From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

On May 17th, with the suburban packed to the gills, we made our way to Santa Barbara harbor to load the R/V Shearwater.

Oceanographic equipment and food for 5 days.

This time we had Augie Lagemann’10 with us. Augie is a biology major at Pomona College. He will be a senior next year and these at-sea data will be the basis of his senior thesis.

Augie just managed to fit!

 

 
 

Kristen and Dr. K with a murrelet!

          After dark all the murrelets come back to the island to socialize and rest from a long day of feeding. Not only do they have to watch out for hungry sea lions, but also our fearless crew of bird-netters! We are collaborating with a research team that is working on a population study of these rare birds. We spent two nights netting and banding murrelets. How do we catch these small birds that can fly and dive? It certainly isn’t easy!

          In a Zodiac, we zoomed around the small bay of SBI. One person steered, while another sat in the bow with a giant net. The third person used a spotlight to find birds. Once a bird was found, they were often captivated by the bright light (similar to a deer-in-headlights) and the netter was able to scoop them up. Though this usually worked, the bird would sometimes dive under the water or, if the spotlight was removed for just a second, they regained their wits and flew away. There were several wild murrelet chases through the bay. Nonetheless, we caught over 50 birds in just two nights!

A newly banded murrelet

 

Brood patch

We also had two re-captures of birds that were banded during the last major banding project- in 1996!! We then released the birds, completely unharmed, off the back of the Shearwater.

 

Banding crew, from left to right: Laurie(NPS), Ben (Cornell), Eduardo (CONANP), Dr. K (Pomona), Harry (Carter Assoc.), Sarah (volunteer), Daryll (Carter Assoc), Kristen (Pomona).

Kristen and Harry deploying the zooplankton net. The flowmeter is visible in the middle of the net hoop.

Every few kilometers we stop the ship to put our zooplankton net in the water. We want to see what kind of zooplankton (the main food for Xantus’ murrelets and Cassin’s auklets) there is in the top 50 meters of the water. In order to calculate how much water the net filters, we have a flowmeter hooked to the mouth of the net and we have a dive gauge that measures the temperature of the water and the depth of the water that the net travels through.

Harry spraying the net (and Kristen)!

Nina and Kristen with the cod ends that hold the catch.

Lots of copepods in this haul!

A chain forming salp! These animals live joined together in a colony.

The most important part of our study was counting seabirds and marine mammals around Santa Barbara Island. We repeated surveys along the transect lines originally done by G.L. Hunt, Jr. in 1976. Whenever the boat was underway, we recorded all seabirds within 200m of our boat.  To determine where 200m was, we used trigonometry—measurements of eye-height and arm length led to little marks on personalized dowels. Cool trick.

Kristen measuring Eduardo Prieto, the biologist from Guadalupe Island, Mexico, for the 200m dowel markings. SBI is in the background.

Each bird was entered with their 4-letter species code (Xantus’ murrelets= XAMU), and their behavior- on sitting on the water, feeding, flying N, etc. We also recorded all marine mammals and anything cool that was out of our transect zone.

From left to right: Harry Carter, Dani Lipski, and Laurie Harvey surveying seabirds from the flying bridge. Harry is holding the Husky computer.

 

            Fun things we saw while observing:

• Lots of Xantus’ murrelets!
• Mola mola sunfish! (3 of them!)
• Gray whales- it was the first time I had ever seen a whale! (outside of Sea World) and humpback whales breaching!
• Lots of sea lions. There is a California Sea Lion (CASL) colony on Santa Barbara Island, so they were all over the place.
• Bottlenose and one pod of 50+ Pacific white-sided dolphins! They liked to ride the wave under our bow.
• A black-footed albatross!

And we got to sit on the flying bridge for bird obs- which was great. Nothing like the sea wind blowing through your hair.

A black-footed albatross riding the wind with Santa Barbara Island in the background.

On April 24th, Kristen’10 and I boarded the R/V Shearwater to begin oceanographic surveys around Santa Barabara Island. The R/V Shearwater is the research vessel of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. The purpose of this project is to assess the seabird distributions around Santa Barbara Island and the physical propoerties of the ocean as well as the food available to the seabirds. We are particularly interested in the Xantus’ murrelet, a small seabird that nests on only a few islands in Southern California and Mexico.

R/V Shearwater and the awesome Captain, crew and staff. From left to right Terrence (Operator), Dani (Research Specialist), Charlie (mate) and Reg (mate)

Kristen'10 in her foul weather gear and Charlotte'10 in her bug baffler shirt. Elizabeth'10 is in the back measuring fish ear bones.

Lately the lab has been filled with crates, boxes and bottles as we gear up for the 2009 field seasons. This spring and summer we will be investigating the diving behavior of Cassin’s auklets on the Farallon Islands, avian diversity in the short-grass prairie of Montana, and the distribution of seabirds and zooplankton around Santa Barabara Island.

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