Little Harbor Adventure

After our Ship Rock adventure, we piled into vans and drove to the other side of the island. We hadn't really explored the exposed side of the island much, so we were hoping to see different things there. Everyone went tidepooling on the rocky shore. The water was calm, allowing for some good snorkeling as well. We saw many different types of algae that didn't grow in our cove. One of our classmates turned over a rock and found a tiny octopus, and everyone took turns holding it.

Acorn barnacles (Semibalanus balanoides) growing on rocks.

Some small orange sponges, some calcified red algae, and some seagrass all together makes for an interesting color combination.

Norris's top snail (Norrisia norrisi) on Eisenia arborea.

Lots of seagrass grew on the ocean bottom here, interspersed with some Macrocystis, making for some beautiful photographic algal opportunities. Schools of sardines swam around in the eelgrass, reflecting sunlight off their silvery scales. The flowing of the seagrass with the motion of the water was very peaceful.

Some Microcladia growing amidst some seagrass.

Ship Rock/Marine Mammal Adventures

Our last few days were full of adventures. We did a few recreational dives, made it to the other side of the island, swam with mammals, and played ocean-themed games with our classmates and teachers. On Monday night, we were introduced to some visiting world travelers. These two lucky people had won the Our World Underwater Scholarship, allowing them to travel around the world to dive and explore possible career paths in marine biology. We agreed to take them on an exploratory dive the next morning so they could experience the California wildlife.

Ship Rock. The next morning, we all loaded up the boat to go to Ship Rock. Ship Rock is a tiny rocky island covered in bird poop. We had never ventured that far from the marine station before, so we were lucky that our T.A. Sara agreed to take us there. The two scholarship students wore drysuits! We descended into a massive field of Sargassum. We went to about 60 feet deep and circled around Ship Rock. We saw thousands of coral anemones (Corynactis), a vividly-colored kelpfish, a strange iridescent blue algae, huge gorgonians, an unfamiliar species of large brown algae, and many other fascinating creatures.

A large Lithopoma with many epiphytes growing on it.

A sea star and some coral anemones.

An unfamiliar but interesting species of brown algae.

A kelpfish we found around 50 feet deep.

Some pretty iridescent blue algae. When we came up, we found ourselves facing three seals lounging on Ship Rock. A large pelican sat on the rocks above them.

We saw dolphins in the distance, so we decided to get in the boat and go follow them. We ended up in the middle of a huge group of sea lions and dolphins! They played in our boat wake and got close enough to us that we could hear them communicating. Sara stopped the boat and we all jumped out to swim with them. Being so close to so many marine mammals was amazing. They must have been following a large school of fish. It would have been mind-blowing to witness them hunting.

crazy weather, first plot retrievallsssss

11/9 friday BFC retrieval madness adventure secret agent, eric boldly going where no other man went by themselves that day

     The day started with gusty winds and word of a swell. However, as this was the first plot retrieval day, we were determined to prepare to enter the water. There was a barge scheduled to arrive at 9am, so we went with Sara to Two Harbors to buy plastic bags for the afternoon collection. Since there wasn't much time for scuba, we moved on to the physiology trials. We prepared the agar for the next trial, weighed, and started the trial, and collected the agar from the previous trial.We also took pictures of the old agar on grid plates as backup data to analyze consumption should weight not be a reliable data source. We think that the water weight might be a factor.


     Despite strong winds and swell and poor visibility, we trundled into the cove via the boat ramp. We felt like daring adventurers as we swam to mooring 11, dropped down, and collected algae from plots 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13. With the surge and awful visibility it was difficult to cut the zip ties properly, but we think that scissors might be easier than knives to cut. On the journey back, Sara, Valerie, and Kaylee were separated from Eric. Once we reached the boat ramp, we loaded the algae bags into buckets and the cooler and took them back to the lab. We sorted through the Dictyota samples from about 7:30-10:30pm, all the while finding interesting species. Our sorting method involves pouring the seawater from the bag through window screening mesh, then rinsing the algae in freshwater for 30 seconds and then pouring the freshwater into the screen. The invertebrates are picked out of the window screen with forceps and counted in several categories as fit for the sample. Amphipods, shrimps, caprellids, and gastropod snails are the most common invertebrates. To subsample the plankton that made it through the screen, we pipet 3ml of the filtered water and then drop 10 drops into a plankton wheel and observe under a dissecting scope (level 12).



11/10 still crazy (even worse, in fact) winds.....counting inverts day and agar as per usual     Today, we were not able to go diving due to very heavy winds and rough surface conditions. We stayed in the lab and continued our counts of invertebrates on the Dictyota plants from our plots. The previous day, we talked about doing plankton counts for each plot as a whole rather than for each plant to save time, but today we decided to do counts for each plant and not skip any more. Julia consulted an invertebrates book and found that the "Dictyota crabs" were a species called Pyromaia tuberculata. 
     Many of the plants we examined today were from the sand plots in Big Fisherman's Cove. These plots seem to be very rich in amphipods, but did not have very many shrimp compared to kelp plots. It may become apparent that the sand plots have much lower invertebrate diversity. Most plots also had large numbers of caprellids as well. Plankton counts were especially rich in ostracods, copepods, and amphipods. We also found very tiny juvenile snails, clams, diatoms, and Nemertean and polychaete worms. 
Sara brought up an interesting question - where are all the plankton coming from? Do they haphazardly settle out of the water column, or do they choose to aggregate on the plants? We will probably discuss this in our paper. 

11/11 LH retrieval, Sara came too.... horn shark/stingray, agar again, more inverts

     Today, we went to Lion's Head in the morning to collect our first set of plots: 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, and 28. The visibility was improving from the last few days, but was still not optimum. Before putting the plants into bags, we did a final set of fish surveys for all plants. As usual, we had to move the kelp off plot #18. Plot #25 (on the sand) had two large Lithopoma snails. One of the snails was on the Vexar, and one of them was on a Dictyota plant. A small horn shark swam through that same plot as well. We have never seen any horn sharks on our plots before. We also saw a stingray near our plots, which is unusual for Lion's Head. 


     Back in the lab, our first order of business was to get the agar trials set up. We created a bladed agar plate, a spiky agar plate, and a control agar plate.


     After the agar trials were set up, we started counting all the invertebrates from our collected Dictyota plants. Lion's Head seems to have fewer shrimp and more amphipods than Big Fisherman's Cove. There are also fewer ostracods in the plankton samples from Lion's Head and possibly more worms from the phyla Nemertea and Platyhelminthes. It is interesting how plankton and invertebrate communities can vary on such a small scale. We also found several Navanax and Hermissenda slugs in our samples. Some very small juvenile sea slugs were seen in plankton samples. We are not sure whether or not we should include diatoms in the plankton data, since they are difficult to count accurately.


11/12 Monday- BFC dive, invert collection, watching tv, stats review     Today was day 3 of plot collection and that meant that our diving in Big Fisherman's Cove was soon to be over. The final 7 plots: 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 14 were collected, bagged, and transported to the lab for invertebrate counting. Conditions were better today, as the swell had been calming down. There was nothing too unusual about the dive today, and collections were going more smoothly as we had gotten more experience cutting the zipties and bagging as quickly and effectively as possible.


     After lunch, we began our lengthy lab reservation for 3 (5 if you count Shred-Ex). We began by completing another agar trial, weighed and took photographs of consumption, and implemented another trial. Not much consumption occured in the previous day's trial. We've gotten much better at grinding the algae, and have gotten a good procedure of agar plating down. Aside from this last trial, consumption has been very evident.

Valerie counting inverts on the window screen. After a 30 second freshwater rinse, the water and inverts were poured over the screen and quantified.

     After agar plating, we were able to start with the invertebrate counting. Luckily we had our buddies ShredEx there to join us in some Workaholics on a Monday afternoon. We've found that having TV shows playing has kept us entertained and able to push through 28 plants per day. We've all gotten much more efficient at counting, and have found some very interesting invertebrates, including a tiny white sea urchin! We spent the whole afternoon in the lab and left about 8-9 plants to be completed after dinner. We also had a statistics review meeting after dinner which pushed back the time we were in the lab. After the meeting we finished up our invertebrate counts, as we had just finalized plans to go diving at ShipRock with two of the Our World Underwater Scholar winners. The next day certainly was an experience of a lifetime.


-Eric and Kaylee

Agar blocks, Statistics (oh boy!), and Looming Bad Weather

Week 4 was another busy week! Here are some delightful highlights!

Monday 11/5

Upon arriving to lab in the morning, we were excited to see that our preliminary agar tests had gone well! About 5 snails were gathered around the agar plate containing crushed algae. It had many chunks missing; it was evident that a lot of grazing had taken place. The plate with just agar and no algae had also been grazed a fair amount, but no snails were on it at the time of our observations. Since the preliminary tests were successful, we got working on making agar squares (bladed, spiky, and an algae-less control). The agar is surprisingly fun to make and cut into squares. Valerie and Kaylee were definitely tempted to take a bite of the gelatinous cubes on several occasions...

     In the afternoon, we did another set of fish surveys at Lion's Head and Big Fisherman's Cove. It was a hot day and there was some wind, and the visibility was bad compared to previous days.At a plot in Lion's Head, we observed a cormorant down at 20 feet chasing a school of mackerel. It was really surprising to see the bird, and it seemed surprised to see us as well! 

     It is increasingly apparent that our plots serve as refuge for juvenile fishes. Juvenile kelp bass rock wrasses arevery common at both sites. This is something we should discuss in our paper and find references to support our observations.

Tuesday 11/6

     After setting up our snail trials, we went to the computer lab to analyze some of our statistics in JMP (a useful analytic statistics program) for the ecological project. Since we had about 8 days left to do experiments, we wanted to make sure that the fish survey data we were collecting and putting so much time and effort to was generating significant results. We took the average number of fish over all three observers for each plot, imported that table into JMP, and computed a two-way ANOVA on our data. ANOVA, or Analysis of Variance, is a good statistical tool to make clearer comparisons between means.
      To perform a two-way ANOVA on our data, we have to make sure our data follows several assumptions: the data must be normally distributed, observations between groups and within groups must be independent, and the variances among the populations must be equal. 

      First, we took the average numbers of fish for each treatment (BFC kelp, BFC sand, LH kelp, LH sand), fit a normal curve to the data, and used the Goodness of Fit function in JMP to see if they followed a normal distribution. We also learned a little about data transformation to make our data appear to be normal so we can run the ANOVA tests. Its not the most interesting of processes (a lot of trial and error and playing around in JMP), so I'll spare you the details!

     After "testing the assumptions", we tested how equal the variances were through JMP. Our variances turned out to be sufficiently equal! We also ran some other tests to examine significance and interactions. All in all, our results are significant enough to consider more fish surveys both relevant and useful!
         This afternoon we went to Isthmus Reef to collect Dictyota for practicing our invertebrate counting methods, as the deadline for plot collection is swiftly approaching and we have yet to completely standardize our methods. After spending some time around 50-60 feet for sightseeing purposes, we carefully collected 14 Dictyota plants. Back at the lab, we utilized window-screen mesh, freshwater rinses, and forceps (tweezers) and got to work! We found hundreds of invertebrates on each plant, including juvenile snails, amphipods, shrimp, caprellids, eggs, small decorator crabs, brittle stars, and isopods. In addition to getting a baseline of critters on each plant, we also tested the efficacy of freshwater rinses by treating some plants just as we had prior to putting them back into the field on our plots. We found the 30 second rinse to be very effective, which was great news.

     We also discussed possibilities for quantifying the animals small enough to pass through the window screen, and decided that using a plankton wheel was probably the best method to subsample the tiniest of critters. 

     Wednesday and Thursday continued the pattern of morning Lithopoma agar trials and afternoon fish surveys. As the days went on and a pretty intense wind began to set in, the visibility definitely decreased due to the turbulent conditions. One such afternoon when fish surveys would not have been useful, Kaylee and Valerie helped out fellow team ShredEx by going on SCUBA and collecting Pisaster giganteus, the giant sea star, and later collecting small Tegula snails in the intertidal. Despite it raining, we all had a good time. Having the afternoon "off" was a great relief since tomorrow (Friday, 11/9), is our first collection day at Big Fisherman's Cove, and the wind is sure to be very strong and a Small Craft Advisory is to be implemented, which will prove to be troublesome.

The last photo is credited to Sam of ShredEx. You should check out their blog at:

http://shredexmbq.blogspot.com/

Routine Snail Tests, Fish Surveys, and Halloween

Hello guys! These past weeks have been extremely busy for Team Valkayeri. Here is a quick rundown (and photos!) for the week of 10/29 through 11/4. 

Cool kids in the lab, of course

     This week we have refined our routine and efficiency well. In the morning, we do what we fondly refer to as "Snail Science", which involves preparing Egregia in the manner mentioned in the previous blog post: cutting, spinning, weighing, measuring, and making visual observations of the algae. We remove the snails and algae used in the trials from the first day, and spin, weigh, measure, and note the "used" algae. Its not the most exciting work ever, but we hope that our methods will beget statistically significant results regarding Lithopoma preference of Egregia morphs.

     In the next few days, we are going to need to run trials with crushed algae to test for any differences in consumption when thallus morphology is not a factor. Today, we tried making an agar gel for the snails to eat. The first step was to use a mortar and pestle to crush the algae. We used just the bladed morph for this preliminary test. Crushing the algae with a mortar and pestle takes a few minutes and some effort, but when a few drops of seawater are added and the algae is finely chopped with scissors, it can be crushed into a paste. We made a gel of just agar and no Egregia using 1.44 g of agar powder and 40 mL of water (equivalent to two standard batches of agar gel. We microwaved the mixture for 40 seconds and then poured it into a coffee filter. Then, we made another one of these mixtures and added some crushed algae mixed with 32 mL of water. We trimmed the excess paper from the coffee filters and placed the agar into the tank containing snails not yet used in experiments. The agar was somewhat buoyant and had to be weighed down with rocks. We put two snails on each agar gel to encourage them to eat, and then closed the tanks and left them overnight. If this is successful, we will start running trials with squares of the gelatinous agar. Can't wait to see how it goes!

     In the afternoons, we conduct fish surveys of our algae plots. We watch each plot for 2 minutes for fish rooting around in the Dictyota. The fish surveys are really just supplementary data to couple with our future invert assemblage data. We hope that the two factors, "inside-reserve" vs. "outside-reserve", and "close to the kelp" vs "far from the kelp" will have interesting results on both fish and small mobile invertebrate affinities.

     We are really lucky to get to see the great diversity of Southern California kelp forest fish in these surveys and the rest of our time in the water. The most common species we see on our plots are kelp bass, señorita, sheephead, and rock wrasse, although we also see garibaldi, kelpfish, blacksmith, kelp surfperch, halfmoon, and ocean whitefish, opaleye, black eyed gobies, and more. It is always exciting to see an elasmobranch (sharks, rays, and skates), such as leopard sharks, horn sharks, swell sharks, bat rays, and stingrays. We even have gone on a couple of night-snorkels, and although we see less fish typically (they hide in the cracks at night to rest), we see plenty of healthy protected lobster and large kelp crabs! The difference between day and night assemblages are really striking.

     Despite being so busy, we have some time for fun too! We dressed up for Halloween and visited a Haunted House in Two Harbors that the local town set up. It was lots of fun, and I doubt I'll ever take a boat to a haunted house and hike back.

Korra, The Catalina Wine Mixer, and face painted science!

Egregia-ous Lithopoma progress!

Thursday 10/25

Today team Valkayeri was proactive and got ready to boat to our intended collection location (Isthmus Reef) right after breakfast. However, after some time waiting to hear from the dock-managers and other staff, it was decreed that the dock would be closed due to a small craft advisory and threat of hefty wind gusts. Since we had gone through the trouble of getting everything ready, Valkayeri and Sara decided to practice fish surveys in BFC. The visibility was poor due to the swell and blustery winds, but we honed in on our techniques a little bit. We hope to get some difference in fish abundance and diversity depending on distance of the plot from the kelp forest fringe/interface.



   
After lunch, we went to Two Harbors via van to collect potential algae for our physiological preference project. We saw some pretty interesting kelpfish and sculpins in the shallows, and collected Egregia. The standard way of drying algae for a wet weight is by using the "hand-powered centrifuge", also known as a salad spinner. Loose algae is placed into nylon stockings before being spun. Ecology projects often are an amalgamation of arts and crafts time, ordinary object innovations, and seemingly simple projects that beget big-picture results. Preeeeetty cool!




We have narrowed down the preference choices for our Lithopoma. Egregia is an excellent candidate for testing snail size and capacity to eat algae of different morphology and texture, since the young parts of the alga are thin, bladed, and pliable, while the older parts of the alga have a thick stipe with dense thin strings. By using one species with multiple "types", we can mostly eliminate other differences, such as potential chemical differences that might arise with using multiple species. We spun both young and old Egregia and set up two tests-containers- one with small Lithopoma and the other with large Lithopoma. All samples of Egregia had about 7.0g of algae. We hope to see a discrepancy in choice and eating methods between the sizes of snail. We've already seen some preliminary results, but only by repeating the experiment can we find actual results.



Above:  A tiny Navanax on one of our Lithopoma!

 Older Egregia nibbled on by large and small Lithopoma, respectively

  A sample of the end of an Egregia trial. This guy did work on the older Egregia!

A snail trial run

Friday 10/26
In the morning and early afternoon, we collected algae from Isthmus Reef. We brought it back to the dock and did the freshwater rinse in a bucket at the dive locker. Immediately after rinsing it, we took it to our spot in Big Fisherman's Cove and installed it in our plots. This was the second set of plots at BFC. We observed that plot #12 was missing an entire plant and the majority of another plant.

Sunday 10/28
We began our first dive at 9:45 at Isthmus Reef to collect the last batch of Dictyota for the final plot implementation at Lion's Head. Eric, Valerie and I functioned efficiently; we were done within 15-20 minutes. After returning to WMSC, we rinsed the Dictyota in our standard way (4 plants in freshwater for 30 seconds) down by the rinse tubs. We placed the samples in plastic bags with seawater back into the buckets and cooler, and made way for Lion's Head. Both the swell and wind were low and pleasant. We began our next dive at 11:30 and put out 7 plots within about 30 minutes.

We began to starve our snails (for 24 hours) to prepare them for formal testing over the next week! One snail was missing and we were unable to find it in surrounding tanks in the lab.

Who got the plots out? Who who WHO WHO

Well its been a week and a half since our last post, and we have accomplished a lot! Get ready for a mondo wall o' text! But don't worry, there will be pictures to tickle your marine biology centers in your brain.


Tuesday, Oct 23:
     We were able to get the first 7 plots out (in a "not-so-random" random order, thanks to our number generator) at Big Fisherman's Cove. As noted in the last blog, we ventured out to Isthmus Reef the day previous and collected 28 Dictyota plants. Since we intend to analyze tiny invertebrate assemblages (more specifically, new colonization) of these plots, we had to rid the plants of the critters that were already living in them. Luckily Valerie and Kaylee had some knowledge of a tried-and-true method of accomplishing this: dunking the plants into freshwater causes the little creatures to go into osmotic shock and drift off into the long sleep. However, we were all surprised when the water started turning a dark indigo and then a rich plum. Dictyota Kool-Aid, anyone? No? Didn't think so.



     After rinsing the plants, we put them in seawater-filled Ziploc bags and began the arduous ritual of loading the boat with scuba gear, science materials, and rocks. (We needed the rocks to hold down our plastic mesh that is used to secure the plants to the ocean floor). All of us will be ripped by the end of this trip. Just you wait.                               


      We boated over to the other side of the cove and after dumping rocks over the side like good ol' rock smugglers and SCUBA'd down to the bottom (17-22 ft) and got to work. We zip-tied plants to the four corners of the plastic mesh. Everything in ecology involves zip ties. 

Lots of heavy lifting!

Kaylee and Eric returning from the bottom

     

Errrrrr-ic being silly

     After diving at Big Fisherman's Cove (hereafter noted as BFC), we headed out to Isthmus Reef and dove between 20-50 feet to collect more Dictyota. Isthmus Reef is the best place to dive in the immediate area that we have found thus far. Every time we go we see Horn Sharks, Giant Kelpfish, and sometimes Leopard sharks, as well as many cool invertebrates. Garibaldi, the California state marine fish, is a particularly striking shade of orange. This bright color is probably aposematic (meaning "warning coloration"), but instead of warning for poisons as in tropical tree frogs, it probably warns observers of their nasty attitude. They're pretty territorial and will fearlessly give divers the stare-down and nip at them. Here are some Isthmus Reef photos, taken by Valerie.

                                                       

Macrocystis and our boat! 

Pretty big Horn Shark!

  

Valerie!

 

                                                                                   Giant Kelpfish

     For our physiology project, we fed our snails, Lithopoma undosa 4 different species of algae: Macrocystis  pyrifera, Egregia sp., Zonaria sp., and Silvetia sp. This was another preliminary trial to see what the general preference of the snails is.

       

Valerie and Eric doing snail science