My, What Big Teeth You Have

photo: C. Moran

While fishing over the rocky reefs of San Jose del Cabo in Baja California, Ichthyology lab student Clinton Moran caught himself a 45-pound Pacific dog snapper (Lutjanus novemfasciatus).  Clinton studies the mechanics of how fish feed – being the studious researcher that he is, he decided to clean and  reassemble the head bones of his catch to display the fish’s wicked chompers.  It’s easy to see where the common name comes from with those teeth that look positively canine.  Check out some more fish bone displays from Clinton and other Ichthyology students.

Can you envision what a dog snapper looks like based on its teeth?  Click here to see if you were close!

photo: C. Moran

Can I take him home to France with me?

photo: E. Loury

French international student and shark lover Marie Cachera cuddles a leopard shark from the MLML collection.  Marie conducted a diet study on the starry skate as part of her Master’s thesis while visiting MLML for five months in 2009. Despite our location in a podunk town, the caliber of research of Moss Landing Marine Labs has attracted scientists and students from all over the world.  Read an interview with MLML’s current international student Edem Mahu from Ghana.

A Method to Algae Madness… How to Measure Miniscule Growth

Rhodoliths (photo by Paul Tompkins)

Jasmine Ruvalcaba

by Jasmine Ruvalcaba, Phycology Lab

edited by Brynn Hooton

We’ve all heard the giant kelp Macrocystis can grow up to one meter per day.  So, how do phycologists, people who study seaweeds, measure growth of different species of algae?  With most, you can use a ruler of some sort.  For instance, Dr. Graham, advisor of the phycology lab,  has a National Science Foundation grant going right now to look at effects of climate change on intertidal and subtidal species.  One factor he looks as is algal growth.  To do so,  we punch holes in the vegetative blade with a regular, run of the mill one-hole puncher near the base of the seaweed, and then each month go back to the same plants, and punch a new hole.   We  measure from the base of the blade to new the punch, from the new punch to the  old punch, and the old punch to the tip of the blade. Wow, sounds like a lot to do underwater, right?  Practice makes perfect.

This is a kelp called Laminaria sinclarii. The arrows show the different hole punches, which show how much the kelp has grown. This one has grown 11 millimeters. (photo by Jasmine Ruvalcaba)

That method is great for species that are fleshy and can grow centimeters per day, but how do you measure growth with calcified species, that grow very slowly?  That’s what Paul Tompkins and I, Jasmine Ruvalcaba, are doing as a part of our thesis research.  Paul studies rhodoliths, which are calcified red algae that form “beds” over soft sediments all over the world.  I am studying their relatives, the articulated species.  In a nut-shell, we soak our plants in stains anywhere from 5 minutes to days, depending on what type of stain we’re using, and let the stain mark the alga’s outer cell walls.  After the plant is stained, we then put it back in clean seawater and let it grow.  Any new parts of the plant that have grown after we took the plant out of the stain should be visible, and we know how long it’s taken to make this new growth.  So, here is what we see…..

This is Calliarthron sp., an articulated coralline species. This photo was taken under UV light, because the particular stain that was used on the algae lights up, or shows up under UV light. (photo by Jasmine Ruvalcaba)

This is a close-up of the articulated coralline branch tips. The arrows show where the stain stops. The white tips, that aren't stained, are growth of the coralline algae that occurred after we stained it. We measure from where the stain stops to the tip of the plant. This particular individual has grown 1.2 millimeters in 1 month. (photo by Jasmine Ruvalcaba)

Keep in touch to read about my future adventures with coralline algae!

Mr. Fish Bones: Some Spooktacular Skeletons

Brynn Hooton and Kelsey James assemble a rockfish skeleton for Ichthyology class (photo: E. Loury)

Erin Loury

by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab

Skeletons are not just the stuff of Halloween at a marine lab – bones galore grace these halls of science year round.  Although being surrounded by dead things can lead to some unfortunate stereotypes of mad scientists with macabre fetishes, getting up close and personal with bones is one of the best lessons in basic anatomy.

That’s why in Spring 2008, many of us set to the task of cleaning, taking apart and putting together fish skeletons for our Ichthyology class to  better understand how the skeletal structures of these fish “work.”  In honor of Halloween, check out some of our bone creations – I mean, preparations (affectionately known as “bone preps”):

Wolf Eel, prepared by Megan Winton and Jenny Kemper (photo: E. Loury)

Pacific Halibut, prepared by Clinton Moran (photo: E. Loury)

Vermilion Rockfish, prepared by Katie Schmidt and Kristin Hunter-Thomson. (photo: E. Loury)

Learning bones can have some practical bearing for research as well.  While going through the stomach contents of my gopher rockfish, I have had to try to identify little fish prey items from their bones.   As an example of cool cross-disciplinary collaborations, I and some other diet students have enlisted the help of Crisite Boone, an archaeologist from UC Santa Cruz who is an expert in fish bones from her study of California Indian middens.  Who knew that identifying fish from bits of bone pieces could be a transferable skill?

Here’s a look at one of the more unique skeletons I found, that of a prickleback of some kind.  Note the really robust spines on its back – looks almost…prickley, wouldn’t you say?

Mind the spines! Prickleback skeleton found in gopher rockfish stomach (photo: E. Loury).

Happy Halloween!!!

Happy Octopus Day from MLML: Eight-armed babies and fish octo-snacks

One for the octopus baby album! (photo: S. Ainsley)

Erin Loury

by Erin Loury, Icthyology Lab

Put your tentacles up – it’s Cephalopod Awareness Days 2010, everyone!  Fellow marine scientist blogger Danna Staff (a cephalopod enthusiast and newly-minted Ph.D. from Hopkins Marine Station) is hosting this week’s festivities at her Cephalopodiatrist blog.  I figured it would be fitting to celebrate October 8th, Octopus Day, MLML-style with a tale of two Erins and their eight-armed encounters.

The first is a repost about Erin Jensen’s octopuses. Erin defended her thesis in April, titled “The Effects of Environmental Enrichment and Problem-Solving on the Brain and Behavior of Octopus rubescens.“  While she spent most of her time stumping octopuses with mazes and food puzzles, and subsequently dissecting their brains, she also moonlighted in octopus husbandry – or at least, attempted to.  When one of her octopus test subjects wiggled its way out usefulness in her experiment by promptly laying eggs, Erin realized there was little she  could do but enjoy just how goshdarn cute they were. While none of the babies survived past a few days, we did get some video of them doing their bouncy thing – check out the full post here.

And then there’s me, the second Erin.  We in the fish community can appreciate cephalopods as much as anyone.  Even fish love cephalopods – they make great snacks!  Here’s a photo straight from the gopher rockfish gut files, aka my thesis on gopher rockfish diet.  Though true octopus lovers may shed a tear at this assortment of consumed critters, consider that an animal’s ecological role is also worthy of celebration.  So here’s to a tasty link in the food chain!

 

Delicious and nutritious: little octopods from the guts of gopher rockfish. (photo: E. Loury)

 

The Oxygen Detective: High Marks for Low Oxygen Research

Ashley Booth shows off her winning poster at the Sanctuary Currents Symposium. Congratulations!

by Erin Loury

Breathing is a pretty key function in life, and most living things need oxygen to survive.  This fact is just as true in the ocean as it is on land, meaning that areas of low oxygen water can severely stress marine organisms.  Scientists and managers are particularly interested in low oxygen, or hypoxic, zones in coastal areas because they can be human-created: agricultural runoff can dump an excess of nutrients into the water, triggering a huge phytoplankton bloom.  Not all of the phytoplankton get eaten, so these algae die and sink to the sea floor, where bacteria decompose them.  These bacteria working on overdrive use up the oxygen in the water, creating a hypoxic zone.

But some areas of the ocean are just naturally low in oxygen.  Much of this low oxygen water is very deep, but is occasionally carried to shallower, coastal areas through the process of upwelling (when surface water is blown offshore by wind and deep water rises up to the surface).  Physical Oceanography student Ashley Booth is studying oxygen data from monitoring stations in a kelp forest near the Monterey Bay Aquarium to determine how often  low-oxygen water from the Monterey Submarine Canyon flows into this important nearshore habitat.  The goal of Ashley’s work is to look for patterns and determine what “natural” low oxygen concentrations look like – using this baseline, managers can then determine the impact the agricultural runoff has in further depleting marine oxygen levels.

Ashley recently won the award for best student poster at the Sanctuary Currents Symposium.  You can also listen to Ashley discuss the importance of her research with a local radio station here (fast forward about halfway through to 2:10).  Congratulations, Ashley!

The oxygen detective: Ashley Booth uses a time series of oxgen concentrations to look for patterns over time. (photo: S. Buckley)

Catch a new WAVE – our latest newsletter is here!

Read about research of the Pacific Shark Research Center in our latest Wave Newsletter! (photo: E. Loury)

Erin Loury

by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab

Hot off the presses!  The MLML Wave Newsletter is here!  Ever wonder what it’s like to study sharks and their relatives?  This issue takes an in-depth look at MLML’s Pacific Shark Research Center, including the description of new species.  You can also read a tribute to Ichthyology Professor Greg Cailliet’s retirement, as well as updates from all the labs.  Click to download your copy of the 2010 Wave Newsletter, or visit our Friends of MLML website. Enjoy!

Featured Photo: Bust a Gut

Even if this gopher rockfish bit off more than it could chew, it still found a way to swallow it all. (photo: E. Loury)

Erin Loury

by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab

On this, the national day of overeating,  I thought I would kick off our new featured photo segment with an example of a stuffed gullet from the animal world.  For my thesis studying what gopher rockfish eat, I’ve cut open a lot of fish (somewhere in the ballpark of 700, and finally as of this week there are no more fish in my freezer!  Woohoo!).  Every now and again I’ll see something surprising or out of the ordinary – but none so much as this one.

To give you some perspective, most gopher rockfish stomachs that are empty or have a bit a food are the size of my thumb.  The one pictured above was closer to the size of my fist.   I’ll put it this way – their stomach lining is some kind of fantastic elastic.  What floors me is that this little porker was caught with hook and line, meaning after all that eating, it still went for some bait.   But I guess when that pie comes around at the end of tonight, I’ll  probably be able to relate.

Just what kind of food does a gopher rockfish pack in at such staggering volumes?  Stay tuned to find out!

Studying a Softball-sized Snail with a Pregnant Foot

Snails living on and around hydrothermal chimneys in complete darkness provide excellent material for startling scientific discoveries (Photo taken by ROV Jason II, Dr. Charles Fisher, Chief Scientist)

Kyle Reynolds

By Kyle Reynolds, Benthic Ecology Lab

Can you imagine being pregnant in your foot?  That’s just one of the fascinating things I discovered about the snail species I studied for my thesis.  I studied animals at hydrothermal vents (seafloor volcanoes) and the adaptations they’ve made that help them cope with their harsh environments.  Specifically, I looked at two species of snails that live about 1.5 miles deep in the southwestern Pacific at a hydrothermal vent system near Tonga and Fiji.

These snails get as big as softballs when full-grown and have evolved many ways to deal with life in a chemically toxic volcanic world.  My thesis focused mainly on reproductive adaptations, and I was able to find many of those.  Not only have they wrapped their larvae in protective coatings, they also house them for a short time in a pouch in their foot!  Like I said – pregnant in your foot!

Hangin' at the vent: These black snails and a variety of neighbors make a living in a harsh environment (Photo taken by ROV Jason II, Dr. Charles Fisher, Chief Scientist)

This research was challenging on many levels.  First, since I was studying something so far away from California and so deep in the ocean, I had only one chance to get the samples I needed and there was no guarantee they would be reproductively mature.  With the expense of the research vessel, the submersible robot needed to collect samples at that depth, and the many crew members needed to run everything, these types of expeditions are much too costly to repeat.   So I had one shot to get it right!

Also, I was studying animals that had very little previous research done on them (in fact, no one had ever studied their reproductive systems before) so I had very little guidance and often had no clue what I was doing!  It took many visits with experts in many fields before I was able to piece the clues together and see the true picture of the bizarre mechanisms these animals were using to give their babies the best chance at survival.

For me, it was the challenge of this research that was most rewarding in the end.  There is nothing like being the first person in the world to discover something!  That’s what science is all about.  More details to come on all of the crazy adaptations we found in these alien snails…

Teeny Tiny Vertebrae = Hours of Microscope Fun

Shaara Ainsley

by Shaara Ainsley, Ichthyology Lab

Long hours in a tiny, dark windowless room looking through a microscope – yes, this is very much a part of a marine biologist’s job description.  Not really the fun and exciting part, but this type of data collection is very, very important.   For my thesis and additional projects, I spent well over 100 hours (probably closer to 200!) in the microscope room. In order to estimate the age of a skate, you need to examine its vertebrae and count the number of bands. In order to get a ‘good’ estimate of the growth of a fish over time, you must examine many vertebrae from fish at all different sizes.

Shaara holds her thesis species, the Bering skate

The microscope is necessary, since the largest vertebrae are about the size of the eraser on top of a pencil, and the smallest vertebrae can be as small as 1/10 of an inch in diameter! The biggest challenge I have experienced was trying to locate a little white vertebra that I accidentally dropped on the white linoleum lab floor. For the record – the vertebra was located!

However, studying skates can have its perks – the most interesting aspect of my work was spending time on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game boat the RV Resolution. I really enjoyed spending each day sorting through fish and seeing what we found on the bottom of the sea. It was an opportunity to meet interesting people who have spent their lives working on boats. The views of the Alaskan coast were astounding. I was completely spoiled by the breathtaking scenery and photos just can’t do it justice. While the days were long, and the work was not easy, I would do it all again if I could. We also had access to a whole variety of candy and ice cream, so I think that helped us stay on track and work hard…

The beautiful Alaskan coastline (if you squint, it even looks like somewhere warm!) - not a bad place to be out fishing. (photo: S. Ainsley)