Intertidal Biodiversity Survey at Pillar Point's Journal

It’s that time of year again: pumpkin carving, apple picking, and...tidepooling! We’re kicking off the field season with an All-Reef Survey on November 8th!

The last time we were out there was in August, so we are curious what we will see! We’ll be doing a reef bioblitz and documenting our findings here on iNaturalist. Bring your family and friends as we explore the reef, make new observations, and learn about our local tidepools.

To sign up and learn more about this event, please fill out this form with your name and email.

Photo: Pillar Point

To stay informed on future Citizen Science Events, sign up for our newsletter here.

I've posted a similar graph to this in the past - this one includes more recent data. This graph represents the average number of Pisaster (all species: ochraceus, giganteus, and brevispinus) per 10m² (the size of our permanent plots) at Pillar Point over the given timeframe. Prior to wasting disease, most of our observations were of adult stars, and of all three Pisaster species (P. ochraceus always being the most abundant, of course). We can clearly see when wasting disease hit (summer of 2013) and the subsequent crash of our Pisaster populations. Since then, we've seen numbers slowly start to climb - but for awhile our observations were primarily of "baby" and juvenile stars. More recently, we've started to find more adult stars - but fewer small stars, so we've actually had a downturn in our overall numbers, as of spring-summer 2016. We have yet to see Pisaster brevispinus back at Pillar Point.

Just to visualize the 10,000+ observations made at Pillar Point, I created this map that shows observations through time. You can definitely tell when we started our citizen science monitoring out there in 2012 - and all the observations we've made since then! Pretty amazing.

The biggest effect of sea star wasting disease at Pillar Point - the loss of most of our Pisaster species and sunflower stars - happened back in late summer/early fall of 2013. Since that time, we've been monitoring the effects and recovery and noticing other impacts as well. But beyond Pillar Point, what is the overall state of sea star wasting disease? How many species have been affected? What have we learned about the disease, what causes it, and what is the outlook for recovery?

To answer all those questions and more, I direct you to the most recent post of The Echinoblog - written by starfish expert and echinoderm-science communicator extraordinaire, Chris Mah.

What's New in Sea Star Wasting Disease?

Happy Holidays everyone! We've picked some monitoring dates for January and February - let us know if you're planning on attending:

Friday, January 8: meet at 2:30. Low tide is -0.6 ft at 3:45 pm.

Monday, January 11: meet at 4 pm. Low tide is -0.9 ft at 5:45 pm. We'll do some night tidepooling that evening!

Thursday, January 21: meet at 1:30 pm. Low tide is -0.7 ft at 3 pm.

Monday, February 8: meet at 3:15 pm. Low tide is -0.8 ft at 4:45 pm.

Thursday, February 18: meet at 12:30 pm. Low tide is -0.2 ft at 2 pm.

In 2015 we continued tracking the effects of sea star wasting disease. Because we take photos when we're out monitoring, we can look back on our iNaturalist observations and see that we used to see mainly adult Pisaster individuals - P. ochraceus but also P. giganteus and P. brevispinus. After seeing the big decline in stars, we started finding very small individuals, which seem to be mainly ochre stars. Once we survey more of our sites this winter, we'll add in that data - since it seems like we've been seeing more healthy adults lately!

Late 2014 and into 2015 has also been unusual due to warming waters (El Niño!), and we've been seeing some interesting visitors in our tidepools. None more obvious than our used-to-be-so-rare-and-exciting-to-find-and-now-is-everywhere-all-the-time Hopkins' Rose (Okenia rosacea). And not just for us at Pillar Point, up and down the California coast they've been fully in bloom. Here's a comparison of maps of sightings on iNaturalist:

Prior to August 2014, most people would only see one. Now, it works out to something like 10 Hopkins' Roses per observer! Amazing!

We're looking forward to seeing what 2016 brings - hope to see you out in the tidepools!

Thanks to those of you who made it out for night tidepooling and for being so willing to share your knowledge with everyone else! Lots of octopus, lots of excited Academy staff, and fluorescing anemones!

Our good low tides are finally moving back into the daylight hours! We have some afternoon monitoring planned in November and December - let's hope for great visibility and beautiful sunsets:

Tuesday, November 10: low tide is 0 ft. at 3:50 pm. We'll meet in the Pillar Point parking lot at 2:30 pm. The plan for this day is to do an all-reef survey, just to see if anything looks new/interesting/different after a couple months away.

Tuesday, November 24: low tide is –1 ft at 3:15 pm. We'll meet in the Pillar Point parking lot at 2 pm. We'll survey one or two of our permanent plots this day.

Wednesday, December 9: low tide is –0.3 ft at 3:30 pm. We'll meet in the Pillar Point parking lot at 2 pm. We'll survey one or two of our permanent plots this day.

Please let us know if you plan to join us for a survey!

And, with our last early morning at Pillar Point on August 1, our intertidal "season" has ended. There are still good, negative low tides... but they're all happening in the dark, from now until mid-October or so.

This past season alone, we almost doubled the total number of observations at Pillar Point - amazing! So, basically, we matched the total number of observations made at Pillar Point from any time before October 2014 with the number of observations we made between October 2014 and August 2015. That's a lot of observations (~3500)!

Look for an email from us in a month or so about a just-for-fun nighttime tidepooling trip at the end of October - just in time for Halloween! Octopus galore...

We enjoyed one early morning together at Pillar Point in the beginning of June, surveying one of our permanent plots. Rebecca and I also went out in mid-June and deployed three temperature loggers that will record once every 20 minutes. We're interested in seeing what range of temperatures are experienced in different levels of the intertidal throughout the day - when submerged and when out of the water. We'll download our first batch of data during the first week of July!

Our upcoming dates - the last ones until late October/early November!:
Thursday, July 2
Friday, July 17
Friday, July 31 OR Saturday, August 1

Send us a message if you'd like to join us!

The last couple days we've been out on the reef, it seems like there's been a surge in overall nudibranch abundance! After a couple months of seeing primarily Hopkin's Roses (Okenia rosacea), we're finally starting to see other species in greater numbers as well. Still a lot of Okenia out there, but lots of others too.

It's been a great couple days of tidepooling! Here are some snapshots from the past two days:

These last few weeks we've been thinking about mussel beds. How best to monitor them in the intertidal? With the competing forces of being released from their main predators, Pisaster ochraceus (ochre stars), yet people freely harvesting them at Pillar Point, it's important to get a sense of what's going on. Are the lower edges of mussel beds expanding because the sea stars aren't there to eat them? Or overall are mussel beds at Pillar Point shrinking, due to harvesting? Mussel beds are notoriously difficult to get an accurate measurement of area by hand, thanks to their strange shapes, often with holes in the middle. I mean, we could do it, but it certainly wouldn't be fun. Or easy.

So we've tried out some different approaches over the past few weeks:
1) Re-taking photos of mussel beds from the ground. Through our citizen science work, we've happened to take photos of mussel beds while exploring the reef. Some of those photos are from 1.5 - 2 years ago, so we thought we should try to re-locate where some of those photos were taken, and try to photograph the mussel bed again from the same angle, so we could compare photos. Here are a couple examples (in each pair, the top photo is the old one, the bottom photo is new):

2) Monitor mussel beds by photographing them via kite, then stitching the photos together and using GIS to map mussel beds. Here's a photo from our most recent kite-deployment (note the mussel beds running diagonally through the photo):

3) Take an even more elevated view, and photograph mussel beds via small plane! Here's Pillar Point reef from the air:

We still need to go through our photos from these three different methods to see what we can learn. Visually, they're all really interesting! But hopefully one or more of these protocols can help us better understand what's happening with mussel beds at Pillar Point.