It's the time of the year for students to graduate from one stage of their education to the next. We don't have students of our own at home, unless you count the cats, but we graduated some 10,000 or so bees! Let me explain.
Since the car accident and head injury in 2016, my activities as a beekeeper had been limited to advising from far away and helping with the honey wrangling. I didn't trust myself to: (1) not freak out; (2) be able to think calmly and carefully while surrounded by thousands of stinging insects; (3) be able to read a hive and intuit what needed to be done; and (4) not do something stupid, like drop a frame of bees, and piss them all off. It has taken me four years to feel confident enough to dig through a hive again. Yesterday I helped, and it wasn't like cat help--my help actually made things go faster.
At one point we had bees in three separate apiaries. Over the years we've been consolidating, and now all of our hives are in one spot. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of everything and to know where all of the equipment is. Even so, over the past year or so we had let our attention lapse and become rather dismal beekeepers. At the end of calendar year 2019 we had lost all of our hives.
We became beekeepers again when a swarm moved themselves into the Purple hive, which was still set up because we were too lazy to dismantle it. So hey, free bees! That was pretty cool. And the same day, Alex got a swarm call, so we went from zero hives to two hives in the course of an afternoon. That swarm went into the Green hive. Within the next few weeks we got two more swarms, one of which went into the Rose hive and a tiny one that went into the nuc. A nuc is a small 5-frame box for little colonies; some beekeepers sell nucs as starter colonies. Our nuc happens to be painted the same color as the Rose hive.
Four, count 'em, four hives! 2020-04-18
Fast forward a month of strong nectar flow, and the established colonies (Purple, Pink, and Green) are all putting up lots of honey. Even the swarm in the little nuc was growing; they probably had a virgin queen that needed to get mated, so it would take about three weeks for the number of bees to begin increasing. Yesterday we went through the hives to check on things and provide space. We also took nine frames of honey, fully capped, out of Green. In the next couple of weeks there might be two more full boxes of honey that we can take. All told, there will be close to 100 pounds of honey for us to extract soon. And the early season honey that the bees make at this location is really good--light and buttery, slightly floral but not pungent. We call it popcorn honey because when it's warm the hives smell like buttered popcorn.
Four bigger hives! 2020-05-16
You'll notice that Green now has two brown boxes? Those are honey supers, boxes where we want the bees to put honey stores. Rose also has two more boxes, one blue and one brown. The blue box is also intended as a honey super. The little nuc, which has grown to about 10,000 bees now, has graduated into the Yellow hive. They now have lots of space to expand into. We left the empty pink nuc on top of Yellow, so any returning foragers can recognize that the home they left is still there and find their way into their new residence.
And yes, we name our hives by color. I don't remember that it was something we planned, it just sort of happened. In addition to the four established hives, we also have equipment for Blue, Aqua, and Orange hives. In a perfect world we'd be able to keep each hive in one color of boxes in addition to the brown honey supers, but as time goes by we end up swapping boxes as needed and things get jumbled. The bees don't care, after all.
Today was the first time I've gone out on a low tide since before the whole COVID19 shelter-in-place mandates began. Looking back at my records, which I hadn't done until today because it was much too depressing, I saw that my last time out was 22 February, when the low tides were in the afternoon. At the time I made what seemed to be the not-too-bad decision to stay away from the remaining afternoon lows and wait until the spring shift to morning lows, which I like much more. And then then COVID hit and we all had to stay home and beaches were closed. So yeah, it has been much too long and I really needed this morning's short visit to the intertidal.
Beaches in Santa Cruz County are closed between the hours of 11:00 and 17:00, except that we are allowed to cross the beach to get to the water. This means that surfers, kayakers, SUP-ers, and marine biologists can get out and do their thing. Of course, my particular thing took place hours before the beach restrictions began, so I was in the clear anyway. I didn't venture too far from home, as I wasn't quite certain how easy it would be to get down to the beach.
Spring is the prime recruitment season for life in the intertidal. The algae are coming back from their winter dormancy, and areas that had been scraped clean by sand scour or winter storms are being recolonized. Many of the invertebrates have or will soon be spawning. And larvae that have spent weeks or even months in the plankton are returning to the shore to metamorphose and begin life as an adult. Just as it is on land, spring is the time for life in the sea to go forth and multiply.
For several decades now, marine ecologists have been studying barnacles and barnacle recruitment. Barnacles are a nice system for studying, for example, recruitment patterns and mortality. The cyprid larva, the larval stage whose job it is to find a permanent home in the intertidal, readily settles and metamorphoses on a variety of man-made surfaces; this makes it easy to put out plates or tiles and monitor who lands there. The fact that barnacles, once metamorphosed, remain attached to the same place for their entire lives means an ecologist can measure mortality (or survivorship, which is the inverse) by counting the barnacles every so often.
These are young barnacles (Chthamalus sp.), about 4-5 mm in diameter. I don't know how old they are, but would guess that they recruited in the past couple of months. These individuals all found a nice place to set up, because as I've written before, barnacles need to be in close proximity to conspecifics in order to mate.
This is a mixed group of Chthamalus sp. and Balanus glandula. Balanus is taller and has straighter sides and a more volcano-like appearance. Larvae of both genera recruit to the same places on rocks in the intertidal, and it is not uncommon to see assemblages like this.
Both species of barnacles are preyed upon by birds, sea stars, and snails. Predatory snails use their radula to drill a hole through the barnacle's plates and then suck out the body. Some of the barnacles in the photo below are dead--see the empty holes? Those are barnacles that were eaten by snails such as these.
Lots of Acanthinucella means that lots of barnacles are being eaten. And empty (i.e., dead) barnacle tests are more easily dislodged from the rock than live ones are. A lot of dead barnacles could result in bare patches. And guess what? That's what I saw this morning!
And those aren't just empty spaces where nobody settled. Notice the clean edges. These empty spaces formed because barnacles were there, but died recently and fell off. The abundance of Acanthinucella may have indirectly caused these patches to form--by eating barnacles and weakening the physical structure of the population. Bare space is real estate that can be colonized by new residents. See?
These brand new recruits are about 1 mm in diameter. No doubt more will arrive in the coming months, and this patch will fill up with barnacles again. Vacant space is a limited resource in the rocky intertidal, and the demise of one generation provides opportunity for new recruits. And if the barnacles themselves don't occupy all of the space, then other animals and algae will. That's one of the things I love about the intertidal--it is a very dynamic habitat, and every visit brings something new to light. No wonder I missed it so much!
The reef-building corals of the tropics are indeed spectacular structures, incredibly rich in biodiversity and worthy of a visit if you ever get the chance. These coral colonies come in many shapes, as you can see in the photo above. Each colony consists of hundreds or thousands of tiny polyps, all connected by a shared gastrovascular cavity, or gut. The living polyps secrete a skeleton of CaCO3, which grows slowly over decades or even millennia as successive generations of polyps live their lives and then die. It's this slow accumulation of CaCO3 that makes up the physical structure of the reef.
Reef-building corals are members of the Scleractinia, the so-called stony corals. The stoniness refers to the calcareous skeleton that they all have. But not all corals live in the tropics. We actually have two species of stony corals in Northern California. The brown cup coral, Paracyathus stearnsi, lives subtidally, and I think I've seen maybe a handful in all my intertidal explorations. The orange cup coral, Balanophyllia elegans, extends up into the low intertidal, and can be very common at certain sites I visit regularly. When I see them at low tide they are emersed and look like orange blobs. But if you touch one with your finger, you can feel the hardness of the calcareous base.
Stony corals they may be, but Paracyathus and Balanophyllia are both solitary; that is, they aren't colonial. Each polyp developed from its own larva and lives its own life independent from all other corals. Its bright orange color makes Balanophyllia pretty conspicuous, even though most of them are less than 10 mm in diameter. They do occur in patches, which makes one wonder. If they're solitary rather than clonal or colonial, how do these patches arise?
To answer this question we need to venture into the lab and examine the biology of Balanophyllia more closely. Fortunately, they grow in the lab quite happily. Years ago my friend Cris collected a bunch of Balanophyllia and glued them to small tiles so they could be moved around and managed in the lab. Cris has since moved on to other things, but the corals remain in the lab to be studied. They are beautiful animals, and can't really be appreciated in the intertidal because at low tide they're all closed up. But look at how pretty they are when they're relaxed and open:
Like all cnidarian polyps, these corals have long tentacles loaded with stinging cells, or cnidocytes. See the little bumps on the otherwise translucent tentacles? Those are nematocyst batteries, clusters of stinging cells.
Let's get back to the biology of this beast and how it is that they seem to live in groups. Balanophyllia is a solitary coral with separate sexes--each polyp is either male or female. They are also brooders. Males release sperm, which are ingested by a nearby female. The female broods fertilized eggs in her gastrovascular cavity. After a long period, perhaps several months, a large reddish planula larva oozes out of the mother's mouth and crawls around for a while, generally settling and metamorphosing near its parent.
This planula is a very squishy elongate blob, and can measure anywhere from 1-4 mm in length. It is an opaque red color, has a ciliated epidermis, and lacks a mouth or digestive system. Instead of feeding, it survives on energy reserves that its mother partitioned in the egg. You might surmise that not being able to eat would necessitate a quick metamorphosis into a form that has a mouth, but you'd be wrong. While some of them do indeed settle and metamorphose very close to their parent, others crawl around for several weeks, showing no inclination to put down roots and take on life as a sessile polyp. Perhaps they can take up enough dissolved organic matter from the seawater to sustain them through a long period of fasting.
At some point, though, the larva settles and metamorphoses into a little polyp. In the lab at least, Balanophyllia larvae settle on a variety of surfaces--glass, various plastics, even the fiberglass of the seawater tables.
The little coral measures about 2 mm in diameter and has 12 tentacles. It feeds very happily on brine shrimp nauplii and should grow quickly. Those three larvae, though, may hang around forever. I got tired of waiting for them to do something and released them into the seawater system. It might or might not have been an accident.
So there we have it. Our local cold-water coral, which doesn't form reefs or live in colonies. Balanophyllia may seem atypical for corals, but what it really demonstrates is the diversity within the Scleractinia. It reminds us that generalities do indeed have some value, and that for the discerning mind it is the exceptions to the generalities that are most interesting.
We have all heard about hummingbirds and their ability to hover and fly backwards. These tiny feathered jewels are a delight to observe. They are birds of the New World, and I feel sorry for people living in parts of the world that don't have hummingbirds. Where I live, on the coast of Northern California, the resident hummers are Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna). We get the occasional Rufous and Allen's hummers (Selasphorus rufus and S. sasin, respectively) passing through on their migrations, but the Anna's are here year-round. We have front-row seats to watch their mating displays, and I know they must be nesting nearby even though I've never managed to locate a nest.
The other day, while sheltering in place at home, I went outside to photograph birds. The Anna's hummers were putting on quite a show. The males have been displaying since February, flying straight up-up-up and then plunging into a J-shaped dive near an observant female. At the bottom of the dive the male uses his tail feathers to create a sharp and very loud chirp. When this occurs about a meter from your head, it sounds like a pistol shot. Trust me on this.
Anyhow, that day I was lucky and captured some shots of a male Anna's hummingbird hovering in place. These aren't National Geographic quality photos, but then again I'm not a National Geographic-caliber photographer. For anyone who is interested in such details, here are the EXIF data:
Nikon D750
300mm f/4 lens
1/2500 sec at f/4
ISO 900
At a shutter speed of 1/2500 sec, you can freeze even the movement of a hummingbird's wings. You can see very clearly that although the bird's wings are moving, his head remains perfectly skill and his position doesn't change at all.
A hovering hummingbird moves its wings in a figure-8, similar to the sculling motion of a skilled rower. If you use your imagination a bit you can see the rotation of the wings in this set of photos.
Given the mandate to shelter in place at home, I don't know how many of the upcoming morning low tides I'll be able to explore. On the one hand, I'd be by myself, not risking exposing anyone to any germs I might be carrying. On the other hand, staying home means, well, staying home. The tidepools are calling to me, but this year I might not be allowed to accept the invitation. All for the greater good, right?
We Californians are all under a state-wide mandate to stay at home, to minimize the spread of COVID-19 this spring. School hasn't been cancelled, but all classes have converted to distance learning. I had four days to figure out how to deal with that. Fortunately we are in spring break this week, which gives us all a little bit of a breather. I'm going to use the time to catch up on grading and plan for the second half of the semester.
The marine lab is also closed for business. Only essential personnel are allowed to be there. The term 'essential personnel' includes people whose responsibilities are animal husbandry. Since animals will die if I'm not there to feed them, I have met that criterion for essentiality. That's not a word, but you know what I mean. With so many fewer than usual people at the marine lab, there's a lot more wildlife activity. A few days ago I saw a long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) chase down and capture a young brush rabbit. I just barely had time to catch a quick shot with my phone.
The most noticeable thing, though, is the increased birdsong. The sparrows, finches, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, doves, towhees, and hawks are all making a lot of noise. The barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) returned to the lab on the 21st, right on time! Maybe this year they'll have a more successful nesting season than they did last year.
Yesterday I witnessed something I'd never seen before: a territorial dispute between a black phoebe (Sayornis nigricans) and a barn swallow. The fact that I had never seen it before in no way implies that it happens only rarely; maybe I've just never paid that much attention to these things before, or they've never happened while I've been around to watch.
Here's the story, in a series of snapshots.
Prologue. The barn swallow (H. rustica) is perched on one of the outdoor light fixtures. The phoebe (S. nigricans) swoops up from below.
The entire altercation lasted maybe as long as four seconds. I didn't see where the swallow flew. The phoebe remained on the rain gutter for about a minute or so, then took off over the meadow. Perhaps it has a nest somewhere nearby and was defending it. Both species build mud nests on cliffs and buildings, so these birds could be competing for nest sites. Or maybe phoebes just don't like swallows. Either way, this was the sort of interaction that I don't notice when there is a lot more human activity at the marine lab. Nature has a way of re-asserting herself when humans are removed from the scene for even a short period of time.
Back in 1994, the U.S. Army base at Fort Ord was closed in one of the base closure events that occur every once in a while. UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) acquired some 600 acres of the former base to establish the Fort Ord Natural Reserve, which serves as an outdoor laboratory and teaching space for students of all ages. University students from UCSC and California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) take classes and have internships on the Reserve. Kindergarten students visit the Reserve for what may well be their first experience of Nature. And I take my community college students there every year.
This year, Joe Miller, the reserve manager, had a lot of things for us to learn about, and we were kept busy all day. The first thing we did, after an introduction to the reserve, was hike to the first of several areas where Joe had set some rodent traps the night before.
They are live traps, baited to lure in a rodent. The doors shut on the rodent once it ventures inside to grab some seed.
There's a super high-tech method to getting a live rodent out of a trap without hurting either the rodent or the human. You hold the trap vertically, open the top end, slip a plastic bag over the open end, make sure there are no escape openings, then flip the trap over so the rodent falls into the bag. And voilà, instant mouse in a bag!
Then you work the rodent head-first into a corner of the bag with one hand, and reach into the bag and approach it from the back end. Follow the backbone forward, then grab the rodent by the scruff of the neck.
We caught three or four deermice, but the cutest rodent we saw was a pocket mouse (Chaetodipus californicus). Joe didn't bother with gloves because, as he said, these guys are really mellow. And it really was! He handed it to us and we took turns holding it.
I think it's called a pocket mouse because it's so cute you want to put it in your pocket and take it home.
We had to let the rodents go because Joe had other things for us to do. In addition to the rodent traps, Joe had set up pitfall arrays to catch herps (reptiles and amphibians). A pitfall array consists of two strips of aluminum flashing set up in the shape of a capital T. At each end of the T there is a pitfall trap. The critter runs or slithers along the flashing and then falls into the trap, which is a small bucket buried so the lip is just at ground level.
We got skunked on the pitfall traps--all of them were empty. We did, however, get to see herps. Joe showed us a couple of tiger salamanders, which he had permits to keep as teaching animals. These two animals are hybrids between the native tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense) and a salamander that was introduced from Texas into California to be used as bait. As happened quite often, the bait species took hold in its new habitat and is proving to be a nuisance. In their larval stage they are voracious predators, gobbling up the larvae of other amphibians including those of endangered species such as the red-legged frog. In the area of FONR, pretty much all of the tiger salamanders are hybrids to some degree.
As with all other amphibians, tiger salamanders require a variety of habitats to complete their life cycle. They reproduce in water, and the larvae live in water. California has distinct wet and dry seasons, and the salamanders must find vernal pools where the water will last long enough for their larvae to metamorphose into the terrestrial adult form. Sometimes the pools don't persist long enough, and in very dry years the pools may not form at all. During the dry season, tiger salamanders may estivate underground, waiting until the weather gets cool and damp enough for them to emerge from burrows and forage on insects and small vertebrates.
One of the students had her heart set on seeing horned lizards, and her wish came true. Some UCSC interns working on the horned lizard mapping project caught a couple of small lizards for us to see. The larger adults aren't coming aboveground yet.
Like the tiger salamanders, the horned lizards face an uncertain future of their own. Their main prey are native ants. California has been invaded by Argentine ants--those are the little black ants that get into houses. The Argentine ants are extremely competitive and form supercolonies, wherein two or more adjacent colonies will merge underground and function as a single colony with multiple queens. They can and do outcompete the native ant species, and predators don't seem to like them. Unfortunately, the horned lizards don't eat the Argentine ants. If the lizards' food source is threatened by the ants, then the lizards could be in big trouble.
One of the things Joe wanted to show us was a plant with a tiny purple flower, that is just now starting to bloom.
This little plant, called greater yellowthroat gilia or sand gilia, is a California endemic species, found nowhere else. The State of California lists it as threatened, and the federal government lists it as endangered. It's a pretty plant, growing low to the ground because although it's March, we haven't had any rain for about eight weeks. And this is supposed to be our rainy season. Joe showed us some Gilia plantlets that were grown in greenhouses and had plenty of water, and they were three or four times as tall as the ones we saw in the field.
There is a lot of very interesting work going on at FONR these days, and it's exciting for me to see how many students are involved. Some of my students said they would contact Joe about internship opportunities, and I hope they do so. If I'm teaching Ecology again next spring, we're definitely coming back to Fort Ord, and I think we'll do an overnight camping trip. I'm sure the reserve is a completely different place once the sun goes down!
Of course, sea anemones don't have faces. They do have mouths, though, and since a mouth is usually part of a face, you can sort of imagine what I'm getting at. The sunburst anemone, Anthopleura sola, is one of my favorite intertidal animals to photograph. Of the four species of Anthopleura that we have on our coast, A. sola is the most variable, which is why it keeps catching my eye.
This afternoon I met the members of the Cabrillo College Natural History Club for the low tide at Natural Bridges. Here are some of the A. sola anemones we saw.
This past Fall semester the NHC went tidepooling at Pigeon Point. Today we were at Natural Bridges, and later in the spring we are going to Asilomar. I didn't intend it, but this school year the club is getting a look at three very different intertidal sites.
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!
A while back now I went out on a low tide even though the actual low was after sunset. I figured that it was low enough that I'd have plenty of time to poke around as the tide was receding. And given that there were promising clouds in the sky, I took my good camera along just in case the sunset proved to be photo-worthy. Having had enough of crowds in the intertidal at Natural Bridges the previous day, I decided to venture up to Pistachio Beach, which isn't as heavily visited.
I ended up spending only 45 minutes in the intertidal, all the while watching the sun sink lower in the sky. It was already too dark to take many photos in the tidepools, but there were some interesting things on the beach.
The majority of shells that wash up on any beach are going to be molluscs, usually either gastropods or bivalves. I've often seen living red abalone (Haliotis rufescens) hidden in nooks and crannies at this site, so it's not surprising to find their shells on the sand. Usually, though, the shells are a little beat up. This one was intact, with a lovely layer of nacre inside.
This butterfly-shaped object is one of the shell plates of Cryptochiton stelleri, also known as the gumboot chiton. Cryptochiton is the largest of all chiton species; the largest one I've ever seen is the length of my forearm from elbow to fingertip. Like all chitons, C. stelleri has a row of eight shell plates running down the dorsal side of the body. Unlike other chitons, however, in Cryptochiton the plates are covered by a layer of tissue called the girdle and not visible from the outside. If you run your finger down the back you can feel the plates under the girdle. I never thought about it before now, but it seems that the name Cryptochiton refers to the hidden chiton-ness of the animal.
Anyway, Cryptochiton lives mostly in the subtidal, although you can occasionally see them in the very low intertidal. As subtidal creatures they have neither the ability nor the need to cling tightly to rocks, as their intertidal cousins do. This means that when big swells come through at low tide, they can get dislodged and wash ashore. I know from personal experience that the tissue of Cryptochiton is really tough. Once a pal and I were trudging back after working on a low tide and came across several dead Crytochiton scattered over the beach. We decided to do an impromptu dissection and try to salvage the plates, hacking away with her pocket knife. The smell was horrendous, and after several minutes we made practically zero progress, so we gave up. I've seen gulls pecking at dead Cryptochiton, too, and they didn't seem to have any success either. However, their bodies do eventually disintegrate, or something manages to eat them, and their naked plates can often be found on beaches.
I've never seen anything like this before. It's hard to tell from the photo, but these two rock faces converge into the crevice, sort of like the adjacent pages in an open book. This side of the rock surface faces away from the ocean and will never be subject to the main force of pounding waves. The barnacle in the middle is attached pretty much in the deepest part of the crevice, and is surrounded by mussels, which are then surrounded by limpets.
Now, all of these animals recruited to this location after spending some period of time, from a few days to a few weeks, in the plankton. The barnacle certainly can't move once it has settled and metamorphosed. Newly settled mussels have a limited ability to scoot around a bit but are generally stationary once they've extruded their byssal threads and fastened them to something hard. The limpets, on the other hand, are quite mobile. The barnacle and mussels gave up their ability to move around after they became benthic, but limpets can and do locomote quite a bit--in fact, they have to, in order to feed. So in a sense, these limpets "chose" to aggregate together long after settlement.
What are the ecological implications of this pattern?
Well, for one thing, that barnacle is a genetic dead end. I've written before about the bizarre sex lives of barnacles. This one lone barnacle, far from any others of its species, is not able to reproduce. It has nobody to copulate with. It is possible that other barnacles will recruit to the mussels (Pollicipes is often associated with Mytilus), but until then there will be no sexy times for this individual.
Another ecological consequence concerns the limpets. If these are owl limpets (Lottia gigantea), then some of them will grow up to be the big females that maintain farms on the rocks where they manage and harvest the crop of algal film that grows. These big females are territorial, and will bump or scrape off any creature found to be trespassing on their farms. Clearly, none of the limpets in the photo above are demonstrating any type of territorial behavior! So they are either some other species of Lottia, or are younger individuals of L. gigantea that haven't yet made the change from male to female.
In any case, I do think the pattern is very interesting, even though I don't understand it. Or maybe because I don't understand it. I'm always intrigued by something that I can't explain, which is a good thing because it means I don't get bored very often. If anyone reading this has an explanation for this pattern, let me know about it!
It has been a while since I've spent any time in the intertidal. There isn't really any reason for this, other than a reluctance to venture out in the afternoon wind and have to fight encroaching darkness. There's also the fact that I much prefer the morning low tides, which we'll have in the spring. However, this past weekend we had some spectacular afternoon lows, and although I was working on Friday and couldn't spare the time to venture out, I went out on Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday was a special day, because I had guests with me. A woman named Marla, who reads this blog, contacted me back in the fall. She said she wanted to do something special for her husband's birthday, and asked if I'd be willing to take them to the intertidal. It turns out that Andrew's birthday was around this past weekend, and he had family coming out from Chicago to celebrate. They picked the perfect weekend, because the low tides we had were some of the lowest of the year. So on Saturday I met up with Marla, Andrew (her husband), and Betsy (Andrew's sister) and we all traipsed out to Natural Bridges.
Taking civilians into the intertidal can be tricky, because they often come with expectations that don't get met. Like expecting to see an octopus, for example. I explain that the octopuses are there, but are better at hiding from us than we are at finding them, but that never feels very satisfactory. This trio, however, were fun to show around. The tide was beautifully low and we had fantastic luck with the weather. It had rained in the morning, but the afternoon was clear and sunny. I congratulated Marla on remembering to pay the weather bill. And the passing stormlet didn't come with a big swell, so the ocean was pretty flat. We were able to spend some quality time in the mid-tidal zone, with occasional forays into the low intertidal.
The typical Natural Bridges fauna--owl limpets, mussels, chitons, anemones, etc.--were all present and accounted for. Of course, there isn't much algal stuff going on in mid-January.
Ochre star, Pisaster ochraceus
Neogastroclonium subarticulatum, a red alga
Giant green anemone, Anthopleura xanthogrammica
Sunburst anemone, Anthopleura sola
Chiton, Nuttallina californica
Feather hydroid, Aglaophenia sp.
Limpets (Lottia scabra) and periwinkle snails (Littorina sp.)
Scytosiphon lomentaria, a brown alga
Owl limpet, Lottia gigantea
A coralline alga, Corallina sp.
Given the time of year (mid-January) and the time of day (late afternoon), the sun was coming in at a low angle. This was tricky for photographing, both in and out of water. However, sometimes good things happen, as in this photo below:
That's a big kelp crab (Pugettia producta) nestled among four sunburst anemones (Anthopleura sola). Kelp crabs are pretty placid creatures, for crabs, and usually take cover when approached. But this one remained in plain sight, holding so still that I thought it was dead. Even when I hovered directly over it and blocked the sun, it didn't move at all. Then it occurred to me that maybe he was having the sexy times with a lady friend. So I very carefully reached down and gave him a tap on the carapace. He flinched a little, so I knew he wasn't dead, but made no move to get away. And I caught a glimpse of a more golden leg underneath him.
Crabs live their entire lives encased in a rigid exoskeleton, and can mate only during a short window of opportunity after a female molts. Early in the breeding season, a female crab uses pheromones to attract nearby males. When a suitable male approaches, she may let him grab her in a sort of crabby hug. That's what this male kelp crab is doing to his mate. They may remain in this embrace for several days, waiting until the female molts and her new exoskeleton is soft. At that point the male will use specialized appendages to insert packets of sperm into the female's gonopores. The two will then go their separate ways.
We didn't disturb these crabs, and let them go on doing their thing. By now the sun was going down, so we headed back up and were rewarded with a glorious sunset.
