gmk9's Journal

This morning Hannah and I went walking on the dock and noticed that the tide was really really high, you actually had to walk up to get to the end of the dock over the walkway. We were looking for nudibranchs but instead found some other crazy things that had washed up near the shore from the strong winds that had been blowing for the past few days. We first saw a dead Western gull in among the driftwood in the water and then found a sleeping bag right next to the dock. I tried to take it out of the water but it was insanely heavy because of the water that it had soaked up. Instead we both had to pull as hard as we could and then let it drain for a minute before pulling in totally out of the water and hanging it on the dock to dry. We then continued our nudibranch hunt and eventually found a Dirona pellucida on a tire on the North side of the dock. Later in the day we had to clean out our sea tables in lab 3 and return our organisms. It was very sad because we had become attached to our unique crabs that we had found and a particular stronglocentrotus droebachiensis named Lenny. We found Lenny at the beginning of the quarter and feed him ulva lectuca and other seaweeds and observed his behavior. He was a very fast mover and made daily laps around the sea table. We also had an awesome hermit crab named Pierre that we found during the bottom trawl on the Centennial. We did not return our nudibranchs yet because we are going to make an ID guide for the 14 species that we have found throughout the quarter on the docks and around the island. This quarter at the UW Friday Harbor labs has been my favorite quarter at college and I will never forget the amazing professors, students and creatures that we found.

During Ichthyology lecture on Monday our class was listening intently to our amazing professor Adam Summers give an excellent lecture on the different locomotion types of fish and life cycle migrations when a river otter ran down the road next to the lecture hall. Everyone got out of their seats and looked out of the window as the otter bounded up the hill and into the bushes. It was the third otter we have seen while sitting in the lecture hall. Later that day I went down to the docks and saw three Dendronotus rufus and two Dirona pellucida on the pilings.

On Nov 15th we went out on the motor boat again to collect Hannah’s shrimp frames. It was another beautiful day on the water and there was a lot of animal activity; especially marine mammals. We saw lots of cormorants and gulls in the current channel and there were harbor seals popping up everywhere. The fishing must have been very good because the seals looked very happy and on the way back we saw a pod of Dall’s porpoises skimming the surface of the water. There were also a couple of Harbor porpoises swimming by themselves through the channel. We also saw a large male Steller sea lion near the shore swimming peacefully.

Today (Nov 27) our Marine Biology class performed a quadrant survey of the tires on the dock measuring percent cover of different species. We surveyed eight tires, 4 on the south side of the dock and 4 on the north side of the dock. We found a bunch of really cool creatures on the tires. Hannah and I have been collecting nudibranchs all quarter and today we found our 14th different species, Doris montereyensis (Monterey Sea Lemon) on the bottom of one of the north side tires. We also found a very cool Granular claw crab that has a soft abdomen and one of its claws is larger than the other. The coolest thing we found were three Gastropteron which are benthic snails that have “wings”, or extensions of their mantel, that they can use to fly through the water. We also saw a harbor seal approach the dock.

Last Wednesday November 14th our Ichthyology class went on a fieldtrip to Deadman's Cove to try and find the rare Bothragonus swanii. There is a certain tide pool that can be bailed at low tide that has been one of the most reliable sources of finding Bothragonus swanii in the world. Low tide was around midnight so we went out at 10:30pm and set up a bucket brigade to bail all of the water out of the large tide pool that was 5 ft deep in the middle. I was borrowing someone’s waiters so I was able to stand in the middle of the tide pool once the water level had gone down a little and pass up buckets of water to the brigade to dump out of the tide pool. After about an hour of bailing water we found our first Bothragonus swanii. We continued to bail the tide pool until there were only a few inches remaining and Nick and I used nets to carefully sift through the fish that were left in the tide pool. We found many Oligocottus maculosus and Blepsias cirrhosus and also found four more Bothragonus swanii. We took the fish back to the lab and found another Bothragonus swanii that we had overlooked in the bucket with all of our sculpins that we caught. In total we found 6 Bothragonus swanii!

Last Wednesday (November 7), our Marine Biology class went on a fieldtrip on the Centennial to do some plankton tows and two CTD scans. It was a rainy day but still really fun to be out on the water. We watched for marine mammals but did not see any but what we did see was almost more spectacular. We were standing on the bow of the boat when all of a sudden a good sized salmon jumped clear out of the water 8 times semmingly ridding our bow like a porpoise would do. Its actions were very strange and we thought it could have been swimming away from a larger predator but we never saw any sign of someting bigger. We also caught some cool plankton that we are going to examine closer in a future lab and we got some interesting CTD data that we need to analyze.

Last Tuesday, Hannah Williams and I went out on the motorboat to collect her shrimp frames on a beautiful calm morning. Out on the water we saw a number of harbor seals in the current hunting for fish and having a good time. We also saw a lot of Western gulls, and Double-crested cormorants flying above the water. On the way back, as we approached the dock, a harbor seal swam up to the surface 5 feet from our boat and caught a fish, it was amazing to see a predation event so close to our boat and I was able to really appreciate the elegant way the seal swim swam through the water.

Hannah Williams and I went to a number of different beaches around Penn Cove looking for beach agates and enjoying the November sunshine and we encountered a number of amazing organisms. We saw bald eagles flying in the air searching for fish, kingfishers on powerlines near the beach, and double-crested cormorants on pilings sticking out of the water. We also walked along the Coupeville wharf and saw some Pisaster, lion's mane jellyfish, Mytilus, and lots of pigeons. Inside the wharf they have a really cool skeleton of a gray whale (Rosy) hanging from the ceiling and a Steller seo lion and dall's porpoise skeleton too. We did not find any agates but we did find a lot of really cool rocks and some clam shells.

Yesterday we went trawling for fish for our Ichthyology class field trip on the Centennial. It was a beautiful day, no rain and some sun. On the way to the trawling site we saw Dall's porpoises making rooster tails at the surface and spotted one Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) swimming near the shore. On the first trawl we caught a lot of flatfishes including Citharichthys sordidus and Glyptocephalus zachirus. We also caught a bunch of Liparis dennyi and a Leptocottus armatus. The coolest thing we caught was a Ratfish (Hydrolagus colliei). It was a female because it did not have a clasper on its head. Prawns were also caught in large abundance. On the second trawl we did not catch a lot of fish but we did catch a striped nudibranch (Armina californica) which I was very happy about. We took the fish back to the lab when we got back. It was a very good day on the water.

At UW's Friday Harbor Labs we have created a nudibranch tank in Lab 3. Over the past 2 weeks we have collected 11 different species including my favorite Acanthodoris nanaimoensis. We found most of the nudibranchs off the dock on the pilings and we collected them with a net. We have fed the nudibranchs bryozoans and sponges and they seem to be happy and move around the tank a lot. The Hermissenda crassicornis and our Dirona albolineata have laid eggs on top of some sea lettuce that we had in the tank. Yesterday we found an Armina californica while trawling for fish in our Ichthyology class.