When things are just a little too swell

One of the things that I’ve been doing with my Ecology class since almost the very beginning is LiMPETS monitoring in the rocky intertidal. Usually we have a classroom training session before meeting in the field to do the actual work. This year we are teaching the class in a hybrid mode, with lecture material being delivered remotely, so we don’t have class meetings except for our field trips. The LiMPETS coordinator for the Monterey Bay region, Hannah, and I arranged to meet at our sampling site, where she would do a training session on the beach before we herded everyone out into the intertidal. It truly was a great plan! But the weather intervened and a spring storm blew through, bringing in a big swell. There was a high surf warning for our area the day of our scheduled LiMPETS work. Hannah and I conferred via email and decided that we’d still give it a shot, and at least the students would have an opportunity to learn about the LiMPETS program and practice with the datasheets and gear.

I arrived early to see how the surf was looking, and it was impressive. The waves were regularly covering our sampling location with whitewash, even as the tide was going out. When my co-instructor arrived and I showed him where the transect would lie, it was an easy decision to make to cancel the monitoring. But we would still be able to do the practice stuff, so we convened with Hannah on the bluff and she went into teacher mode.

We didn’t bother with the transect, but had groups of students work through some quadrats out on the intertidal bench, which you can just see in the background of the photo above. Hannah kept everyone out of the danger zone and we stressed the importance of having one member of each group keep an eye on the ocean at all times. We stayed mostly in the high zone, venturing down into the upper mid zone only when the tide was at its lowest. Even then, the big swells would surge up the channels and splash up onto the benches. Nobody got swept off, though, or even more than a teensy bit damp.

Most of the students left after what little work we had for them to do, and that gave me the freedom to poke around on my own and take pictures. I hadn’t had a chance to do this in a long time, and intended to make the most of a decent low tide that was almost wiped out by huge swell.

So here we go!

First up, the high-intertidal seaweeds:

And here’s a typical high intertidal community at Davenport Landing. Inhabitants include:

• Several large clumps of rockweed (Silvetia compressa and Fucus distichus)
• Several smaller bunches of tufty reds (Endocladia muricata)
• Mussels (Mytilus californianus)
• Many blotches of “tar spot alga” which is the encrusting tetrasporophyte phase of Mastocarpus papillatus

The water was pretty murky, so not great for underwater photography. Some of the shots turned out pretty well, though. The soft pale purple structures that you see in the photo below are papullae, used for gas exchange. You can see these only when the star is immersed.

The anemones were, as always, happy to be photographed. In this shot, the anemone was being photobombed by a turban snail.

Here’s another typical intertidal assemblage:

A couple of students stayed after the rest of the class had left. They were happy to see the nice fat ochre stars, and so many of them in one small area.

It’s always good to see so many big ochre stars. For this species, in the intertidal areas that I visit, sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS) no longer seems to be a problem. Fingers crossed! We’ll have to see what unfolds in the next months and years.