches, it’s safe to assume that there is a lot of Psathyrella, too. That means it’s time to start looking for mushrooms on the beach!
Joshua Tree National Park gained a certain notoriety this past winter, when idiots went there during the federal government shutdown and trashed the place. The vandals chopped down the iconic Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), let their dogs run around unleashed, left litter scattered over the landscape, and carved new roads through the desert. I’d like to give most people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they didn’t realize the damage they were doing to the park. However, it takes only a few bad apples to destroy a public resource for everybody, as we’ve all experienced at some point.
The very first thing I learned about Joshua Tree is that it has two distinct desert habitats. Hey, I’m a marine biologist, and the desert–any desert–is new territory for me. None of this landscape has been anywhere near the ocean for millions of years! Anyway, the eastern half of the park is Colorado Desert, which is similar to what we had seen at Anza-Borrego State Park. Many of the plants in this region were also familiar to us because we had seen them in Anza-Borrego, but for the most part were more abundant here in Joshua Tree.
For example, we saw many more bluebells (Phacelia campanularia) at Joshua Tree than in Anza-Borrego. The P. campanularia at Joshua Tree also looked healthier (more robust and vigorous, less spindly) than they did in Anza-Borrego. Perhaps the higher elevation of the Colorado Desert in Joshua Tree (approximately 914 meters, or 3000 feet) compared to Anza-Borrego (182 meters, or 597 feet) accounts for this observation.
I really liked the Colorado Desert in Joshua Tree. Even though it was the same ecosystem as what we saw in Anza-Borrego, here the flowers seemed more colorful and striking. The yellows were a little brighter, and the pinks and blues a little deeper. The scenery was breathtaking everywhere I looked. I wish my photos could do justice to the beauty of the landscape.
Aside from the desert bluebells, other flowers that we had seen at Anza-Borrego included the brittlebush (Encelia farinosa), which seems to be ubiquitous in the Colorado Desert. The Arizona lupine (Lupinus arizonicus) was also common in Joshua Tree; like the bluebells, these appeared to be more robust here than in Anza-Borrego.
There were new flowers, too. My favorite, which I didn’t see a lot of, was this desert globemallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua:
Against the prevailing palette of yellows and purples, this orange really stood out and caught the eye. This plant is also called the apricot mallow, for obvious reasons.
Some other flowers that we saw:
Arizona lupine (Lupinus arizonicus)Desert star (Monoptilon bellidiforme)Phacelia sp.
Among all the colorful flowers in the overall landscape, there was this very subtle plant, easily overlooked by eyes accustomed to more brilliant blossoms.
Something that tickled my funny bone was the little chia plant, Salvia columbariae. It looks like a prickly purple pom-pom. Two days in the desert had taught me not to touch things if I didn’t know what they were, but I had to know if these blossoms were as pokey as they looked. They weren’t!
There are parasitic plants in the desert, too. The red branches in this bush are the desert mistletoe (Phoradendron californicum), a hemiparasite. It drains water and nutrients from its host plant but performs its own photosynthesis.
In Joshua Tree National Park there’s an area called the Cholla Cactus Garden. Chollas are cactuses with cylindrical stems, rather than the flat stems of the beavertail or prickly pear cactuses. The most common one in the Colorado Desert (that we saw, at least) was the teddybear cholla, Cylindropuntia bigelovii. As the name implies, it’s a cute, fluffy cactus, but it’s definitely still a cactus.
The teddybear cactus blooms in May and June, so we didn’t see any flowers. In addition to having the normal plant sex using flowers, these cactuses also reproduce clonally by dropping branches. The dropped pieces roll around and find a new place to attach and grow. Interestingly, this type of clonal replication, called budding, is common in many marine invertebrates!
The trees that give Joshua Tree National Park its name live in the higher and cooler western region of the park, known as the Mojave Desert. The Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) live singly or in clusters. In some ways, Y. brevifolia is the symbol of the Mojave Desert. They are also abundant in the higher elevations of the Tehachapi Mountains along Highway 58 between Bakersfield and the town of Mojave.
I’ll have more to say about reproduction in Joshua trees and some other desert plants in another post. This one is getting long, and we had more desert adventures to come.
The first new-to-me visit on our spring break road trip was Anza-Borrego State Park in the southern California desert. We arrived late in the day on Monday and had just a brief chance to look around. On Tuesday we got up early and went for a hike, trying to avoid some of the midday heat. Fortunately there was a bit of a breeze, which helped with the heat but made flower picture-taking challenging.
Anza-Borrego is located in the Colorado Desert, which is a western subdivision of the Sonoran Desert. The Colorado is a low-altitude desert (most of the surrounding hills are only ~900 meters tall) and thus gets much hotter in the summer than deserts at higher elevations, and very rarely experiences a winter frost. Winter is the main rainy season and some regions also receive rain during a late-summer monsoon season.
After a rainy winter, the desert explodes into vibrant life:
This running water would be a temporary situation, of course, but one that is of great help to the wildlife in the park. At the park visitor center I read that wildlife large and small come to drink from the shallow streams, and that if we were to see bighorn sheep approaching the water we should stay out of their way. Water is so scarce for these animals that any delay in getting to it, or any separation of individuals from their family unit could be very stressful. I didn’t know whether or not we’d even see the sheep, since they are shy, but we got lucky!
Handsome fellow, isn’t he? He was eating and didn’t seem to mind us hikers as long as we stayed on the trail. Of course, there was an idiot who approached too close to get a better photo, and this ram wasn’t happy about it. He withdrew away from us and then went about his business. Other sheep wandered through, too, to forage or drink from the stream. But this big guy gave me the best photo op.
A visit to the desert this spring, after all the rain we had over the winter, was all about the wildflowers. Most of them were new to me. One thing that struck me was that, instead of the carpets of color that we’d seen at Carrizo Plain or Antelope Valley, flowers at Anzo-Borrega were much more widely dispersed. Some species were very common and others I didn’t see more than once or twice.
As I mentioned above, yellow was the predominant color at Anza-Borrego. There were several daisy-like flowers in both yellow and white, and some were very common. Fortunately for me, the visitor center had an easy-to-use pictorial guide of the most common wildflowers; using that, some wildflower field guides that we brought with us, and Calflora.org, I may have identified them all correctly. I’m sure that somebody will point out any identifications that I got wrong.
One of the defining characteristics of E. farinosa is the way that the blossoms are raised up above the grayish-green foliage. It’s a cool morphology, and makes the plant look very different when you see it from the side. Here’s a shot that shows it:
Another very abundant yellow flower was the very aptly named desert dandelion, Malacothrix glabrata. It looks like a typical dandelion, perhaps a more pale buttery color than usual, and when mature the blossoms have a small purplish red spot in the center.
Our state flower, Eschscholzia californica, is typically a brilliant pure orange color, although sometimes the color can be more yellow. In Anza-Borrego I saw some plants whose foliage looked poppy-ish, but the blossoms didn’t look quite right–a little too small to be California poppies and a color that was definitely yellow rather than orange. Turns out, though, that they were gold poppies (E. parishii)!
And who can resist a plant called ghostflower? That palest of yellows, almost but not quite white, combined with the tiny dark speckles, makes the plant seem very quiet–indeed, almost spooky. Ghostflower is easily overlooked, compared to the vibrant yellows of brittlebush, poppies, and dandelions.
The color purple was represented by two species of Phacelia, P. distans and P. campanularia. Phacelia distans was by far the most common in the floors of the valleys, and we saw P. campanularia at higher elevations.
This is Phacelia distans. Note the shape of the inflorescences, and how the blossoms are arranged.
These plants have the same blossom shape, but very different blossom arrangements and foliage morphology. Nifty, the differences between presumably closely related species, eh?
Another flower in the purple family was the desert sand verbena (Abronia villosa). It occurred in sandy soils, often in washes or dunes, similar to the sand verbena that I see on beaches along the coast.
The pink color family was represented by the bright pink Bigelow’s monkeyflower, Diplacus bigelovii. They were fun. The golden-orange throat is the diagnostic feature for this species.
I didn’t get very many good pictures of the white flowers. It always seemed to be especially windy when we saw them. Desert chicory (Rafinesquia neomexicana) is a white daisy-like flower.
Everything living in the desert survives only if it can take advantage of the minimal precipitation that falls every year. Cactuses must suck up as much water as they can during the wet season, and store it for use during the hot, dry summer. Barrel cactus (Ferocactus acanthodes) this spring are fat, like the barrels for which they are named, and full of water. Their bodies are pleated longitudinally, allowing them to swell up when water is available. Then, as their water stores are depleted during the summer, the pleats fold together and the body becomes more compact. The large saguaro cactuses in the Sonoran Desert do the same thing.
A cactus whose blossom definitely belongs in the pink category is the beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaria). I think it was early in the blooming season for them, as I never saw any plants with more than a few open flowers, but most of them had many buds developing.
The chollas are cactuses in the genus Cylindropuntia, characterized by cylindrical stems. The teddybear cholla (C. bigelovii) was the one we saw at Anza-Borrego. It has dense spines that give it a fuzzy look but in reality form an impenetrable defense–it manages to say “I’m cute and fuzzy!” and “Don’t touch me!” at the same time.
We’ve had a good strong wet season this year, resulting in another wildflower superbloom. Over spring break we went to southern California to chase the flowers and, while we were at it, visit some places that I’d never been to. Our first stops were at familiar stomping grounds that we’d visited in 2017: Shell Creek Road, Carrizo Plain, and Antelope Valley. There were significantly more people at all of these places, compared to two years ago. Many of the well known sites for wildflowers have become very popular lately, and we tried to avoid the most crowded areas.
Location 1: Shell Creek Road
Just because I love the California oaks, here’s one that is well festooned with lace lichen (Ramalina menziesii) and moss:
The sky was hazy that day, making for less than ideal picture-taking conditions. The wind certainly didn’t help, as the flowers were moving constantly. This early in the bloom the predominant color was yellow: a soft, buttery yellow due to the tidy tips and a much more brilliant, retina-searing gold due to the goldfields.
Soda Lake Road, which runs through Carrizo Plain, was quite crowded. We stopped at the vista point and then headed off the beaten track onto some less-traveled dirt roads.
To the northeast of Carrizo Plain lie the Temblor Range hills, on which the bloom was just beginning. We saw fiddlenecks and goldfields at lower elevations, and splotches of purple Phacelia and orange poppies higher on the hills.
Antelope Valley was overrun with people, climbing up hillsides with their dogs and selfie sticks. Seems that selfies of people sitting in poppy fields is all the rage these days. We didn’t bother even trying to get into the poppy preserve, as there were lots of flowers to be seen in the surrounding areas.
Compared to what we saw at Antelope Valley in 2017, this year’s bloom was different. This year the poppies were not as widely scattered as in 2017, but where they occurred they were extremely dense. Then again, this year we were early in the bloom, and by now it could be different.
The other day my students and I lucked out with the weather and managed to get in a full day of exploring a former military base. Fort Ord, on Monterey Bay near the small city of Marina, was an Army base until it was closed in 1994. Since then, most of the land (~14,600 acres) has been designated the Fort Ord National Monument, administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Smaller portions were transferred to the surrounding cities, the campus of CSU Monterey Bay, the state park system, and the University of California’s Natural Reserve system. Our guide for the day, Joe, is the reserve manager for the Fort Ord Natural Reserve, and had arranged for us to meet with researchers working at both sites that we visited. It really was a fantastic learning opportunity for all of us.
The Fort Ord National Monument (FONM) came into being in 2012–thank you, President Obama! Most of the monument is public land, with miles of trails used to hikers, bicyclists, and horseback riders. The monument is also home to the California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense), the central California population of which is federally threatened. The first person we met on our field trip was a guy named Robert, who is a graduate researcher working on conservation of the tiger salamanders. Robert showed us some artificial vernal pools that he’s using in his research.
The 18 pools are about 10 meters in diameter, lined with an impermeable layer, and were allowed to fill with natural rainwater. Robert’s plan is to seed them with salamander larvae and record how they survive and disperse from the pools. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but it’s Robert’s story to tell, not mine.
We did get to help Robert check the pitfall traps, which are arranged in pairs on each side of the fence surrounding each pool. Each trap is a small bucket set into the ground to be level with the surface. The lid is mounted on wooden legs and sits above the trap, to keep it from filling with water. Animals crawling along the fence will fall into the bucket. Robert collects data on the animals trapped and then releases them unharmed.
The tiger salamanders are all underground at this time of year so there were none in the traps. The students did, however, find a pair of western toads (Anaxyrus boreas) in one of the traps. They were in amplexus, which is what herpetologists call the mating position of frogs and toads: the male clasps the female around her body, ideally positioned to fertilize the female’s eggs as she lays them.
The pair of amorous toads were released into one of the ponds, where they swam off together, still in amplexus. Their offspring will be born into the pond as tadpoles, along with those of the chorus frogs, the red-legged frogs, and hopefully not too many bullfrogs. Incidentally, herpetologists use the term ‘tadpole’ to refer only to the larvae of frogs and toads; Robert calls the larvae of his study salamanders just ‘larvae’.
We ventured over to the Fort Ord Natural Reserve (FONR), where we ate our lunch in a clearing surrounded by coast live oaks and coastal scrub. FONR is one of five natural reserves managed by UC Santa Cruz as an outdoor classroom and teaching lab. School groups ranging from elementary school to university levels visit FONR to learn about the natural environment, often for the very first time.
FONR sits on an ancient sand dune, and all of the vegetation has had to adapt to difficult growing conditions. The soil is almost entirely sand and doesn’t hold water at all. The wind picks up just about every afternoon and blows in salt from the ocean; these winds can be quite fierce even without the salt. The sand itself gets blown around, making an unstable substrate. As a result, plants that would otherwise grow tall are stunted here. Take, for example, the coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia). In places that are more sheltered from the wind, they are tall and majestic, even as they continue their meandering growth form. At FONR they are much shorter and more closely resemble the other scrub plants than actual trees.
After lunch we heard from Dani, a UCSC undergraduate student studying horned lizards (Phrynosoma sp.). The lizards are very well adapted to this environment. They live in sand, and have flattened bodies so they can hide on top of the sand and become practically invisible. Like the tiger salamanders the horned lizards are underground now. They should emerge in the next couple of months. This is one that we saw last May, when Joe invited last year’s class to visit the Reserve on a Saturday, after our planned field trip was cancelled due to rain.
In early March the plants were starting to bloom. One of the earliest bloomers is this delightful plant called ‘footsteps of spring’; its real name is Sanicula arctopoides. They look like small blotches of yellow spray paint against the ground. And when you see several of them scattered on the trail, you really understand their common name.
There were, of course, no horned lizards to be seen. We did, however, hike the reserve, and Joe showed us some of the endemic and/or endangered plants that live there. That’s Joe, in the front of the group here:
Fort Ord Natural Reserve 2019-03-08
Our last stop at the end of the field trip was at a location where the Army used to work on fire suppression. They did this by dumping various flammable items and fuels on the ground, lighting them on fire, and putting them out. This activity resulted in groundwater and soil contamination, which Army contractors have been working to clean up for 20 years now. Currently the site is where Robert is raising his tiger salamander larvae in raised ponds; he will eventually release the larvae into the artificial pools that we saw earlier in the day.
Each of those ponds is filled with natural rain water and contains a small screened tub into which Robert placed 10 salamander eggs. The larvae, after they hatch and have used up all of their yolk reserves, feed on whatever zooplankton have sprung up in the ponds–a quick glance showed that copepods, ostracods, and insect larvae had already taken up residence. The idea is that the salamander larvae will escape from their tubs into the pool at large, which will give them lots of room to grow up.
In a very real sense, this field trip ended where it started. Things don’t always work out this nicely, and my Type A personality is pleased at both the symmetry and the closure. Because these field trips are necessarily snapshots of what is happening at a particular moment in a particular place, it can sometimes be difficult to connect them to the real world. This week, though, I feel that my students got the whole story, or at least the entire outline of it. This visit to FONM and FONR may very well be my favorite field trip of the class, because I learned so much about things that are new to me. Thank you, Joe, for arranging such an amazing day for us!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
In biology, it is often the exceptions to the rules we teach that are the most interesting organisms. For example, every child knows that the sky is blue and the grass is green. With a few leading questions you can get a child to generalize that all plants are green. We all know this, right? Plants are green because they have chlorophyll, which allows them to perform the magic of photosynthesis. And yes, it really is magic. Harvesting the power of the sun to build complex molecules out of CO2 and H2O? Hell yeah, photoautotrophs are freakin’ amazing!
But what about the plants that aren’t green? How do they make a living?
I’ve already written about dodder, a parasitic plant that is commonly seen growing on pickleweed at Elkhorn Slough. A few weeks ago when I was at Lake Tahoe I encountered another plant that has a parasitic lifestyle: snow plant.
Snow plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) is a non-photosynthetic plant that has zero chlorophyll and thus zero green color, and is instead a rich blood-red color hinted at by its species epithet. It lives on the forest floor in close proximity to coniferous trees. The blood-red inflorescences shoot up from the ground, apparently out of nothing; the rest of the plant lives underground. If you break an angiosperm into its basic anatomical components you have: leaves, stems, roots, and flowers. Snow plant isn’t photosynthetic, so it doesn’t need or have leaves. And since stems are essentially support structures to hold leaves up to the light it doesn’t have those, either. The roots and vegetative parts (rhizomes?) of snow plant are underground and for most of the year there’s no indication that it’s there at all, until it sends up an inflorescence in the late spring as the winter snow is melting.
Since snow plant isn’t autotrophic and doesn’t fix its own carbon, it has to obtain fixed carbon from elsewhere. Snow plant lives under conifers, but is not a parasite on the trees the way that dodder is a parasite on pickleweed. The relationship is much more complex and involves a third player. And all of the action happens underground.
Enter the third player, a mycorrhizal fungus. This fungus’s mycelium spreads through the roots of the conifers with which it has a mutualistic relationship. The tree shares photosynthate (i.e., fixed carbon) to the fungus, which in turn provides minerals to and enhances water uptake for the tree. These mycorrhizal symbioses are very common in Nature, but most often go unnoticed because they occur in the soil.
Sarcodes sanguinea, the third partner in this unusual plant-plant-fungus ménage à trois, takes advantage of the intimacy between the conifer and the fungus. Instead of parasitizing the tree it targets the fungus, siphoning off part of the fungus’s share of photosynthate. I suppose this makes snow plant an indirect parasite of the tree. The tree is doing all the work, as it is the only autotrophic member of the trio. It shares photosynthate with the fungus and gets something vital in return. Snow plant, on the other hand, doesn’t contribute anything to either the fungus or the tree. Rather, it takes directly from the fungus and only secondarily from the tree.
It would be interesting to investigate the energetics of this three-way relationship. How do the fungus and tree react to parasitism by snow plant? On which of the mycorrhizal partners does snow plant have the strongest effect? The fungus, because its share of fixed carbon is being drained directly? Or the tree, which suffers because feeding the snow plant via the fungal intermediary means less photosynthate available to support its own metabolic activities? Does the tree have any way to stop the flow of fixed carbon to an area of the fungal mycelium that is being parasitized by the snow plant?
One last note. Many of the snow plants that we saw on the trail out of Carson Pass to Big Meadow had been surrounded by stones. We never saw any signs so aren’t sure why, but I think hikers want to keep the snow plants from getting trampled. The species isn’t endangered or threatened, although it is restricted to higher altitudes in California’s mountain ranges.
Distribution of Sarcodes sanguinea in California
I think the stone rings were put there both to point out and protect the S. sanguinea inflorescences, although it would be hard to miss them. Nothing else is that bloody shade of red, and it really does stand out. Even small plants are very conspicuous.
