From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

So, I have been tasked with beginning a selfie challenge in which you take a selfie in the lab/field and then pass the torch on to another person in the Karnovsky lab!

This is me and my darling otoliths. You can’t tell, but this one is totally making a duck face in honour of this photo.

Your turn, Nikole McDuffie!!

Nola Shi’15 has sent an update on her postgrad research adventures in Oregon!

Nola after butterfly surveys up on Steens mountain.

“We finished up our woody riparian and wet meadow point counts. We basically trudged 6-8 miles through marshland (nothing like water and cow poop sloshing around in your hiking boots for several hours!) and through fields with grasses taller than I am at 4 AM, and there are 99999 mosquitos here.

Intern covered in mosquitoes!

The point counts were really cool — tons of white faced ibises, black necked stilts, avocets, black terns, double crested corms, curlews and phalaropes. We’re also just about done with our impoundment brood surveys — one of the lakes here has around 3000-5000 birds on it, so it takes hours to count them all! Someone took a sandhill crane colt from near its nest and brought it to refuge headquarters. So we had to drive 10 hrs to a rehab center in Portland and the poor thing is probably going to be put into a zoo.”

Nola also reported on a trip to the coast where she was able to check nests of snowy plovers with other biologists. Looking forward to more updates!

So, I’m up to my ears in otoliths (pun intended). I’ve gotten a decent way through sorting all of them and picking out a pretty representative sample from each season to put in immersion oil, and I’ve finally started taking pictures of and ageing the otoliths that I put in oil last week and the week before!

An Electrona otolith that I’ve aged to be about 8 years old

A Pleurogramma otolith that I’ve aged to be about 6 years old

It’s really exciting when they look this great!!

But then other times they turn out to still look like this:

My notes for this one just say “nope”

And then most of they time they’re somewhere in between

This one’s currently down as 3 years, but I’m gonna re-check it in a few days

My favourite ones though are the juvenile otoliths of the Pleurogramma

Those bands aren’t annual, but they’re so cool to look at!

Last night, Prof. K had me over for dinner and I had fried clams for the first time! They were DELICIOUS!! Max showed us some magic tricks, and Lillian sang lots of Frozen songs. And I also got to see Darrell, a seabird biologist from CA who I met at PSG and got to help out with some Scripps’ Murrelet surveys on Catalina Island last semester, so that was really fun also!

I’m still having such a great time here! Living on the beach, fresh seafood, and a whole bunch of really freaking smart people who are all into marine science–it’s paradise!

I do have to get back to work now though.

Until next time 🙂

Mimi

There is a lot going on here besides just the seabirds, and I thought it would be nice to make a post showing some of the animals we see when we stop to just look around a bit. There’s a lot to see, so I’ll just post a few of the photos I’ve taken and maybe add a few more the next time I offload my camera. Of course to start out this list of things we’ve seen that aren’t seabirds, I have a picture of some of the birds we’re watching. This was on our off-time however, so I think I’ll let it slide. This was taken a while ago around sundown, when I happened to be on a walk with my parents who were visiting. We decided to go past Leo’s cormorant viewing site, and when I looked over I was surprised to see that along with the dozen or so pelagic cormorants with nests there were somewhere around fifty cormorants strewn across the bluff (we counted when I brought the others out to take a look). Since we never see that many during the day, we figured that this must be a convenient place for birds without nests to come and rest during the night. They were there again at sunset a few days later, so it seemed like we had the right idea.

On a similar walk, this time with a little fog, we saw something partway up a tree whose branches reached across the edge of the bluff and hung above the rocks and surf below. As we got closer I realized that the bird was actually an osprey perched on one of the longer boughs. It looked as though it was considering the ocean hazed in fog, perhaps thinking how best to go about its next hunt. Or perhaps it was simply nesting.

We were able to get pretty close as far as seeing osprey go, though that wasn’t quite close enough for my camera. We end up seeing osprey from a much closer view at Jeffrey’s GPI site, where we sit on a point of the bluff which the osprey glide over in passing. One had to have come within twenty feet, giving a perfect profile of its wings strained against the sky.

Song sparrow

Scrub jay

Dark eyed junco

For all the seabirds that we see, there are certainly plenty which prefer to stick to land. As most of our work keeps us in open spaces away from trees, most of the birds we see either are varied in habitat preference or enjoy the scrub and grass in which we sit.

Our most common visitor as we sit at Nicole’s site on the south side of the island has to be the sparrows, namely the song and white-crowned, which flit between the soft branches of the yellow lupine bushes. Their songs are always enjoyable.

The scrub jays, who I know quite well from my time working with Professor Levin at the Bernard Field Station,  can be heard around the houses and the bigger bushes, swooping, calling, and hopping along the ground, their plumage a mix of muted blues and brown. They always have something to say when they’re around.

A few birds we only see glimpse of, like the dark eyed junco, which I have only seen the one time. Others include the gold finch, which bobs when it flies, the spotted plover up the river, the herons which Jeffrey had in one of his posts, and many others.

We also have seen a lot of one of my favorite birds, the ravens! They’re everywhere along the coast, and not a day has gone by that we haven’t seen at least a few pairs flying about. At Jeffrey’s GPI site they fly overhead in groups of six, sometimes with grass or food, making caws and croaks and strange rolling rattles. At my cormorant viewing site they fly overhead and through the cove, sometimes with a morsel, or even swooping overhead in long arcs in the company of turkey vultures.

In the picture on the top the three ravens were having some sort of conversation with coos and calls so soft and sonorous that I can’t find the words to describe them. I would love to know what they were talking about, as it did seem clear they were speaking towards each other.

The picture on the bottom has a small blackbird (brewers?) which was mobbing a raven. They both started out perched on a house, and I’m guessing the raven was a little to close to the nest for comfort. The little bird got a few good swipes in, and I could see it make impact a few times. The raven got out pretty quick.

Here we have a family of North American gray foxes. We’ve seen a few of these guys around wandering right past, heading somewhere into the grass. Usually we only see a lone adult, but we managed to spot the ones in this photo while driving around. They were heading behind a fence into someones yard, though one of them got sidetracked and took a little detour around the house.

This is another picture of the garter snake that Nicole talked about in her last post, minus the flowers of course. I got it at the perfect time to show of its tongue, and I have to say I wasn’t expecting the contrast of the red and blue coloration. We’ve seen a few other of these guys around, but usually they’re pretty quick to slide into the brush.

And here’s a few from our tidepooling forays to finish things off. On the bottom is a velella, color leaking onto the rocks as it dries in the sun. And on the top is some kind of isopod. Probably (I don’t know marine invertebrates that well, anyone have ideas?).

Anyways, hope you liked the post, and I hope to have another one soon!

Well only some of them are actually owls…

Great horned owl attempting to bore holes into the camera with its eyes

Barn Owl (This is the first time we’ve seen owls in the project so far!)

Rabbits staring into the distance contemplatively… What is life? What is love?

Woodrat looking very guilty… Of being adorable

Coyote looking at camera with suspicion

Woodrat checking out a tree

Rabbit with bat casually flying overhead

Raccoon family!

Hi Everyone!!

Monday was my first day of work here at WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). Let me just say that Woods Hole is AMAZING! It’s so beautiful, the weather is perfect (most of the time… there’s a storm coming in now and the power keeps going out). But here is a picture from Monday night.

After work on Monday, two friends and I picked up dinner and hung out on the beach until about 8pm. This is a photo of the sunset as we were walking home.

Also, there is this family of ducks that I’ve been drinking coffee with every morning before work, a momma duck and 6 or 7 little ducklings. They get fed all the time, so they come right up to you and expect food.

Papa duck was looking for some food, but I didn’t have anything, so he figured that he would see if my toes tasted alright. I’ve been remembering to bring bread now.

I’m working on ageing my otoliths in Joel Llopiz’s lab. His work focuses on larval fish, and he has 2 undergrads (Sara and Justin), a post-grad (Julie), and a post-doc (Andy) working on various projects with him.

This is my lab space! Otoliths on otoliths on otoliths.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be sorting out individual otoliths to age from as many samples as possible from each year (the 04-05 season through the 10-11 season).

This is what I got through yesterday…

The sorted samples

And this is what I have left to do (each stack is about 15 high).

So… I have a little bit of work ahead of me before I can start actually reading the otoliths, but it’ll be worth it! I’m hoping to get some really cool data from this! 🙂

I hope that everyone’s summer is going well, and I’ll keep y’all updated on this end!

-Mimi

Mimi at her lab bench (photo inserted by Prof. K. )

Hi all! Nicole here, and since I’m the semi-local of the group I wanted to write about places I’ve been showing the others! Yay field trips! But first here are some pictures of my Black Oystercatcher nest through a scope!

Also here’s a picture of the sunset from the house we’re staying in!

A few weeks ago we used one of our half days off to go to a tide pool beach where we saw tadpoles (in freshwater pools), anemones, chitons, crabs, hermit crabs, sea snails, and a few other cool things.  Here’s a picture of Jeffrey looking contemplative:

And Kyle and Leo taking lots of pictures:

Crab friend!

And a gorgeous Garter Snake that was hanging out by the trail!

A few days later we went to Anderson Valley to check out the Rock Stop (a geology shop) and a small apple orchard.  The orchard had some friendly dogs that took a liking to Leo and Kyle:

This dog especially liked trying to herd Kyle and would try to tag him with his paw when Kyle wasn’t looking.

And then we stopped in the redwood forest on the way back!

My mom came to visit last weekend and we played a lot of Settlers of Catan (Kyle continued his winning streak).  We’ve been going through my childhood art supplies and I found my old loom that I’ve started making a purse on!

I passed on joining their game of Risk, and I’m glad I did…it has been going on for more than a week now (Leo and Jeffrey are fighting it out).

And Leo observing Pelagic Cormorants in front of the house:

Lastly on Thursday Kyle and I headed to a part of the Gualala River where we a lot of really cool animals, including a swimming Garter Snake…

…and what we think is a Crayfish? Kyle almost stepped on it!

Now we’re visiting Jeffrey’s parents in Sonoma! We’ll probably spend tomorrow swimming and enjoying the unlimited wifi!

Lots more to come!

Nicole

The double crested cormorant (DCCO) is the most common cormorant in the United States, but you wouldn’t know that in Sea Ranch since we see relatively few of these guys around. Unlike the Pelagic Cormorant and the Brandt’s Cormorant, the Double Crested Cormorant prefers to nest around freshwater. Their orange faces make identification easy.

Double Crested Cormorant in flight

The majestic Great Blue Heron(GBHE) is certainly a sight to behold, unless you happen to be a small animal living in shallow water because by the time you see this stealthy assassin you have likely been snatched out the water and impaled by its bill and will soon be eaten. Sometimes it’s good to be human.

Great Blue Heron hunting during low tide

It might be cheating to include this picture of a Brown Pelican (BRPE pronounced Burp–ee) since it was actually taken in Cabo nearly 2 years ago, but who cares about technicalities anyway. On the West Coast Brown Pelicans breed down in Mexico and make their way up north to hang out and feed. As intimidating as these guys can be, we are lucky to have them around since we had nearly driven them to extinction by the 1960s by spraying DDT everywhere. Thankfully a really awesome woman by the name of Rachel Carson came along and and published Silent Spring in 1962. It only took 10 more years of spraying DDT everywhere and killing tons of birds before DDT was finally banned. As Winston Churchill once said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing–after they’ve tried everything else”

A rather intimidating Brown Pelican

Rachel Carson- marine biologist, author, BRPE savior and DDT eradicator

Pesky paparazzi…

Ready for my close-up

Plans of world domination or an innocent clearing of the throat – we will never know…

Exclusive rabbit party – you’re not invited

Get my good side

And my other good side

Silly humans… My cuteness knows no bounds

This past week brought a new adventure for the Sea Ranch team! We (Jeffrey, Kyle, Nicole, and I) volunteered along with several other individuals to help with an intertidal survey conducted by  UC Santa Cruz’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department. Maya, Melissa, Karah, and Molly were our mentors throughout the project as the grad students in charge of conducting the survey.

Kyle scanning species into an electronic database as Karah goes through a typical plot. Each plot was divided into a 10×10 grid and belonged to one of five different species plots. Each individual rectangle was classified by the predominant covering species (if no species present, just rock or sand) and then scanned using pre-made barcodes and a PalmPilot (essentially a PDA with a scanning machine like in a grocery store). A bit tedious, but the plots were only exposed during low tide and we were racing the clock to get all the plots done before the tides rose again. (Thankfully we won the race)

Jeffrey and Nicole setting up the rig for an overhead photo of a plot.

Nicole carrying the camera rig. Climbing over wet, algae-covered rocks was hard enough without the rig, but she did it!

Me using the Palm Pilot to scan species into a preset database as Maya identifies the predominant species per area. The heavy jacket was crucial in the cold morning wind, and the gloves (almost) kept my hands from freezing solid.

After the survey, we all went to Trinks cafe in Gualala to warm up and talk without the impending threat of the rising tide. From Left to Right: Doug Forsell, Lynn Suer, Karah, Kyle, Nicole, Amy and Bob van Soyk, Jeffrey, Me, Molly, Melissa, and Maya.

Overall this was an amazing adventure and an incredibly fun morning.