by Angela Szesciorka, Vertebrate Ecology Lab
In March the MS211 class (Ecology of Marine Turtles, Birds and Mammals) climbed onto a small inflatable boat, pointed offshore, and ran a half mile obstacle course through rocks, waves, and seals to Año Nuevo Island.
This tiny boat (named Dragon Rojo!) carried us to the island. About an eight-minute boat ride though, so not bad. Photo from Oikonos.org.
by Angela Szesciorka, Vertebrate Ecology Lab
Last Monday, I bussed it to Santa Barbara then hopped a train to San Diego. One night in a hotel and an overpriced taxi ride later, and I was laying eyes on the R/V Point Sur for the first time since November 29, 2012, on it’s way back from its 17,000 mile round-trip journey to Palmer Station in Antarctica.
The majestic R/V Point Sur.
by Angela Szesciorka, Vertebrate Ecology Lab
This summer I hopped on a plane, flying 29 hours one way (via Paris — ooh la la) over a period of three days to spend nearly a month on the island of Madagascar working on my pilot study.
Madagascar, a former French colony until 1960, is the fourth largest island in the world. Don’t let it fool you. It looks so tiny next to Africa, but it has 44 percent more area than California, and boasts more than 4,800 km of coastline.
Rocky coastline in Madagascar. Photo by Angela Szesciorka.
Most of the country’s export revenue comes from textiles, fish/shellfish, vanilla, and cloves. Newer sources of income include tourism, agriculture, and extracted materials (titanium ore, chromite, coal, iron, cobalt, copper and nickel). Madagascar provides half of the world’s supply of sapphires! But with a GDP of around $20 billion, The Economist rated Madagascar as the worst economy in 2011. Most of Madagascar’s inhabitants are subsistence livers, meaning they live off of what they can grow or catch.
Local fisherman spear hunting for crabs. Photo by Angela Szesciorka.
By Diane Wyse, Physical Oceanography Lab
In the spirit of sharing exciting new student research during Shark Week, we caught up with MLML and Pacific Shark Research Center graduate student Paul Clerkin. During the spring semester of his first year at MLML he took a two-month cruise aboard a commercial fishing vessel in the Indian Ocean for his thesis research. During that time, Paul collected sharks that came in as bycatch of the planned fishing activities – sharks that would otherwise have been thrown back overboard because they are not among the targeted species of commercial value. Clerkin explains that the sharks that he collected were all DOA, that very few survive under the weight of fifty tons of fish. As part of his bycatch-only collection practices, any sharks that were still alive when the fish and sharks were sorted were promptly sent back overboard to increase their chances of survival. Below are highlights from our interview with Paul on his latest fieldwork expedition.
Paul identifying sharks from a haul in the factory of the ship.
How long was the cruise?
I spent two months at sea, and then five weeks at Mauritius. During that time I processed and prepared samples to ship back to MLML. Overall I spent about 100 days out of the US. I remember because I had to get my visa renewed while I was there.
How many specimens did you bring back?
We brought in around 400 to the island, and around 350 made the trip back to MLML. It was just about a ton. On top of that I have hundreds of vertebrae and spines and around 800 tissue samples.
When you collected, was it usually a consistent number per day or catch, or did the numbers vary with time and location?
The catch amounts varied greatly, some mornings I’d wake up and have no sharks to work with, during which time I’d work on data processing, and other days I’d wake up and have 16+ hours of work sitting for me on the deck. Using bottom roller gear brought in many more sharks.
What will you do with the specimens? Are they all to be used on your thesis project, or are some saved for other projects?
The specimens will be used both for my thesis research and will be available for future research projects. We’re looking to get a lot of use out of the data. The list of possible projects and papers is pretty long.
Paul working on deck with a false catshark. Paul comments on the critter: “This species isn’t new but it is considered to be rare. I was extremely excited the first time we found one. As we caught more false catsharks over the trip I started to suspect these sharks are not as rare as previously thought. I think they just live in remote locations relatively unexplored by science. Although it is not a new species I gathered data and information on this shark that was previously unknown and will increase our understanding of this strange animal.”
Was this your longest cruise to date?
Yes, my longest cruise before this was out of AK for 90 days, but halfway through we came back to land for one day, then went back out again. After the first two weeks all the days blend together anyway.
Research cruise, Queen Mabel, with a view
Photo by: Paul Tompkins
By: Paul Tompkins
MLML Phycology Lab
PhD Candidate
Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology (ZMT)
After my master’s thesis was accepted in the fall of 2011, I began applying for PhD positions. I was accepted at the University of Bremen’s Center for Tropical Marine Ecology. My current advisor, Dr. Matthias Wolff, leads the resource management working group within the department of ecological modelling. He has spent many years studying the highly productive waters along the Pacific Coast of South America, and is currently leading a project in the Galapagos archipelago. The goal of this work is to understand how upwelling influences the tropic structure of the islands, and to use this understanding to inform fisheries management in the face of climate variability. My role in this project is to describe the biogeography of macroalgae around the Galapagos archipelago, and determine the functional role of these primary producers in the Galapagos marine tropic web. Of particular interest is the influence of upwelling on algal species distributions, community structure, and productivity.
View from my desk at BioMar
Photo by: Paul Tompkins
I have now been in living in Puerto Ayora for two months. During my first week here, I was living on the R/V Queen Mabel, with collaborators both from ZMT and the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), and surveying the Islands of Darwin, Wolf, Pinta, and the East coast of Isabella. To estimate the percent coverage of macroalgae, I used sampling protocols were similar to those used by the CDF’s ecological monitoring project. At each site, a 50 meter transect was laid parallel to the shoreline at depths of 15 and 6 meters. Every five meters along transects, a 0.25m2 gridded quadrat with 80 intersection points was placed on the seafloor, and the primary substrate was recorded.
The characteristic hexagonal pattern of the basalt columns form after the rock cools.
While on a beach down in Chile, South America the Moss Landing Marine Labs Global Systems class stumbled on a series of interesting rock features. The low silica rock of Chile flows easily and comes from molten lava, when it cools it contracts and forms. These cracks that form from cooling are roughly 6-sided, or hexagonal, and can form huge columns as seen at California’s Devils Postpile National Park. We took the liberty of testing the rock’s structural integrity while trying to climb these amazing columns. The columns seem man made, but knowing some basic geology helps to determine the origin, even when in another hemisphere from home.
You can tell these columns shifted after the time they were created by the way they tilt to the side.
Studying letherback sea turtles in the field can be a taxing undertaking!
Deasy Lontoh
by Deasy Lontoh, Vetebrate Ecology Lab
Kamdo! That’s “Good day” in Abun, the language in this region of Indonesia.
The number of turtles coming up to nest is starting to go down, a sign that the nesting season is coming to an end. I met one big mama a couple of weeks ago that went back to sea after daybreak.
Staying healthy in the field is a real challenge. One of our crew members had to go back to the city to receive malaria care ten days ago, and he’s still not fully recovered yet. Another had a fever last night, and we’re still waiting to see if the fever is due to malaria or infection. Almost everyone I work with has had malaria. The symptoms include fever and body aches. They have to go back into the city to receive proper care, which is a half-day trip by a ship.
Infection usually starts with sandfly bites. Most people are allergic to them, including me, so every night I end up with about 20-30 very itchy welts. No kidding! I haven’t found a bug repellent that works. If I scratch them too hard, I’d end up nursing the scrapes for a few days. Cuts and scrapes heal slowly in this humid region. If my immune system is down, I may end up fighting infection.
Hard physical labor, lack of sleep, and limited diet are the reality here. We walk about 10 km a night on sand. Sleep during the day is difficult and often divided into two to three-hour chunks. We subsist on a mainly carb-based diet and canned meats because we have no means of refrigerating veggies and fruits. We do our best to make weekly trips into nearby villages to get veggies, but the amount doesn’t come close to the recommended daily servings. Besides collecting data, staying well definitely gets my full attention!
A nesting female leatherback returns to the ocean at daybreak after a hard night's work
photo: CCFRP
The little whippersnapper was too tiny to tag, but definitely deserves some points for biting a big hook! This young lingcod was caught during a marine protected area survey at Año Nuevo as part of the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program. Lingcod do have a reputation on our surveys for biting off more than they can chew (or swallow).
Pretty easy to guess where this photo was taken with those landmark smokestacks in back! (photo: E. Loury)
When it comes to doing ichthyology field work, loading up on nets is only the first step – then you have to actually use them to catch fish! To study the sandy-bottom fishes in Elkhorn Slough, the MLML ichthyology class conducted a survey with a seine net. This net has a weighted bottom, so casting it wide then pulling the ends together like a drawstring corrals all the fish into a small area to collect and study them. What kind of fish did we catch? Stay tuned to find out!
photo: E. Loury
(photo: S. Jeffries)
Graduate student Sara Hutto surveys the swell before venturing out farther in the tide pools to work on research for a grant. Sara ventures out into the intertidal at all times of night and day and in all kinds of weather to get her work done on low tides, when more of the algae she studies are exposed.
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