bncantrell's Journal

I was helping Garrett and Hannah out with cataloging and photographing their nudibranchs that they had collected in Dr. Carrington's lab. As I watched Garrett photograph these organisms on the black background of the desks, I noticed that they began to secrete increasingly disturbing amounts of slime onto the desk which then began to drip in an offensively dramatic way down the side of the desk and land in little "spats" on the concrete floor. Though the slime reminded me of spit and I hate spit it was awesome that these little blobs of slime could produce so much of it themselves. It's also really cool to see an organism that spends its life in water out of it, because it can usually rely on that water to keep it up and looking fresh, but when it's in the air, it collapses on itself and just starts to look sort of sad and blobby. That's how a nudibranch is though. The rufus ones were the worst because of how much they open up in the water. They expand all their little tiny parts and they look like a piece of purple broccoli or something, but out of water they look like a boiled ham hock. Anyways after all this we went down to the dock where we released them back into the sound. They floated slowly down into the shallow abyss and I'm sure are up on the pilings by now joining the pyncnopodia and shrimp that we noticed there as we released them. We also netted a liparis sp? we believe. It was a rather large one too.

Last Thursday night, a bunch of us went down to the dock to nightlight, as it was our last night at the labs together. I am hopelessly impatient, and when I first put the light in the water, I was disappointed that schools of fish didn't immediately swarm the small beacon. I was also irritated with the frigid cold and the fact that the dock was icy as Neptune. They started coming slowly, but soon more and more had surrounded the light and were swimming about in circles and investigating the cord that ran vertically into the abyss of our world. Soon hundreds and hundreds of fish were milling about, enticed by the light and all its mysteries. The fish that came were some kind of anchovy, as we could tell when we caught one in our net and then Garrett went and bit its head off. It was silvery and long, with green on its back and two large eyes. Its scales readily shed and left slime and rainbow scales on our hands. We were really really hoping to see a sea lion harbor seal, or even a large fish that would have come to prey on the huge amount of smaller ones. We also saw a little Eumicrotremus orbis swim into their school as well as a few shrimp.The experience was incredible, and could only have happened at Friday Harbor with people who are interested in biology for Biology's sake, not to go into the medical profession.

We went to Cattle Point in the early morning of October 9; it was a grey, windy, and the sky was painted with a pallet scraped down in rough strokes. Cattle point a completely different experience than this side of the Island- it's wave-exposed and windy, rough and intertidal. There's some of that here, but not anywhere like it is here on these shores. We descended down the steep path to the water, and once we got there were overwhelmed by the variety of species, both plant and animal, that we saw there. There was a ton of fucus and other kelps, the ubiquitous Nereocystis, and tons and tons of ulva. Dr. Emily Carrington told us all about how the 'emerald carpet' forms when the seagulls proliferate their guano on the rocks. The huge amount of nitrogen that comes from their feces fertilizes the seaweeds and they grow in abundance on the rocks that the seagulls live on. And there WERE a lot of birds there. I even saw a bald eagle, whose scientific name I PRAY is Aquila americana but it turns out is not, it's Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Some students who are from the east coast had never even seen a bald eagle before that day. It's kind of remarkable when you consider that some of them are kind of outdoorsy. It was at this field trip that I first became interested in seaweeds because there are so many of them and because they're just so cool! The intertidal nature of this environment was also especially neat to experience. The water comes in and out makes and engulfs little islands in almost the same instant. The cattle point ecosystem is really an amazing one.

I wouldn't have ever thought that plants would be as interesting as I have found them during the Marine Biology Class this quarter. I thought that my interests in Biology would lie squarely in the "Chordate" box, but I found that when our Marine Biology class went down to the dock to find the seaweeds that made their habitat there, I was surprised by how interested I was in these organisms. What had once been to me rather uninteresting piles of slimy and rubbery film now became complex structures left over from the wastes of the mesozoic. I found a red alga called "Turkish Towel," known in the Scientific community as "Chondracanthus exasperatus" which is an alga of surprisingly rich and deep purple-red that is covered in probably thousands of small, polyp-like raised bumps. These cover the towel and give it the texture of terry cloth, which is no doubt where the common name for the alga derives.
One of the most "vanilla" algae off the dock is "Ulva lactuca" which is the rather common sea lettuce. It is a striking kelly green, and floats in the current in an apathetic, 'devil-may-care' way. It doesn't seem to be too intent on latching onto anything permanent, but rather allowing itself to drift in the current to conditions of optimal light and nutrition. Since the species has flourished, this mechanism seems to have been a favorable one. I have learned that the scientific observer cannot fault an organism for a survival or reproductive strategy that serves its purpose of continued and eternal existance no matter how unorthodox.
Even though I have lived in Washington my entire life, and spent countless hours on the beaches of the sound taking note of what comes out of that mysterious aquatic abyss, I had never seen a great many of the species of seaweeds that are found off the dock. I had never before seen a Turkish Towel and I have never seen the Giant Bullkelp, Nereocystus. The kelps which fill themselves with air I find especially fascinating; how these non-sentient organisms can fill themselves with noble gasses is astonishing. Seaweeds are inappropriately named.

Earlier in the quarter, we went to Dead Man's Cove to flip rocks over and see what kind of fish lived underneath them. What we discovered is that there are actually a lot of fish that live underneath rocks! I wasn't convinced that we would find anything, but that's not what happened. We found Anoplarchus, Atropurpureus, and Pholis ornata and Pholis laeta. They are all very similar looking, and I assume that this means they are also similar functioning, and that is why we found them together under rocks on the beach at 11:30 at night. I also went wading in the water and saw the bioluminescence that happens when you disturb and splash the water. I witnessed an enormous Pyncnopodia hiding in a crevice between some rocks, and also found a lot of crabs among the rocks as well. I found blood stars and chitons, and some hermit crabs. The shore is remarkably wet and remarkably alive at the late hours of the night, and it's during this time that we went. There was a ton of fucus and Ulva lactuca. The shore is healthy and diverse with plant and animal life. I was most surprised that the anguilliforms mentioned earlier could live after being stuck under a rock for hours at a time. This is one of the many wonders of Fish that I have learned about while here this quarter.

In Fish Lab we used a high-speed camera to try and capture the swimming mechanism of different fishes. I cannot speak too highly of my surprise in discovering how different a fish appears when it is viewed in slow motion. What is at normal speed appears to be a fast oscillation of tail and fin becomes a beautifully executed movement that can only be appreciated at such a slow speed. The regularity of the motion becomes apparent as well as the minute movements of dorsal and pectoral fins that can't be seen by the naked eye. Garrett and I filmed Blepsias cirrhosus and I was surprised by the vast difference in motion that appears in the screen of the camera compared to the eye alone. Blepsias oscillates its dorsal fin in a sinusoidal motion as well as oscillating its tail back and fourth. It uses its pectoral fins to start it from a stop, and in slow motion, it looks like flight. The high speed camera affords a view of the swimming fish that is impossible to view without it. The timed and ordered motions of the fish are like the inner mechanism of a watch: always there but never seen unless you have the right tools. This lab was really beneficial for my understanding of fish locomotion.

The Atlantic coast is drastically different from the West coast, especially the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Northwesterners typically pride their location on its ability to remain green and scenic throughout the year due to the massive quantities of evergreen trees that are native to the region. However, about three weeks ago I went to South Carolina and I can say for certain that there is no comparison between the greenery of the Southern Atlantic coast and our own during the winter season. In comparison, our PN is dismal. The Southern Atlantic coast is full of gorgeously and vibrantly green trees covered in thick Spanish moss, while our evergreens remain a somber shade of darkest green and all deciduous trees have lost their foliage. The weather there was also beautiful- about 75 degrees and beautifully sunny.
The fauna of the region are also dissimilar. While walking on the white sandy beach, I discovered the shell of a horseshoe crab. It is not something I had ever seen before, and I am sure that it does not exist in our region. Placed next to my shoe on the ground, it looked remarkably large, and straight out of the mesozoic. The shell was in two parts, and an articulation between them. I loved seeing the carapace of such a large crustacean, as they don't get that big here. The Atlantic is warmer, which seems to provide a better habitat for the growth of larger organisms.

I knew about seining in the sense that some fishing boats use seining nets to catch large amounts of fish indiscriminately. We used a long net and rowboats to set the seining net and then a large group of us pulled the ends of the net to shore as they were attached to long ropes that we had access to on shore. As we pulled the ropes in, the net came to shore, and the net was filled with tons and tons of sea creatures. We caught a ton of fishes: Platichthys stellatus, Ophiodon elongatus, Myoxycephalus polyacanthocephalus, Blepsias cirrhosus, Lepidopsetta bilineata, Enophrys bison, Hexagrammos stelleri, Aulorhynchus flavidus, Embiotica lateralis, Pholis Laeta, Pholis ornata, Cymatogaster aggregata, Psychrolutes paradoxus, Eumicrotremus orbis, Lepticottus armatus, Liparis dennyi, Liparis florae, Appodichthys flavidus, Syngnathus leptorhynchus, Oligocottus maculosus, Gadus microcephalus, Hexagrammos decagrammos, Artedius harringtoni, Scorpaenichthys marmoratus as well as many many shrimps and crabs. There are many more fish in the sound than I knew where there, and most of these I had never even heard of before. It was a very rewarding and enriching experience to observe and collect so many species of fish.

About two weeks ago I went out in the channel with Garrett, Hannah, and Shelley to set shrimp down into the channel and film them being eaten for their MERE project. We left before lunch, and it was a beautifully sunny day, and slightly breezy. We saw a ton of wildlife, much more than can usually be seen from shore. We saw Dahl's porpoises, Harbor porpoises, and Steller's sea lions: all right around the shallow shoal off the harbor. I had never seen so many large marine mammals before. The Porpoises were swimming parallel to our boat for a short time after they just appeared from beneath the waves around us. We also saw a lot of birds on the water; some that were really cool dunked below the water as we went by and didn't come up for some time. We also saw some Glaucous wing gulls and Western Gulls. When we were setting the shrimp apparatus, the Steller's sea lion came up to investigate our boat. It was a beautiful day on the channel and we saw some great charismatic megafauna. It could only have been better if we had seen some killer whales!

Though Anderson Island isn't relatively far from San Juan island, the terroir of Anderson is markedly different. Firstly, the coast and beaches are almost completely opposite: up here the shores are a vertical wall of rock, but on Anderson, we have rocky shores all the way around. I have found very few beaches like the ones on the island, but many that are drastically different. Jackson beach is like the ones on AI, but the ones by the labs are different- they're the vertical rock wall that plunges directly into the sound without stopping.
The trees even seem different here. I don't think that they are, but San Juan island reminds me a lot of the Northern California or Southern Oregon, while Anderson Island has the familiar lush green feeling that most of Western Washington has.
I've also noticed that the wildlife in the very southern sound is much different than it is in the north. Down south there aren't as many seals or sea lions, and I've definitely never seen a harbor porpoise down there. I believe that this is because there's less activity and less productivity down in the south sound than up here in the north due to the much greater amount of water that is exchanged from the ocean through the straits. In contrast, the water in the south sound has a much longer turnover rate. And there can be whales up here, and I've never seen a whale down in the south sound.
Both of these areas are stunningly beautiful and wonderfully diverse, but for being so close geographically I see many differences between them.