Within 10 Feet

Today I decided to try and find as many species of all types that I could within 10 feet in any direction of the houseboat. I surveyed the area about once an hour between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM, took some photos, discovered you can use binoculars quite well to look at deeper intertidal life, and spent some time with a stack of field guides. In total, I came up with about 40 species - here's how they broke down:

Birds

Glaucous-winged gull

Belted kingfisher

Rock pigeon

Pine siskin

Dark-eyed junco

Rock pigeon

Flowering plants

Licorice fern

Two unidentified tiny, weedy species

Licorice fern

Seaweeds

Bull kelp

Rockweed

Eelgrass

Sea cabbage

Seersucker kelp

At least one other type of kelp-like seaweed

At least one type of sea lettuce (Ulva spp.)

At least one type of brown tuft seaweed 

At least one type of filamentous red seaweed (of which there are about 60 local species that can only be distinguished microscopically)

Amazingly this shot shows almost all the different types of seaweed at once

Mosses 

Five species, including probably:

Juniper moss

Red bryum

Moss species

Lichens

At least four species, including potentially:

Xantharia sp.

Hypogymnia sp.

Lichen species

Arachnids

One type of orb spider

Invertebrates

Blue mussel

Acorn barnacle

California sea cucumber

Orange sea cucumber

Giant plumose anemone

Giant green anemone

Red-trumpet calcareous tubeworm

Ochre star

Monterey sea lemon (a type of nudibranch)

Graceful decorator crab

Kelp crab - perhaps Pugettia gracilis

Giant rock scallop

One shrimp species

One unknown crab-like species (see photo)

Giant plumose anemone

California sea cucumber

Two kelp crabs, possibly graceful kelp crabs (Pugettia gracilis)

The coolest find of the day, a small species with a big name that I hadn't noticed before - red-trumpet calcareous tubeworm

Another red-trumpet calcareous tubeworm - they ranged in color from all white to all red or any level of mixed banding between the two colors

The unknown crab-like species, about the size of a thumb nail. Any ideas??

And a last minute addition!

Mammals
Mink

Marine Debris Survey

Those of you that have been following my blog for a while know that I do monthly surveys of a local beach for COASST, the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team. The main focus of this citizen science project has been dead seabirds, but as part of a National Science Foundation grant they're looking to potentially expand the program to include a marine debris survey. They asked current COASSTers to photograph some debris on their local beaches to help them start the process of figuring out how to categorize debris. 

What's so interesting about surveying marine debris? You might be surprised!

Recently, a lot of debris from the Japanese tsunami has been washing up on Pacific Coasts. In addition to being interesting for beach combers, some of these debris pose greater risks than other trash in that they might introduce non-native species to our local coastal areas. A piece of a dock that washed up in Oregon had almost 2 tons of living marine organisms on it. Some tsunami debris has even been returned to their owners; a basketball that washed up in Alaska was returned to a school in Japan, where the kids were thrilled to receive it back.

Some native barnacles growing on a rusted piece of old anchor

It doesn't take a major marine catastrophe to make marine debris important, though. Even the run-of-the-mill beach trash may contain important information. Plastic lighters are notorious for their impacts on seabirds after being ingested in great numbers by birds like albatross. But did you know albatross are far more likely to ingest a red or orange lighter than a blue or black one? What if we could use this information to help protect albatrosses?

I remember reading about a waterside clean up in the Puget Sound area that quantified the different types of garbage they picked up. I believe plastic bottle caps and lids over 2" are recyclable, while smaller ones aren't. They found large quantities of small bottle caps, and only one larger one. Does this mean recyclable items are less likely to turn up on beaches than non-recyclable ones?

Debris can also tell us about weather and oceanic currents and how they influence debris. Have you ever heard about the 28,000 rubber duckies that fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean in 1992? They're still washing up on beaches 20 years later, continuing to inform scienctists about how our oceans work. Some have even found their way to Europe!

 It will be interesting to see what COASST comes up to do their marine debris survey. Some things they hope to do with such surveys include directing clean-ups to the most littered areas, further understand weather patterns that bring debris to shore, define which fisheries contribute to fishery-related debris, and look at the relationship between shore and ocean debris.

While I found some debris (not that much - San Juan beaches are usually pretty clean), I didn't find any dead seabirds, as per usual. There was still plenty of else to look at, however including live birds. The winter seabird are starting to show up in numbers. There were probably 600+ scoters - mostly surf scoters but a few white-winged, too. I also saw 10 or more common loons, horned grebes, and red-necked grebes. Another surprise just because of their numbers was a flock of over 50 northwestern crow!

The one other picture I had to stop and take was of these clouds over towards the Straits. How many cloud types do you think there are in this photo? It was an impressive sight!

An Abundance of Life in San Juan Channel

Recently I got a newsletter update from the SeaDoc Society that had an interesting article about a sand wave in the middle of San Juan Channel. Underwater sand waves can be created by strong tidal currents, which San Juan Channel has plenty of. Here's a graphic from a paper written by Friday Harbor Lab student Jennifer Blaine showing the location and bathymetry of the sand wave:

Living in the sand wave, they found, are an estimated 44 million immature sand lance, a forage fish that is an essential link between plankton and higher order predators like sea birds, pinnipeds, and cetaceans. That explains why you often see a lot of seabirds in the middle of San Juan Channel! This rhinoceros auklet has a beak full of sand lance - it's a photo I took in San Juan Channel is July:

These thoughts were in my mind as I headed out yesterday to volunteer for a San Juan Channel bird survey. These transect surveys are part of a citizen science effort to get more data on the birds of San Juan Channel and create a year-round dataset to supplement the fall data that has been collected by the Friday Harbor Labs for the last bunch of years. I went on the inaugural volunteer survey in April, and this was my first one since then.

On yesterday's survey I saw 11 different bird species, but hundreds and hundreds of actual birds. The most abundant were the common murres, of which I saw more than 500. Also abundant were rhinoceros auklets and lots of gulls, including glaucous-winged, mew, California, and Heermann's. We also turned up about ten marbled murrelets (an impressive number), a few red-necked phalaropes, and a single Pacific loon still in stunning breeding plumage. Double-crested and pelagic cormorants rounded out my list. Compared to April, we had a lot more marine mammals in our survey zone - both harbor seals and harbor porpoise.

On our way out to do the survey, however, we had another task: an invertebrate release! One of the other volunteers had been doing a marine invertebrate educational unit in local classrooms and was returning some of the collected specimens back into the channel. We were all fascinated to see all the invertebrates up close before we released them! Here's the underside of a sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides), a sea star that usually has between 15 and 25 legs:

I should have taken more pictures, because there were lots of other cool sea stars to look at too. Two that impressed me were the leather star (Dermasterias imbricata), with its intricate red color pattern on olive green skin, and the slime star (Pteraster tesselatus), a fat little sea star that produces a snot-like clear mucous. (Guess who got to release that one? Me!)

I did, however, take some pictures of this umbrella crab (Cryptolithodes sitchensis). This was a female, and was comparatively drab in coloration compared to some others of her species, which can come in brilliant reds and oranges. She was still a marvel to look at though - her carapace is so wide it covers her legs entirely. They really blend into the rocks and can be very hard to see:

Fish, birds, invertebrates - even when the whales aren't around much, there's still a lot to look at and learn about here in the Salish Sea!

San Juan Channel: Bird Survey and Branded Sea Lion

Yesterday afternoon we participated in a marine bird survey transect down San Juan Channel. In the fall, a class at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs has been conducting surveys down this transect for birds and marine mammals over the last several years, and my friend Phil is interested in establishing a year-round data set following the same transect. Seven volunteers gathered to do the first one yesterday on a drizzly but calm afternoon.

While on the water I saw 13 bird species, the vast majority of them rhinoceros auklets. We did one survey going north to south, and one going south to north, and both times the other side of the boat saw WAY more birds than my side in terms of numbers. Still, we counted several hundred rhino auklets in each direction. Some other highlights included almost a hundred common murres, about 20 red-breasted mergansers, and a single long-tailed duck, the latest in the season I've seen one.

In terms of marine mammals, we had only one harbor porpoise and one harbor seal within our survey zone, but there were other marine mammals out there. Lots of Steller sea lions were hauled out on Whale Rocks, and this California sea lion was hauled out on the Reid Rock buoy just outside of Friday Harbor:

You can't tell in the above photo, but this sea lion is branded with the number 670, and this is the fourth spring in a row he's been hauling out on this same buoy! He was branded in Puget Sound in 2000 as a two or three year old, weighing 235 pounds. He has been seen multiple times on San Miguel Island, California (where he was a territorial male in 2008), as well as at Cascade Head, Oregon, and in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia. That's a known range of over 1200 miles! Pretty amazing. As a 15 year old (or so) now, he probably weighs 800+ pounds. According to Wikipedia, the average lifespan is about 17 years in the wild. It will be interesting to see how many more years he keeps returning!