Multimedia Presentations: The Natural Laboratory Audio Podcasts
The Natural Laboratory is a series of podcasts, videos, audio-slide shows, and other multimedia presentations produced by Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center Science Communication Interns from 2007 to 2012 exploring science from Bay Area National Parks. The audio podcasts are presented on this page, below. Visit our The Natural Laboratory Videos page to view the videos and audio-slide shows.
In December 2020, Point Reyes National Seashore, the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, and Point Reyes National Seashore Association revived The Natural Laboratory podcast series, initially focusing on the Woodward Fire.
In "The Legacy of Fire at Point Reyes," Science Communication Intern Jerimiah Oetting dives into how the Woodward fire compares to its predecessor, the 1995 Vision fire. He also explores how climate change and fire suppression drive the increasing intensity of wildfire in the West.
In "New Growth," Jerimiah speaks with fire ecologists and botanists about what that recovery will look like in the coming months and years, and what we can learn from Indigenous practices of managing the landscape with fire.
In "How Wildlife Withstand Wildfires," Jerimiah speaks to park scientists to learn how certain vulnerable species might be impacted by wildfires.
In March 2022, Science Communication Intern Theodora Mautz recorded two podcasts about black abalone.
In "A History of Black Abalone in California: From Abundance to Scarcity," Theodora dives into the science and history of black abalone from multiple perspectives, and explains how they went from one of the most ubiquitous intertidal species in the state to federally endangered in just a few years due to a disease called Withering Syndrome.
In "Recovering Black Abalone: Their Roles in Intertidal Ecosystems and in Ours," Theodora speaks with a handful of experts on strategies to combat Withering Syndrome, some of the lessons learned, and some of the next steps for black abalone recovery.
A History of Black Abalone in California: From Abundance to Scarcity
and Recovering Black Abalone: Their Roles in Intertidal Ecosystems and in Ours
Citations:
Vileisis, Ann. Abalone: The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish. Oregon State University Press, 2020.
Audio credits:
Ambient Intertidal Recordings - Mark Lipman
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: California Sea Otters: A Gap in the Point Reyes Ecosystem
Once abundant along the entire west coast of North America, sea otters were hunted to the brink of extinction. A small population has recovered off the coast of central California, yet they have failed to expand their range. Cassandra Brooks interviews Tim Tinker and Jim Estes to find out why visitors at Point Reyes will not likely see California sea otters today.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
Sea otters once thrived off the entire west coast of North America. The kelp forests off of Point Reyes Seashore would have been prime otter habitat. But aside from the occasional wayward male, visitors at Point Reyes won't see California sea otters today. They were hunted to the brink of extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries for their thick pelts. A small population has recovered off the coast of central California, yet they have failed to expand their range. But why?
[Interview with Tim Tinker]
Tim Tinker: The first and most honest response to that is we don't know the answer completely.
CB: That's Tim Tinker, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, California, who studies otters in the Monterey Bay. I met up with Tim in Santa Cruz to find out more.
TT: Over the last ten or fifteen years, our research projects have provided us with a lot of insight into some of the factors that are limiting population recovery. In the north end of the range, the reason we probably do not see sea otters up around Point Reyes Seashore yet, um, it has a lot to do with shark bite mortality.
CB: And you are saying, again, it's shark bite—it's not as if the sharks are targeting otters—their just accidentally checking them out...or they're checking them out intentionally and accidentally killing them.
TT: Yeah, that's why you'll notice I am being very careful not to use the term "shark predation." These are all single bites. And what we think they are are exploratory...exploratory bites by the shark to determine whether or not it wants to eat this particular object or not. But even a small bite from a white shark is generally lethal for a sea otter.
CB: But shark bites are only one of many threats to California sea otters. Disease, parasites, pollution, and even fishery interactions all contribute to sea otter mortality. But, also, the otters—particularly the females—just don't move a whole lot. Tinker says the larger Central California sea otter population is actually a series of small neighborhoods with limited exchange between them, especially for females.
TT: Most animals in the population do not move very far from...from the point we capture them, um, for the next three or four years that we...when we study their movements and their behavior, they...they really don't move more than about five or ten kilometers along the coast.
[Interview with Jim Estes]
CB: For sea otters to increase their range north, females would have to venture from their local neighborhood. But they seldom do, says Tinker. From the time they mature at three until the time they die, females give birth to one pup each year, and so, they are almost always either nursing or pregnant. These high-energy demands require adult females to know their local feeding habitat extremely well, and, unlike males, they rarely make extensive movements.
Scientists are working hard to better understand what's happening with California sea otters because they are so important in maintaining a healthy nearshore environment. After talking with Tinker, I caught up with Jim Estes, a Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the first to truly document how profound the sea otter's role is. He went to Alaska in the 1970s where small segments of the Alaskan sea otter population were beginning to recover.
Jim Estes: They were thought to be extinct by…in…in the early part of the twentieth century, but, in fact, there were a few small remnant colonies. But since they are very poor dispersers, you know, their population buildups were very localized. And so, there was fifty years of recovery, but it was a very fragmented, localized type of recovery. So, here we had islands that remained uninhabited by otters, and others on which they had completely recovered.
And so, the first step was simply to go to one of these islands where they hadn't recovered, and it took like a tenth of a second to see the story. I mean, it was just so stunning. You know, I walked out on the shore and I looked down there and instead of kelp all over the bottom, it was just green with sea urchins. And, you know, the water clarity was different, and the bottom and the color, and there were all these urchin tests on the beach, which I never saw at places where otters were abundant. And it was, like, wow, you know, otters eat urchins, and urchins eat kelp, and there's the story.
And then I started wondering, well gosh, what are the effects on…on the rest of the ecosystem? It's like taking a forest out. You know, what do you do to everything else—the birds and photosynthesis and nutrients and energy flow and all of that?
CB: Estes continued to study otters and their effect on the ecosystem they live in, filling in the missing pieces of the story.
JE: We understand now that there is this…what we call a trophic cascade. It's a link, in this case, between predators, herbivores, and plants. That predators limit the herbivores, in this case the otters limit the urchins, thus facilitating the growth of the plants, and that those plants are really the base of the coastal food web. And much of what we've been looking at in the otter-kelp forest system is what the consequences of that interaction between otters and urchins and kelp is to other species in ecosystem processes. So, what we've discovered is that when you take otters out of the system and the kelps become much less abundant, overall productivity goes way down.
CB: Despite the ongoing threats to otters, Estes and Tinker are optimistic that otters might ever so slowly expand their range, perhaps even someday again thriving off the shores of Point Reyes National Seashore.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Declining fog in coastal California?
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2012 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Mike Vasey and Todd Dawson about recent studies indicating that the fog is declining along the California coast.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
[Interview with Mike Vasey]
Cassandra Brooks: Can you tell me where we are right now?
Mike Vasey: Point Reyes Peninsula, which is really one of the...one of the fog capitals of the universe. And looking out over, uh, Point Reyes Headland, and Drakes Bay, and the Pacific Ocean, and it's a fantastic scene. Along the coast it's particularly exciting; you have so many different unique species that occur.
CB: That's Mike Vasey, a lecturer at San Francisco State University and PhD student at UC Santa Cruz who studies plants on the California coast. The rich, lush environment of Point Reyes—and really all of coastal California—heavily depends on the fog. During rainless summers, this fog—which can account for 1/3 of the ecosystem's water input—is critical to the persistence of the local plants and ecosystem.
CB: Earlier you were explaining to me where fog originates from. Can you tell that story to me now?
MV: Let me, uh, start here on the coast. We have upwelling of really cold waters—very rich, nutrient rich—right off the...right off the immediate coast. And then, winds that are warmer, that have a lot of moisture, come sweeping in off the Pacific, and when they hit that upwelling cold water, they condense into fog. Then the third big factor is that you have these, uh, hot air masses that are moving out towards the ocean at high elevation. And as they move out towards the Pacific, they kind of depress down and cause an inversion of that condensation—that cloud layer—so it becomes this so-called marine layer. And this occurs late spring through the summer.
[Interview with Todd Dawson]
CB: But recent studies have indicated that the fog is declining from the California coast. I went to meet with Todd Dawson, a professor at UC Berkeley who has studied California fog for decades. In a recent study with former graduate student and postdoc Jim Johnstone, Dawson found some troubling trends.
Todd Dawson: And Jim and I basically discovered that, if we looked over the last 50 to 60 years, we started to see that, not only temperatures along the coast were warming up, but fog was actually declining. And when we started to really look at that even over longer time frames, we began to see, really, over the last century, fog has been declining, and it's declined by about 30 percent in about 100 years here in coastal California.
CB: Are you able to see any impact on the environment yet from this? Or will it take longer to see a shift?
TD: We're beginning to see some signs of that...that change in the fog-water inputs maybe having some impacts in the southern parts of, say, the redwood range. So, you go down to southern Big Sur, right at the very southern end of where the coast redwood lives, and we begin to see, now, that the summers are a lot drier, soils dry out, they're drier for a longer period of time.
CB: And it means that, perhaps, the redwood range will shift north, or will just decrease, or might go away all together?
TD: Yeah. Some of the predictions that have been, um, sort of, recently released, and this work has been done by a woman named Healy Hamilton, that's really been interested in, sort of, modeling climatic envelopes of plants. And she's focused very specifically on the coast redwood. And she said just what you've said, is that the climatic envelope that's gonna favor the coast redwood is gonna creep its way north into Oregon and, also, it's gonna creep its way west. And, of course, that's impossible because as we go west, we hit the Pacific Ocean. So, what that really means is that the envelope is getting narrower, it's moving north. And, at the southern end of the range, it's gonna get drier and hotter and we're probably gonna be losing trees there, eventually. Whether that happens in the next 20 years or the next 50 years, we can't really say yet.
CB: What can people do, you know? What can the national parks do, or the state parks do to deal with that?
TD: Well, ther...I think there's a couple of strategies that we've been talking with the parks, um, about. Um, of course, there's always playing a very active role. I mean, you know, we can plant trees, and we can plant trees into areas that may be much more favorable—little microclimatic areas—little niches that we know could be very favorable to healthy redwood growth. Um, those are, obviously, gonna be wetter, cooler areas 'cause the redwoods really love those. We could also try to—in a...in a, sort of, entire geographical context—go and do an analysis of where are those climatic niches that might be very favorable for future recruitment and healthy growth for mature trees, and make sure those areas are set aside.
CB: A few of my friends I mentioned to that, you know, I was doing this story on how fog is declining in the...in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz area, they said, “No way! It has not. You know, I see just as much fog. There's more fog!”
TD: You have to take, kind of, the normal oscillation, along with the long-term trends, to really, kind of, understand how something like fog decline or temperature increases really play out. In our human experience, you know, we kind of remember one year at a time. And I think, sometimes, that's why people say, “Hey, wait a minute. It was a really foggy year last year!” And you go, “You know, you're right. It was.” But in the long-term picture, it's actually been on the decline.
[Conclusion]
[theme music]
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Searching for the Endangered Black Abalone in Northern California
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2012 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Amy Henry, an intern looking for black abalones in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[intro music fades and is replaced by upbeat guitar-led music for duration of the podcast]
Black abalone is one of seven abalone species found in California's intertidal waters. This small abalone, with a smooth dark shell, has succumbed to the same fate as most abalones: overfishing. Commercial fisheries for black abalones began in 1968, and by the 1990s, landings plummeted to zero.
But fishing wasn't the only culprit. Black abalones have gotten sick—really sick—with withering syndrome. This disease, caused by a bacterial infection, halts the abalone's production of digestive enzymes. No longer able to digest food, the abalone must consume its own body mass.
The disease was first recognized in the mid-1980s and has since decimated black abalone populations by up to 99% in some regions. As a result, black abalones have been classified as critically endangered by the IUCN.
Southern California populations have been especially hard hit by withering syndrome, yet little is known about the status of Northern populations.
[Darren Fong Interview]
Darren Fong: We got a request from the federal agency—National Marine Fisheries Service—for information about the status and trends of, uh, black abalone in our park and we actually had no information to provide them because we never did any surveys for that species within our park.
Cassandra Brooks: That's Darren Fong, Aquatic Ecologist with the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. Per request, Fong set out with interns Amy Henry and Kari Eckdahl looking for black abalones in the Golden Gate National Recreational Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. Here's Amy Henry.
[Amy Henry Interview]
Amy Henry: Well, no large-scale survey has been done of black abalone north of San Francisco Bay before, or even in the Bay Area. Black abalone have never been particularly common in this area, but no one has ever been out and surveyed these sites before. So, although we know that they're rare, we don't know how rare. So, the data and information that we're collecting is going to provide information for future studies, for the studies of these endangered species, and will lead to better legislation and how to protect them.
CB: So far, they've found black abalones, but not very many of them, and none with withering syndrome. But these surveys are just the first step.
Part of their challenge is getting down to the rocky—and sometimes treacherous—intertidal, where the abalones live.
AH: So, the sites that we've been surveying have been identified using Google Earth and a project, a few years back, called the Coast Biophysical Inventory. This project identified areas of rocky coastline where abalone possibly could live. So, basically, all that we know going to a site beforehand is that it's rocky. So, we've interviewed park rangers from the local area to find out about the best trails to get down to sites. Sometimes this requires a rope to climb down crumbly steep cliffs, sometimes we get there and it doesn't look like good abalone habitat at all and we are sorely disappointed.
We're also working at very early in the morning hours. The timing of our surveys have to be going with the low tides, and they have to be negative tides, below zero tide. And some of these will occur at 4:30 in the morning. We've woken up at 3 am before and taken a hike out in the dark with flashlights where we think there are spooky creatures behind every turn.
CB: To Amy and Kari, all the early mornings and scrambling over cliffs have been worth it.
AH: The Park Service really has a mission that you can get behind. You can really support and know that the work you're doing is for the benefit of all the citizens of America and California and to protect it for future generations. And even for our small little piece of protecting black abalone, it's a really beautiful creature that I never appreciated before, never knew much about before. And, hopefully, because of our work, we'll be able to show it to our children in the future and say, "We had a piece in protecting this animal from going extinct."
CB: With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music fades]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Burning Ancient Life: The Geology of an Oil Reserve
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2011 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Ivano Aiello, a geological oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, about how we burn ancient life to power our civilization and some of the issues that result from fossil fuel pollution.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
Phytoplankton form the base of the ocean's food chains transferring energy from the sun to sustain the global ocean. These tiny floating plants account for half of the photosynthetic activity on Earth. They also generate the majority of our fossil fuels.
[Interview with Ivano Aiello]
Ivano Aiello: Ninety-five percent of oil is marine algae, marine plankton.
Cassandra Brooks: Ninety-five percent?
IA: Yeah. I mean the vast majority of oil comes from marine plankton.
CB: That's Ivano Aiello, a geological oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Monterey Bay, California.
According to Ivano, plankton populations bloom, then die and drift to the seafloor. Slowly, they accumulate, getting compressed and buried under sediments. And, so long as they are in low oxygen conditions, the plankton will be preserved.
And how long of a time period are we talking about here for all of this to happen?
IA: Millions...millions to hundreds of millions of years. It takes millions of years for oil to form. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So, even though, probably, right now, there's oil...new oil being formed all the time, it's…
IA: We'll have to wait for millions to hundreds of millions of years. Yeah. No. It's, um...it's the scale of things we are talking about is insane. So, yeah, our rate of consumption is orders of magnitude faster than anything that has to do with the actual formation of oil. We are exploiting something that moves so slowly that there is no way that it can be regenerated anytime soon.
So, but that's what we use in our cars—something that formed a hundred million years ago. So, it would be really nice to have this in gas station so people will say, “Wait a second. You know, I'm burning this thing in the next two hours and it took 200 million years to form?!”
CB: And it isn't even just gas for our cars—our entire western lives depend on petroleum products. Our roads are covered in tar. Petroleum based plastics are all around us—in our phones, computers, cameras, toys, clothes, toothbrushes, and cosmetic bottles. And almost everything we buy at the grocery store is covered in plastic.
And while we once found reserves of oil so rich and abundant they came bubbling out of the ground, we now have to probe ever deeper and farther. At this point, we have to use a great deal of oil to drill for more oil.
IA: So, that's the problem. And that is that when we were working on land, mostly, and you could poke just the ground and the oil was coming out, that was it. Costed, I don't know, one gallon of oil to drill 100 gallons of oil. But now, we are talking about one gallon of oil to drill, I don't know, 10 gallons of oil or 20. So, it's becoming more and more expensive. So, that's the problem.
And when you push the technology offshore, not only do you increase the risks, but also, it's very expensive, you know. An offshore oil rig is a really expensive thing to run. But our thirst for oil is so much that we are...we are really like drug addicts right now. We are looking for a little drop somewhere.
So, I gave a lecture after the oil spill…
CB: You did?
IA: Yeah, on the Deepwater Horizon. So, that's why it's actually neat that you asked me to talk to you, because I, actually, I was, uh, reading more about, uh, offshore drilling and, uh.... So, this is one...this is a map from 2006. There are 3,858 oil and gas platform only in Gulf of Mexico. It's like covered.
CB: No way!
IA: Yes, way. I mean look at that. They are just next to each other. So, just think about when you have a hurricane going through this thing. It's insane.
I...I don't know. Our society is a fossil fuel-based society. Our civilization in the last several hundreds years has been—I mean, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—has been completely dependent on fossil fuels. But that's why we had this amazing, uh, increase in technology, I mean, in the last few hundred years. The technology has been...and also life quality, in a way. I mean, unfortunately, you know, it allows us to travel, it allows us to make clothing and...and containers and...
CB: Everything.
IA: everything, everything. But it's a limited resource.
CB: Here in 2011, we are at a crossroads. Those tiny plankton sinking and compressing over millions of years can't support our appetite for energy. As humans, we have incredible ingenuity, which is why we've been so efficient at using up our reserves of oil. As we look to the future, perhaps it's time to apply that same ingenuity to cutting energy consumption and employing alternative energies, ones that don't depend on ancient ocean plants.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Ocean Acidification: Where will all the seashells go?
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2011 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Ann Russell, Terry Swyer, and Andrew Dickson about the effects of ocean acidification on shellfish.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[somber piano music begins and continues through most of the following introduction]
More than a hundred thousand marine species built their bodies using calcium carbonate, including snails, oysters, sea stars, coral, and plenty of planktonic animals.
This incredible diversity of life evolved over millions of years as animals figured out ways to pull calcium and carbonate ions from the water to build shells and skeletons so robust that they remain intact long after the animals perish.
But all of this is changing. Our addiction to fossil fuels and the billions of tons of carbon dioxide [CO2] we're pumping into the atmosphere each year may be undoing millions of years of evolution in a geological blink of time.
[Ann Russell Interview]
Ann Russell: Geochemists and oceanographers have known for a long time that when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid.
Cassandra Brooks: That's Ann Russell, an ocean geochemist at the University of California, Davis who studies ocean acidification in Tomales Bay, just east of Point Reyes National Seashore.
Almost one third of the world's carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, says Ann. This excess CO2 reacts with seawater, freeing hydrogen ions, which lowers the pH and makes the water more acidic.
Living in more acidic waters is bad enough for shell-building animals, but CO2 adds another problem. Animals need both calcium and carbonate to build their skeletons. But the extra hydrogen ions in the high CO2 water bind carbonate, reducing the amount available for animals to build their shells. So, what might this mean for the future of calcifying organisms?
[music]
AR: Just to bring in some of the geologic perspective on this, 18,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, atmospheric CO2 was 200...200 parts per million. Then it rose at the end of the glacial period.
CB: But it only rose to 280, Ann says. And the increase happened over an 8,000-year period.
Since the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide has now spiked to more than 390 parts per million. That's an increase of 110 ppm in only 250 years.
AR: So, they're faced with much more rapid change than has ever been seen in the geologic record...ever. We don't have a geologic analogue for the rate of change going on right now.
[Terry Sawyer Interview]
CB: Given how fast the ocean's chemistry is changing, it's no surprise that we're beginning to see widespread effects in many calcifying animals, including those we like to eat. Oyster hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest have recently experienced massive larval die offs. When scientists measured local seawater, they found that during certain times of the year, the waters were corrosive enough to be the culprit.
Terry Sawyer: It's fairly insidious, as far as the effects, if you're talking about degradation of shell because of the lack of ability to bind the calcium carbonate, which is what our bivalves use to build their homes.
CB: That's Terry Sawyer, one of the owners of Hog Island Oyster Company in Marshall, California. Terry said that young oysters are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification. Their thin shells dissolve much faster and they struggle to make their transition from planktonic larvae to settling out on the sea floor. In general, more acidic waters simply stress the animals out.
TS: So, what is the...what are we seeing, you ask. Let's say, in the past five years—let's go even ten years—we're seeing disease, a lot of disease issues. Why are they becoming more, uh, susceptible to disease? So, one, maybe there's an introduction of that disease from another shellfish growing region. You know, maybe there's transport going on. Maybe there is stress. And that's where we go into the OA.
CB: OA or ocean acidification.
Hatcheries and oyster growers are actively discussing mitigation strategies, like only pumping in seawater during low CO2 periods or installing seawater treatment systems.
[Andrew Dickson Interview]
CB: These strategies might work in the short term, but they would prove ever more difficult as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise. And they're sure to continue rising. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the oceans won't quickly return to pre-industrial levels.
Andrew Dickson: That's one of the biggest concerns—if we add CO2 to the oceans, and then we just stopped, how long would it take. CB: That's Andrew Dickson, a chemical oceanographer with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
AD: One picture is that it would keep going up a little bit, because the CO2 in the atmosphere has not all yet dissolved in the ocean. But after a while, it would start coming down. Unfortunately, "after a while" is tens of thousands of years. We're putting it in over a few hundred years, and if we leave it to purely natural processes of our planet to take us back to where it would—I don't like to use the word—perhaps, "prefer" to be, the general chemistry, it's going to take tens of thousands of years.
CB: Do you have any visions in your mind of what the future ocean's going to look like in light of these changes? [pause] Visions, nightmares, dreams…?
AD: Visions, nightmares, dreams, I don't know. Clearly, it's going to change the possibility for a variety of calcium carbonate organisms in certain environments.
The coral reefs—if they grow more slowly, they are always being hit by waves and broken up. So, you have to keep growing back. If it's harder for them to grow, then they may get to the point that they're not growing fast enough to stay the same and start shrinking. And the coral is a wonderful place, um, the reason it looks so beautiful—with all the fishes and everything—is because it provides so much protection for all these varying different species. It's a whole ecosystem that is kept there, in part, just because there's this reef.
CB: We've touched on, sort of, worst-case scenarios of...of animals dissolving. What's, sort of, what's the best-case scenario of what...what we could expect in the future?
AD: Probably, the best case would be a combination of things happening at once. We could reduce how much CO2 we were putting in the atmosphere so that we never went to the stage to where it's guaranteed to be bad—just to where it might not be good. We might be lucky. There could be organisms that have within their genetic capacity the ability to adapt to the changed chemistry. That's plausible. Is it likely? We don't know. We really don't know.
In addition, there might be some local things we can do that help. For instance, we were talking here about helping hatcheries for, uh, oyster larvae, where a very simple dealing with it—don't take high CO2 seawater—that would work. That would work locally. You could almost imagine making changes on a ...on a larger scale, a few square miles even. But I can't imagine making those changes on the whole of the ocean. So, it would be a matter of deciding that there were some parts that were more sensitive or more valuable and...and taking active action to change things.
[somber piano music]
[Conclusion]
It's hard to imagine that humans are burning so much fossil fuel that we've altered our atmosphere—and now our oceans—faster than has ever happened in the history of the Earth. And it's easy to feel hopeless. But I walked away from my conversations feeling that our fate—and the fate of our oceans—were not yet sealed.
We live in an ever-connected world, which affords incredible power to educate and be educated. We have the power to learn about the world around us and to listen to the scientists who are continuously deciphering our impact on it. We have the power to teach our children, to inspire change in our communities, and to support policies that are in favor of a healthy planet. We have the power to make a choice—every day—about how we live our lives.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music fades out and ends]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Deep-water corals of Cordell Bank
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2011 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Lisa Etherington, Research Coordinator at the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and Dan Howard, the sanctuary's Superintendent, about research on the deep-water corals of Cordell Bank and the impacts of ocean acidification on corals.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music]
Much of the ocean is a desert, dark depths devoid of life with muddy bottoms where animals scour for food and mates.
But in the midst of these muddy bottoms, rocky banks rise from the continental shelf providing structure for life to grow and flourish. Cordell Bank, just 20 miles off the Point Reyes Seashore, is one such place. A world bursting with creatures beyond our wildest imaginations.
[Interview with Lisa Etherington and Dan Howard]
Lisa Etherington: The overwhelming colors and diversity of life that are associated with these corals and other animals on the bank is just...it's breathtaking. It's like nothing you've seen before.
Dan Howard: Because of where the bank is situated and because of our local oceanography, it's a very very productive place, both on the bank and around the bank. So it just really is a...an oasis of life out there; it's just spectacular.
Cassandra Brooks: That's Lisa Etherington, Research Coordinator at the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary and Dan Howard, the sanctuary's Superintendent.
A key component of this biological wonderland are deep-water corals. Unlike shallow water reefs, these corals thrive in dark water anywhere from just below the surface down to two thousand meters. All over the world, from the Arctic to Antarctica, researchers have found deep-water corals. And each new community they find supports an incredible assemblage of life.
LE: I do know that some deep coral communities...uh...have been shown to have diversity levels of the associated animals with the...the corals to be similar to tropical reef systems. So, people think of these lush, shallow-water, warm-water coral ecosystems as being one of the most diverse places on earth, but, um, deep-water coral communities can rival that.
They provide a 3-D structure, so a lot of organisms will use them as habitat, either for refuge from predation, areas of feeding, areas where, um, they will spawn, or nursery areas where young individuals can grow up.
CB: And I wondered if, um, Cordell Bank wasn't designated a sanctuary because of the presence of corals?
DH: I don't think, uh, when the sanctuary was designated in 1989 that many people other than the fishermen understood the deep coral communities. I doubt...I don't think anybody really understood it.
CB: I know there's still a lot of things we don't know about deep-sea corals, but, in terms of what we do know, I understand they're really slow growing and pretty vulnerable.
LE: Right. Right. I think it's been documented that some individuals will only grow one to two centimeters per year. So, it takes them a while to get to, um, you know, a substantial height. And some of these will, you know, be 10 to 15 meters high, you can have some really large colonies or individuals. And some form reef systems.
CB: So how old are those that are 10 to 15 meters high?
LE: I know they've been documented as over 1500 years old. So, one of the, uh, longest-lived organisms on the Earth.
CB: As knowledge of deep-sea corals has grown, so has a desire to protect them. While acres of coral communities have been destroyed by trawl fishing, many countries, including the United States, have banned trawling over some seamounts or other rocky habitats where corals live. The hope is to protect the remaining deep-sea coral communities, though a new threat is on the horizon, one that is far harder to manage.
LE: For deep-sea corals, one of the...the big concerns right now is the changing acidity of the ocean. So, as we put more, uh, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean is taking up more carbon dioxide, which reduces the pH or increases the acidity of the ocean. And that causes, um, some potential detrimental impacts on corals which use calcium carbonate to build their skeletons. So, if we have a more acidic ocean environment, then it's harder for these animals to build their skeletons and also potentially could dissolve their skeletons in some cases.
DH: You know, we have...we have so...so much to learn, but as a sanctuary, I, you know, we certainly, the one thing that we can do is...is try to protect these habitats and keep them in as, you know, as close to a natural state as we can so that they have the...the best chance possible to survive or, uh, be resilient in a changing environment.
[Conclusion]
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music fades]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: An Underground Answer to Greenhouse Gasses
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews Becca Ryals, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and her advisor, ecosystem scientist Whendee Silver, about carbon sequestration and Marin Carbon Project's efforts in Nicasio, California, to sequester carbon in the soil of cattle pastures.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain. [music fades]
[footsteps through grass]
The grass is crisp and yellow on John Wick and Peggy Rathmann's ranch in Nicasio, California, a short drive east from Point Reyes National Seashore. I'm following Becca Ryals, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. As we pass a group of lazy cows, European oats, bunch grasses, and thistles poke my ankles. But today, we're more interested in what's going on below our feet.
[Becca Ryals Interview]
[augering and digging sounds]
Becca Ryals: Nice to feel the fresh air, to dig around in the soil. It's a lot of manual labor involved here, but it's always really fun.
Daniel Strain: Ryals torques what looks like a giant corkscrew almost four feet into the ground. Below the surface, the dirt teems with roots, bugs and micro-organisms. This eclectic community could become California's ally in efforts to slow climate change, she says.
BR: A lot of the carbon has actually been lost from soil across the world. So, this is one way where we can just take advantage of natural processes that happen, plants growing and putting some carbon from the atmosphere into the soil.
DS: Carbon dioxide flows in and out of wild meadows and rangelands across California. But due to overgrazing and development, many grassy regions have become run-down, absorbing less and less of the gas. The owners of this ranch learned years ago
just how easily the balance could tip, Ryals says. When Wick and Rathmann first bought the property, feral cows from a previous owner had stripped the land bare.
BR: And they originally thought, “Oh, cows are bad for ecosystems. Let's remove them. Let's get rid of those cows.” But they soon found out that grazing is an integral part of that ecosystem. And what they found when they removed the cows was an invasion of coyote bush, these woody plants that you see on the landscape here.
DS: The ranch now hosts a healthy mix of grasses and some bushes, thanks to the cows I passed earlier. They're unofficial partners in the Marin Carbon Project, a coalition of university, government, and non-profit groups. Whendee Silver, Ryals' advisor at UC Berkeley, heads the team. Together, the organizations are exploring how they can encourage the growth of resilient grass communities that store more carbon for longer.
[shovel hitting a rock]
BR: Oh, no—a rock. I'm really good at finding the rocks.
DS (ON SITE): It's the experience.
BR: Too good, yeah.
DS: This ordinary-looking dirt is buzzing with the ebb and flow of carbon, Ryals says. To grow deep, the roots we see chew up sugars. Plants make those sugars from the carbon in carbon dioxide and the energy in sunlight. When grasses die, microbes in the soil gobble down their roots, carbon molecules and all. Over months or even years, these underground bacteria exhale some of what they eat back into the air. Grasslands make such potent carbon sinks because they have so much going on under the surface, says ecosystem scientist Whendee Silver.
[Whendee Silver Interview]
Whendee Silver: And that's because grasses and grasslands and rangelands tend to occur in places where there's more water loss from ecosystems—evapotranspiration—than water coming in—rainfall. And so by living in this chronically dry environment, the plants make a living by putting lots of their energy belowground into roots to hunt for water and nutrients.
DS: To super-charge this carbon-holding potential, Silver and her team laced tennis court-sized plots of land with thin layers of organic compost. She says that grass grows 50 percent better with this shot of nutrients. And based on her initial calculations, these small changes could add up. If half the rangelands in California sucked down one more ton of carbon dioxide per hectare each year, the gains could offset the state's commercial energy use.
WS: Is it worthwhile doing? Yeah, I would say it's worthwhile doing, if it works. And our preliminary results suggest that this is likely to work.
DS: But happy grasses aren't just good for carbon storage, Silver says. Taller blades mean more food for livestock and, in turn, better payouts for ranchers.
WS: Many of these approaches are common sense techniques that other ranchers have applied in the past. What we're doing now is taking what ranchers would say are their best management practices and looking at what the impacts are on soil carbon storage but also on greenhouse gas emissions.
[Conclusion]
[rustling noise and an unidentified female asking, “What depth are you at?”]
DS: Back in Nicasio, Ryals says that before the summer lull, she had no trouble spotting the plants that dined on compost.
BR: In the winter, when the rains are here, and the grass is growing, as you're driving up to the plots, you can actually see rectangles of greener plots. And those are the plots where we've added compost.
DS: Those rectangles hint at the potential lying in wait in grasslands across California. As climate change progresses, Ryals and Silver hope to find out what the green ground below their boots can do.
[music]
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
[music fades]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Birds on the go: Climate change and California's feathered friends
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews Diana Stralberg, an ecologist with PRBO Conservation Science, about how climate change will affect birds at Point Reyes National Seashore and elsewhere in California.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Birds on the go: Climate change and California's feathered friends
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain.
[Forest ambience, bird calls]
This oak forest in Point Reyes National Seashore is noisy with songbirds. But decades from now, I may hear a different set of voices at this shady spot. Some birds may be gone, while others will be new.
California's feathered friends could be on the move, scientists say. Where birders today spot oak titmice, they may soon find spotted towhees. The culprit may be climate change.
[Interview with Diana Stralberg] Diana Stralberg: What we looked at was community change and, specifically, how different might future communities be from current communities. So, as species move independently, they kind of reshuffle.
Daniel Strain: Diana Stralberg is an ecologist with PRBO Conservation Science, a conservation research group based in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. If global temperatures continue to climb, she worries that many birds will have to leave their old homes to find new ones.
Stralberg and a team of researchers combined climate change forecasts with survey data from 60 flyers common in California to predict where these birds of tomorrow might live. The red-capped acorn woodpecker, for instance, may trek North, while the rust-colored California towhee pushes west toward the coast. Despite appearances, the woodpecker and towhee aren't fleeing the heat…at least directly.
Stralberg: A lot of people have looked at wintering ranges of birds and tracked that they're moving North as the climate gets warmer, but for these Californian birds during the breeding season, we're really assuming that it's vegetation that the birds are responding to.
[Forest sounds, stream]
Strain: For centuries, this oak forest thrived in the stable climate of coastal California. But as the region warms, these oaks may begin to inch North, following what's left of the state's cool weather. Dry-weather scrub plants like chamise will take their place. According to Stralberg's predictions, which extend to 2070, a wide range of plant communities could undergo similar shifts. For vulnerable habitats like redwood forests, which depend on chilly, wet air, these shifts could be drastic.
Stralberg: You would expect to see more scrub or more hardwood or more oak where there's now conifer, so that's a shift in the North Bay region.
Strain: And as redwood trees go, so go all the animals that depend on them for food and shelter. Birds are just one piece of this mass migration, Stralberg says.
With so many species on the go, some may never find their just-right spot. East from Point Reyes in California's Central Valley lives one such unlucky Goldilocks, the yellow-billed magpie. As the valley becomes a pressure cooker, this bird, distinguished by the big beak that gives it its name, will fly west, she predicts. There it will sit along a sliver of mountain foothills with the climate too dry for comfort on one side and too wet on the other.
Stralberg: It's been hit by a lot of other issues, particularly West Nile virus, recently. And so that would be one species of concern because it is endemic and is found nowhere else.
Strain: In the coming decades, at-risk species like this will need to keep moving to keep up with rapid fluxes in climate. But in a climate of equally rapid human growth, many won't be able to move at all.
Stralberg: The thing that we're concerned about is there is going to be a lot of moving around on the landscape when we're manipulating that same landscape so much through urban, suburban and rural residential development.
[Cars driving by]
Strain: Cars zip past Stralberg's office in Petaluma, California with ease, but to tree seedlings and crawling beetles, the city is a treacherous obstacle course. Without trees to nest in and insects to eat, even the most mobile bird species may become grounded.
Stralberg: So, if it's not climate change, it's urban development. And sometimes it's both.
Strain: Protecting birds and their communities means giving them a little elbow room, Stralberg says. Big parks like Point Reyes have room to spare, but in urban areas, many land managers have turned to habitat corridors. These corridors are strips of grassland, woodland or marsh that bisect towns like Petaluma, providing plants and animals with a safe path through the concrete.
Stralberg: Especially in California, where we have this double whammy of urban expansion and climate change, I think the best thing we can do is to embrace smart growth.
[Conclusion]
[Wetland ambience] Beside Stralberg's office, next to the zipping cars, sits Shollenberger Park. In this swath of wetland, red-winged blackbirds lounge on fence posts, while geese and egrets wallow in a pond. Many are making quick pit-stops as they wind their way down the Petaluma River.
The voices here are different here than those back in Point Reyes, but they're equally boisterous. If Californians cut down on office parks and embrace more wild channels like this, Stralberg hopes the rest of the state will stay just as noisy.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Sustainability at Point Reyes National Seashore
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews John Dell'Osso, Point Reyes National Seashore's Chief of Interpretation, and Sara Hammond, the park's energy manager, about efforts at Point Reyes National Seashore to make park operations more sustainable.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain.
[loading laundry into a washing machine]
Every week, I run my smelly clothes through the washing machine gauntlet. But this week, I'm switching the dial from hot water to cold. [Dial clicking] With help from the website doyourpartparks.org, I've pledged to save cash and reduce my impact on climate change at the same time.
In the washing machine or on the road, we emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air annually. These gases contribute to the planet heating a little more each day, which could spur floods, droughts, and forest fires in California. It's hard to imagine that one washing machine chugging along on cold could help. But it can.
[John Dell'Osso Interview]
John Dell'Osso: You can do things that are at a smaller level, for example, changing out light bulbs or, better yet, even turning them off in a room you've just left. Little things like that can make a difference.
Daniel Strain: John Dell'Osso is Chief of Interpretation and Resource Education at Point Reyes National Seashore. In 2007, Point Reyes joined the Climate Friendly Parks Network—a coalition of 49 parks that have pledged to make small carbon cuts count.
JD: The Climate Friendly Program is a program put together by the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. And the idea behind it is to allow parks in the national park system to have the tools to, first of all, look at their carbon footprint to see where they are, what they're generating right now, and give them the actual tools to reduce that carbon footprint.
[Sara Hammond Interview]
DS: Energy Manager Sara Hammond is in charge of greenhouse gas slashing, but not burning, at Point Reyes. To meet the park's energy goals—a 15 percent drop in emissions by 2015—she's targeting excess carbon from four sources: waste, building, transportation, and other.
Sara Hammond: And our biggest category here at Point Reyes National Seashore is other. It's the methane that's emitted from the cattle that are part of the dairy ranching communities.
DS: Hammond isn't looking to get rid of the seashore's cows—they're important park residents—she just wants to limit their carbon hoof-prints. Methane digesters—devices that turn cow pies into power—could fill that need.
SH: So, we're looking at a couple of ranches where cows are being fed and milked in one central area where you could flush that waste into a lagoon and cover it, and, through the magic of chemistry, it breaks down into methane.
DS: And methane, also known as natural gas, is a clean-burning fuel. Cows, however, aren't the only sources of waste at Point Reyes. Field biologists, trail crews, and office workers make their dent, too. To target this waste, Hammond installed low-flow urinals in park bathrooms to save water, and started a recycling program to save paper, plastic, and aluminum trash. The park also put solar panels on six buildings, and Hammond plans to add them to seven more soon.
SH: We're really ramping up our solar here, and I've calculated that through the solar on those buildings, we'll be producing close to 30 percent of our load.
[electric car sounds]
DS: Point Reyes scientists can ride to study sites in style in five all-electric Toyota RAV4s. These plug-in cars get 80 miles per charge and run quietly. Louder vehicles like backhoes and bobcats refuel at the park's diesel blending pump, which mixes biodiesel with traditional diesel gas. These overhauls have made Point Reyes a greener place to work or explore.
But climate change is a global problem, one the National Park Service can't address on its own. As climate change education grows across the parks, Hammond hopes that Point Reyes' two million annual visitors will take away more than just photos during their stay.
SH: It's not park service employees alone that are causing global climate change. And we get so many visitors a year, and we have this really wonderful captive audience to say, "This is what we're doing at Point Reyes, and we real do care."
[Conclusion]
Lowering carbon emissions doesn't require a big government budget, Hammond says. Park-goers can trim waste, at a profit, in any number of ways, whether it's by driving less, recycling more, or turning down the thermostat.
[washing machine running]
I not only pledged to wash my clothes in cold water, I also reset my laptop's sleep function and switched from paper to electronic mail. According to doyourpartparks.org, in 15 days, I've saved almost $4 and 71 pounds of carbon dioxide—equal to half the energy the average American consumes each year watching TV. And, at least, now I know my new jeans won't shrink.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Understanding the ecology of native Olympia oysters in Tomales Bay
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Anna Deck, Ted Grosholz, and David Kimbro about research on the ecology of native Olympia oysters in Tomales Bay and how the oysters are threatened by invasive whelks.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
Tomales Bay is known for its thriving oyster farms, where they grow Pacific oysters, a massive and fast-growing species from Asia. Less well known are Olympia oysters, the species that's actually native to the Bay. Despite their small size, usually less than a couple inches, they were an important food source for American Indians and early settlers. They also played an incredibly important ecological role in Tomales Bay. As filter feeders, they cleaned the Bay's waters and the built reefs with their shells, providing habitat and shelter for other marine species.
But you won't see an abundance of Olympia oysters in most parts of the bay today. Their popularity as a food source, coupled with pollution, caused populations to plummet by the early 1900s. Despite a lack of harvesting for almost a century, they still haven't recovered in Tomales Bay.
UC Davis professor Ted Grosholz and his students have been studying the oysters for more than a decade. They're trying to understand what limits the oyster's recovery and provide information for potential restoration efforts.
[Anna Deck Interview]
[Sound of water lapping]
Cassandra Brooks: So, I'm out here with Anna Deck a graduate student in Ted Grosholz's lab.
So, why the heck are we out here at 10 o'clock at night? It's crazy foggy right now. Definitely, the tide is starting to come up and…
Anna Deck: Yeah, so, right now is the low tide, so...[chuckles] Uh, oysters are generally found in the intertidal zone and, so, in fall, the low tides tend to be in the evenings and that's when oysters are exposed. So, one of the things we're looking at is whether competition for space or food limits oysters either in their growth, survival, or their recruitment.
[Ted Grosholz interview]
Ted Grosholz: Hi, I'm Ted Grosholz. I'm a professor at UC Davis.
CB: I was hoping you could describe what Tomales bay looked like a few hundred years ago, and then maybe describe how it looked a hundred years ago, and then describe what it looks like today.
TG: Let's see. Tomales Bay probably...this is all conjecture for, you know, putting together a lot of information, but several hundred years ago, um, it probably looked very different than it did today. So, uh, prior to all the...the advent of...of land use change, it probably had a much more diverse shoreline. It probably had lots of rocks and cobbles and probably had very healthy native oyster populations.
Probably, a hundred years ago, or just thereabouts, um, it was also a very active fishing village, but there were quite a range of land use changes, involving grazing and a number of activities which contributed a lot to silt...silt and sedimentation. So, there was a lot of sediment that came into the bay and it filled in much of the bay, as much as 15 feet in some places. And, so, we had a bay that had a much more diverse shoreline transition into a very soft-sediment, uh, silty area.
You go out to Tomales Bay right now, the first thing that would probably strike you is the shellfish aquaculture. The west side of Tomales Bay, uh, with the National Park Service boundary, certainly represents a little more of what Tomales Bay probably used to look like.
CB: You describe the difference in the habitat change in Tomales Bay, is that, primarily, why the oysters have become depleted over time?
TG: Uh, this is the question that we spent several years trying to answer is, well, if the native oysters haven't been fished for a hundred years, why don't we have a lot of native oysters? Why haven't they recovered? Like most, uh, ecological processes, it's complicated and based on several different factors. But we suspect that the lack of hard substrate that has resulted from the land use changes is probably part of it.
We also have several introduced predators and from our work we know these have an important impact on native oysters.
[David Kimbro Interview]
CB: To find out more, I called Ted's former graduate student David Kimbro, who did his Ph.D. dissertation on how invasive species introductions have impacted Olympia oysters in Tomales Bay.
David Kimbro: All throughout the bay, you have three trophic levels. You have crab; a snail or whelk; and an oyster. Right? But in one half of the bay, you have crabs at healthy numbers, snails at healthy numbers, and oysters at healthy numbers. In the other half of the bay, where oysters historically were more abundant, you have crabs, you have a lot more snails, and you have absolutely zero oysters left.
So, what's the difference between the halves of the bay? The outer half is all native organisms and the inner half is all, you know, invasive crabs and invasive whelks. It's like in the...in the outer half, like, the native crab and the native snail or whelk have, sort of, spent a long time around each other. So, the native crab knows what to do when it comes across a whelk, it can easily crack its shell open and consume it. At the same time, the native snail knows what to do when it senses a native crab, it gets the heck out of the way. It, sort of, migrates higher up on the shore and eats barnacles.
In contrast, the invasive whelk, in its source population in Long Island Sound, it wasn't around big bad crab predators. So, it hasn't been selected to, sort of, have this "I better watch out for crabs." So, it just, sort of, munches through oysters happily and worry-free.
And, at the same time, the European green crab, it's like a generalist predator, it...it eats everything. And, as a result, it's not a whelk specialist. And, so, it has a hard time cracking open these large snails. And, so, while it can eat a couple of these snails, it just...it can't mow through them like the native crab does.
I did notice before I left, was it...there's a new whelk, a Japanese whelk. And these dynamics that I told you about, they just might completely change in the next year or two if the Japanese oyster drill numbers become more, uh, of an important factor.
[Conclusion]
We have yet to see how this new invasive species will impact Olympia oysters. But Ted and his students will continue trekking around all hours of the day and night trying to understand more about the oyster's ecology.
[music starts]
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music fades]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Death Cap Mushrooms at Point Reyes National Seashore
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Benjamin Wolfe, a graduate student at Harvard, who is studying the invasive death cap mushroom at Point Reyes at Point Reyes National Seashore.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music]
Death cap mushrooms (also known as Amanita phalloides) are found throughout the Point Reyes region and are the most poisonous mushrooms in the world. But they're fairly new arrivals here. They invaded the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1930s, likely brought over on cork trees from Europe for the wine industry. By the late 1960s, death caps were found in Tomales Bay State Park and have since spread throughout the Point Reyes Peninsula.
Benjamin Wolfe, a graduate student at Harvard, is studying the mushroom's invasion here in Point Reyes. He's using genetics to study their abundance and distribution, trying to understand what controls and confines their invasion.
I sat down with Ben in his mushroom lab at Harvard to find out more.
[Benjamin Wolfe Interview]
Benjamin Wolfe: We're pretty much the CSI of mushrooms. So, we go out...instead of working with criminals and murderers and crime scenes, we're just trying to figure out where mushrooms have gone. And we use similar techniques. So, we use a lot of DNA bar-coding that they use in forensics labs to figure out: is this actually Amanita phalloides, or is it a different species? And then, we go to our herbaria and look back in time at records that people have collected to track where it's spread over time. And then, we often go into the soil and probe the soil with these DNA bar-codes to figure out: does this soil sample have Amanita phalloides? Has it been invaded?
Cassandra Brooks: Ben does his fieldwork in Point Reyes because Amanita are incredibly abundant and large here. But it's also a real hotspot for ectomycorrhizal fungi in general, he says.
So, what are ectomycorrhizal fungi? This tongue-tying term refers to fungi that form a symbiotic relationship with tree roots. Many of the mushrooms you see throughout the forest are ectomycorrhizal fungi, but you're only seeing part of the story. If you could peak below the soil, you would see white cobwebby mushroom roots, called hyphae, snaking out in all directions.
On one end, they're grabbing nutrients from nooks and crannies that tree roots can't get to. On the other end they're connected to the trees, sharing their nutrients and stealing sugars produced from the trees' photosynthesis. They use those sugars to make the mushroom you see throughout the forest, which are used for spreading spores and reproducing.
Amanita phalloides is one of, perhaps, ten thousand species of ectomycorrhizal fungi, but it stands out, Ben says, because it's managed to move from one part of the world to another and suddenly take over and become very abundant.
BW: And when we went into Point Reyes and looked at it in more detail and we actually went into the soil and extracted DNA to see what trees it was growing with, it was really, clearly picking and choosing—from the entire community available—just these oak roots, which is really surprising for one of these fungi to be that specific.
We are also just looking at general patterns of how it associates with different hosts. So, it's really different on the East Coast. So, on the West Coast it loves the coast oak. But when you come on the East Coast, it's only associating with pine. And then, when you look at the native range where it grows in Europe, it only generally associates with oaks. So, it seems like it's gone from its native habitat with oaks, moved to North America, and on the West Coast where it's invading, it seems to really associate mostly with oaks; on the East Coast only with pines. So, it's almost like it's made a host shift.
That's what we're broadly interested in the lab, is fungal symbioses. What controls them ecologically? And then, from an evolutionary perspective: how did they come to be? What genes and what processes have allowed these things to evolve this symbiotic lifestyle?
So, it's sort of like the Human Genome Project for fungi.
CB: Right.
BW: You can ask these really broad questions about, you know, what genes give me a certain eye color, but, in this case, we're asking: what genes are making this thing associate with an oak versus a pine?
CB: Maybe you can talk a little bit about...when this mushroom is so well known—it's called the death cap—I mean, how is it that it's still the most amount of people get poisoned by it?
BW: Right. Right. I think the main reason is that the people who have immigrated to North America from other countries get confused, because there are things in their native range that look like the death cap mushroom but aren't poisonous.
CB: Right.
BW: And so, there is a lot of confusion. And, unfortunately, it's hard to educate people in so many different languages and warn them about it. And in areas where it is so abundant, people encounter it very frequently, they pick it, and they think it looks like this thing they ate back at home which was really tasty.
CB: In your understanding, is it the most poisonous mushroom?
BW It is. It, you know, in terms of the amount of toxin and how toxic it is per amount that you eat...
CB: It is. OK
BW: it is considered the most poisonous one. Yeah, 'cause, once you get poisoned, once you've ingested about half a cap of mushroom, it goes in your body and the toxins are really concentrated in your liver. And, essentially, your liver just starts to dissolve, it just, sort of, falls apart.
The story is that you eat it, you get really sick at first, you're like, "Wow! This does not feel good." And the second day, you'll apparently start to feel a little bit better. And then the third day you die.
The other thing about these mushrooms in California, they're really robust, they're huge and they're just so...you're intrigued by them.
Ben and his colleagues are indeed intrigued by the mushrooms, not for eating, of course, but for understanding the ecology and evolution of symbiosis. They've even recently put together a review paper showing that ectomycorrhizal fungi invasions occur across the globe. They have yet to see if invasive mushroom species act similar to plant and animal invasions, but with more CSI-like investigation, they're sure to find out.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: New Findings about Great White Sharks of the North Pacific
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Scot Anderson, a local researcher who has studied white sharks off of Point Reyes Seashore and at the Farallon Islands for more than two decades.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music]
Today, I'm with Scot Anderson, a local researcher who's studied great white sharks here off Point Reyes Seashore and at the Farallons for more than two decades. In the fall of 2009, Anderson and his colleagues with Stanford University's Tagging of Pacific Predators Program, UC Davis and others published a paper on the sharks. Their study revealed new information about where the sharks travel to, how they spend their time, and showed that the shark population here off California's genetically different from great white shark populations throughout the world.
I sat down with Anderson to find out more about the study and what it tells us about these iconic and revered animals.
[Scot Anderson Interview]
Cassandra Brooks: Maybe you could tell me a little bit about what at typical day is like for you out in the field.
Scot Anderson: Yeah, okay, so a typical day, uh, going out looking for sharks, let's say, on the Farallon Island runs, we leave out of San Francisco, now, on a big sailboat called the Derek M. Baylis. It has this launch and we, uh, go to the island and we launch the launch and we work out of that for six hours on the water looking for sharks. Um, usually what we do is we put a decoy out that's about the size of a small sea lion and a small piece of whale blubber next to the boat, that's tied to the boat. And what that does is provides a area of scent around the boat that gets the sharks interested in sticking around. And then, if the shark comes around, we videotape them first, try to document what the shark looks like, who it is, and what their sex is, and then we go ahead and either tag them.
CB: How do you actually tag a great white shark?
SA: [cross talk] tag a white shark. [Brooks chuckles] Um, it sounds like it'd be a complicated process, but it's actually quite simple. You wait for the right moment, which is when the shark is at a 90-degree angle to you, swimming by the boat. So, then, the tag is on the end of a long pole and it has a harpoon-like dart on the end. Once it's embedded in the shark's skin, it's going to stay there until it finally pulls out, in a year to two years, or something like that.
CB: And during that year to two years, it's collecting data the whole time about where the shark is going and...?
SA: Yeah…okay so there's two kinds of tags we use. The first kind of tag is a satellite tag and that we put on the shark and then it...it records data, like, uh, the depth of the water, the temperature of the water, and light levels, and things like that. And that's on the shark until a pre-programmed date that it's, uh, released. When it releases, it floats to the surface and starts downloading data.
The other kind of tag's called an acoustic tag and, um, it makes a sound that's a signature sound for each individual shark, comes out to a number. If they swim within a quarter mile of the receiver, it logs them in. Now these receivers are placed on the bottom and we have one at Tomales Point, one at Point Reyes, two at the Farallons, and two at Año Nuevo.
CB: Wonderful, so people will just have these underwater devices that are just constantly picking up these pings that are individual to each shark, and, then, you know when they are there and when they are not there.
SA: Yeah.
CB: I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about the recent study that was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And you were co-author on this study.
SA: Well, it's a study that, sort of pulls together a lot of different kinds of data. And, so, what we did was we took DNA data and looked at that and what we found is that the sharks are very closely related. And then you start looking at where the sharks have migrated to and from and it's actually a...an area that's well defined. They don't go much past Hawaii—maybe 500 miles beyond that—and they don't go past Midway, and they don't go north of in a line with Canada, and they are pretty much in this zone.
CB: But why do they even migrate as far as past Hawaii?
SA: So why do they go there?
CB: Yeah.
SA: Well, that still remains a question to be answered. But it really looks like it has to do more with breeding than feeding, because this population, when they're on the coast, is feeding on an abundance of food. So, why would you go somewhere where there is very little food?
CB: You were talking that the study also shows that this population is genetically distinct. Does that...so it means that they’re not breeding with sharks from South Africa, obviously, or other areas...
SA: Right, yeah, because of the genetics, we know they're isolated up here and it's its own distinct population, so...
CB: And that seems like a very important finding in terms of understanding their role in the ecology here in the North Pacific.
SA: Yeah, you know, when you look at the role animals have in the environment, they're either going to be a producer or a consumer. Obviously, white sharks are apex predators; they're at the top of the game here. The role they play in the environment is...has yet to be totally understood, because we know they eat seals and sea lions—during certain times of year—and we know that they scavenge on dead whales and things and...but so do other animals. Whether they're actually, you know, keeping the environment healthy and all that, it's yet to be seen, but probably. They must play some role.
[Conclusion]
Looking out over the ocean from Tomales Point, it's surprising to think that great white sharks, among the most massive and mobile predators in the world, don't use the whole Pacific as their playground and that they don't mate with other white sharks in the world. Instead, they follow a strict and isolating migration path between California and the Hawaii region, which, as winter rapidly approaches, they are soon to embark on. Why, exactly, they make these vast migrations remains to be seen, but until then, Anderson and colleagues will be out every fall doing more observational and tagging studies.
[music]
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore - Part 1
Part one of a The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), who has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore – Part 1
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks. Today, in a special two-part episode, we explore how climate change is impacting the California coast, including the Point Reyes National Seashore.
As one of America's greatest coastlines, Point Reyes National Seashore, part of the National Park Service, encompasses 71,000 acres, including 80 miles of unspoiled and undeveloped coast. This seashore, just one hour north of San Francisco, is home to more than one thousand species, including 32 threatened and endangered species. Millions of visitors come here every year to see the elephant breeding colonies or the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse.
But climate change has come to the California coast, potentially threatening many species that make their home here.
Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it. I drove down to the NOAA office in Pacific Grove, California to meet with Dr. Schwing and find out more.
[Interview with Frank Schwing] [Sound of car and then breaking waves]
Cassandra Brooks: I was hoping you could start by explaining what the California current is and what affect it has on the ecosystem.
Frank Schwing: The California current is the eastern most wing of a giant clockwise gyre, or circulation, that covers the North Pacific. The water we get that enters into the waters off California and the west coast really originates in the sub-arctic regions of the North Pacific. As a result, these waters are relatively cold. But they are also very rich in oxygen, nutrients and a lot of other things that really make for a productive ecosystem. As they flow south, they combine with wind patterns in spring and summer that tend to drive surface waters offshore. This process is replaced by waters that come up from depth, which we call upwelling. So, it's bringing these deep water up to the surface, again they are very productive waters, so it's the equivalent of spreading miracle grow all over the surface ocean where it can encounter plants and animals that grow there. And that's why the ecosystem is so productive off the west coast.
CB: It's difficult to know what affect climate change will have on the ecosystem off the California coast, Dr. Schwing says, but they're seeing changes in weather patterns as well as in the behavior and distribution of marine organisms.
To illustrate this point, he referred to a well-known study completed in the 1930s by scientists at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. The researchers went out and sampled tide pools off of Pacific Grove to figure out what species lived there. As expected, they found a mix of cold and warm water species. Then ten years ago, scientists went back out and re-created the study to see how the species composition changed. This time, just 60 years after the first study, they found warm-water species in much higher numbers while the number of cold-water species had dropped.
FS: Its clearly one nail in the idea that we are seeing a switch towards warmer water species in the California current.
CB: So, what does that mean for some of the bigger species, some of the fisheries say or marine mammals?
FS: It could be quite significant. The ones that can swim might start moving north. Species that are less tolerant of warmer waters, such as salmon, may be more seriously affected in a negative way by climate change. On the other hand, we may see more warm water species, albacore and tunas and other fish like that showing up in our waters.
CB: Do your time scales go back far enough to discern whether these changes are actually human induced or just part of natural cycles?
FS: The good observational record goes back about 50 to 60 years. And we do see some fairly robust trends in the record. Definitely, we've seen conditions are now warmer than they were half a century ago, another very important change comes back to upwelling. Overall, we are seeing more upwelling than 50 years ago but a lot of it seems to be occurring later in the year.
CB: But if upwelling is increasing is that overall a good thing for most species? Does it mean there are more nutrients in the water?
FS: Because it appears to be occurring later in the growing season it's the equivalent of planting your garden but not fertilizing it for two months, it's not going to do very well. That's the problem a lot of these species have, by the time the upwelling finally kicks in its too late for them, their eggs don't do well, the offspring starve. We've seen some significant problems like that with a number of species.
[Conclusion] We've certainly seen changes in the upwelling currents in recent years off the Northern California coast. Thanks to the work of coastal oceanographers like Dr. Frank Schwing who study this phenomenon and its effect on marine plants and animals, managers and policy makers will be better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change in the future.
Stay tuned for the second episode of the Natural Laboratory to find out more about how climate change is affecting the Point Reyes National Seashore, the potential for dead zones off of California and ocean acidification. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore - Part 2
Part two of a The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), who has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore – Part 2
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks. Today, in a special two-part episode, we explore how climate change is impacting the California coast, including the Point Reyes National Seashore.
In part one we discussed the how climate change and ocean warming might be impacting the California current and the animals that live there. Here we continue our conversation with oceanographer Dr. Frank Schwing about the impacts of climate change on the Point Reyes National Seashore, as well as the potential for dead zones and ocean acidification.
[Interview with Frank Schwing] Cassandra Brooks: So, Dr. Schwing, I was hoping you could tell us how climate change and changes in the California upwelling currents might specifically affect the Point Reyes region? I know there are a lot of elephant seal haul out sites, and a lot of great white sharks, and many animals specific to this place. Can you comment on how some of these changes will affect them?
Frank Schwing: While climate change is a global process the impacts on populations or organisms really occur at very local scales. Could be things like changing in the time of upwelling, and Point Reyes is a very large upwelling area. If we see delays there, it could be particularly sensitive to those changes compared to other areas say off of Washington or southern California where the seasonal cycle of upwelling is not as strong. In terms of marine mammals again one of the things we are probably going to see are these big shifts, geographic shifts in their distributions. So their traditional haul out areas are associated with a geographic feature like a point it may be at some point that the conditions are no longer right for them to return to those spots and they'll be seeking other locations for their reproduction or other life history activities that may be further north.
CB: What is the potential for us to have dead zones here off of California due to the circulation changes you talked about?
FS: Well we actually are getting some dead zones here. We are seeing some interesting changes in the oxygen levels through the California current. We're seeing two things that seem to be occurring. One is that climate change seems to be slowing down the overall clockwise circulation of the Pacific Ocean. So, we are seeing less of that subarctic water and it's losing the battle with the subtropical water. When you combine that with the upwelling we are getting it's bringing that low oxygen water much closer to the surface than we've seen before. So now we are seeing fairly close to the surface at times, what we call hypoxic water, water that is very difficult for most gilled animals to survive in.
An area we haven't talked about much is ocean acidification. We know very little about what the impacts of this are going to be. But recent surveys have shown an alarming trend towards higher acidity in the waters off the California current and again because of upwelling these acidic waters are showing up very close to the surface.
CB: Dr. Schwing said these acidic surface waters could be really detrimental in the formation of animals that are calcium carbonate based since carbonate can't form when you reach below a certain pH.
FS: So that's an area we are really concerned about in terms of being one of the consequences of climate change.
CB: Despite these potential impacts of climate change, are you fairly hopeful that most of the species here off California will be robust to survive the next century of climate change?
FS: I think most animals will be pretty robust, whether or not they remain California animals is another question. But both with natural variations in the oceans as well as things driven by human activities, there will be winners and losers. Some of the animals don't fare so well there will be other animals that will be happy to come in and take their place. The question is whether those animals that are replacing them will be appropriate for the ones that will benefit the various human activities in the ocean. Not only economically, but socially, through recreation and just the intrinsic connections we have with the ocean, living close to it for so many years.
Conclusion [Sound of footsteps and then breaking waves]
I walked out of Dr. Schwing's office, and out to the beach just across the street, wondering what the future will hold for the California Coast and all the species that live there. One thing is clear, having protected places, like Point Reyes National Seashore, will at least provide a stable place for creatures while they adjust to these tremendous changes.
This is Cassandra Brooks with the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center at Point Reyes National Seashore.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Fishing for the Humboldt Squid
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews four marine biologists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station who are studying the Humboldt squid in central California's coastal waters.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Fishing for the Humboldt Squid
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music]
Today, I am out with scientists and educators off Monterey Bay searching for the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), also known as the Jumbo squid. Or in Mexico, where the fish are caught commercially, they call them “Diablo rojo”—the red devil.
These voracious deep-water predators, which can grow to up to ten feet long and swim 24 kilometers per hour, are new arrivals to the central California coast. Scientists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station are studying the squid, trying to understand why they've moved into the northeast Pacific coast and what affect they might have on the local ecosystem.
I join the Stanford crew for a fishing adventure, along with scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service, local fishermen and educators with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
[Interview with Erik Larsen] Erik Larsen: So I'm Erik Larsen, captain of the research vessel Fulmar and we just left Monterey heading to a point about four miles southwest of cypress point off of Carmel and we are going to stop the boat and set up for some squid jigging in about 700 meters and see what happens.
Today it's a little windy and a little bit of swell, 6- to 7-foot swell, supposed to get to 25 knots of wind, but right now, it's not too bad, a little lumpy, of course that's just me talking (he laughs).
[Interview with William Gilly] Cassandra Brooks: I'm standing on the back of the boat with professor William Gilly, who is spearheading the Humboldt squid tagging program as part of Hopkins tagging of Pacific predators program.
We are perched on the side of the boat, holding sturdy fishing rods outfitted with large spiked glow-in-the-dark jigs. We drop the jigs a couple hundred feet down in the water and wait, hoping to trick a squid into biting.
Humboldt squid feed in frenzies, snatching anything they can find in the water, including a variety of different fish species, but occasionally other squid that get in the way.
They seize prey with long tentacles covered with rings of prickly serrated teeth, which they use to bring the prey up to their mouth where they devour it with their large sharp beak.
If the squid are down here and actively feeding, they're sure to latch onto the jig.
Gilly's research team uses satellite tags to record an animal's movements underwater in space and time. Once affixed to a squid, the tag tells the researchers how deep the animals are diving, where they are traveling to and where they prefer to live. Historically, the Humboldt squid were seldom found further north than Baja California, Mexico.
Then with the 1997/98 El Nino, the squid came en masse and have maintained a fairly regular presence since then.
Cassandra Brooks: So, why do you think they are here?
William Gilly: Well I guess there is stuff for them to eat. [chuckles] It's not clear why they seem to be expanding their presence to more northern latitudes, maybe there are too many in the south and they need growing room. But they seem to be establishing themselves in areas that in recent history have been not subject to their presence. Like, Monterey Bay, and they seem to be getting established off the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, a lot around Vancouver and the Queen Charlotte Islands.
CB: Does it seem like they are here to stay?
WG: Well they have been here more or less stably since 2002 and unless something changes to make what they are eating go away, I think they will probably be here for a while. That's my guess
[Interview with Julie Stewart] CB: Julie Stewart is a graduate student in Gilly's lab who is looking at oceanographic properties that may correlate with the squid's seasonal invasions and migrations.
CB: So, you think it's a combination of climate change and ecosystem changes?
Julie Stewart: I think so, there has to be, they have to be able to get here to begin with, so climate change is providing a route, but once they are here, they have to be able to stay here. Physical oceanographic conditions have to be correct and they have to be able to find food, they have to be able to avoid predators and to be able to reproduce. Which is a big thing.
The big question is establishment. Is this thing able to establish itself, what is it eating, what is it doing?
If these squid are going somewhere else to spawn and each generation is re-invading and re-establishing itself then that's an interesting question, but right now we just don't know.
CB: So, the satellite tags will actually give you information as to whether they are just migrating here to feed and then returning back south?
JS: That's the goal.
[Interview with Danna Staaf] CB: To find out if the squid are reproducing here in California, Danna Staaf, a graduate student in Gilly's lab, has been searching for squid babies, or what she calls paralarvae.
CB: So, we were just out here doing a plankton trawl.
Danna Staaf: That's right. That's one of the main ways we use to look at where the squid babies are and what the squid babies might be eating. It gives you an ecosystem perspective of what's available for them.
We are up here in California in cold water, which is not where they spawn, at least not where we think they spawn. We know that Humboldt squid spawn in warm waters off Mexico, and Central America and further south than that, but we have not yet found any baby Humboldt squid in California. But we keep looking, because as waters get warmer and conditions change, they might well start spawning here. We want to be the fi rst to know. I do think it's too cold for them (it's too cold for me!).
[Conclusion] We continue fishing for the rest of the day, but didn't find any adult or larvae Humboldt squid.
Gilly and his team aren't sure why there were scarce today, but they'll be out again soon fishing in nearby waters.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: What’s in a Seal?
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which John Cannon interviews three marine biologists about the effects of agricultural and industrial contaminants on harbor seals, and how what we learn from these studies can be extrapolated to the contaminants' impact on humans.
Credit / Author:
John Cannon / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: What’s in a Seal?
[Intro music]
John Cannon: This is The Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for San Francisco Bay Area national parks. I'm John Cannon.
The round, mottled bodies and whiskered snouts of harbor seals are a common sight on beaches around Point Reyes and San Francisco Bay. As a species, they've done fairly well in most places, managing to adapt to living in undisturbed areas near humans. But a hazard lurks beneath the surface, a danger that's far more sinister than even the great white sharks that patrol these waters.
Runoff from agriculture and industry, chemicals from streets and sewers, and bacteria and pathogens have found their way into the water and the food chain as a result of how we humans use our environment. In the long run, these contaminants have the potential to do a lot of damage to harbor seals and to other species, like us.
Infiltrating the miniscule droplets of oil found in single-celled marine plants called phytoplankton, these particles work their way up the food ladder, first through the organisms that graze on phytoplankton, then to the carnivores. Each step along the way creates high contaminant concentrations.
And studies have shown that these industrial chemicals can cause problems with immune function and the reproductive system in seals and humans. By the time a harbor seal gets a hold of a rockfish or a crab, those chemicals have accumulated in the prey animal's fat, sometimes to a dangerous level. Harbor seals, with their thick ribbon of blubber, serve as a repository for these contaminants.
But if seals are eating crabs and rockfish and other things in San Francisco Bay that are dangerous to them, what about us? We humans eat a lot of the same foods. In a way, we are predator of fish and crabs. So, that describes our position on the food chain or, in scientist's terminology, our trophic level.
[Interview with Denise Gregg] Denise Gregg So, on some levels, the harbor seal, as an animal that eats at the same trophic level as a human, might be able to tell us about some of these environmental impacts on us as well.
JC: That's Denise Gregg. She's a marine biologist at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California. She's studying the effects of contaminants on harbor seals. Armed with this research, scientists might be able to someday better understand how those chemicals in the water affect not only sea life, but also us.
DG: You know, the study is to look at animals in San Francisco Bay during their first year, 'cause that's when survival is toughest for these animals. So, it's our best chance to make any kind of correlation between something that's impacting them and their ability to survive it.
JC: These chemicals are stored in the seals fat cells. Most of their fat ends up in blubber surrounding the seal's body, just below the skin. Blubber doesn't have many nerve endings, so rotund seals make excellent research subjects because scientists can easily take small samples for contaminant analysis without causing too much trouble for the animal.
Gregg also study seals in Tomales Bay at Point Reyes National Seashore that haven't been exposed to such high levels of contaminants. Here, every spring, mother seals give birth to hundreds of pups. Gregg predicts that the Tomales Bay seals will show lower contaminant levels than those in San Francisco Bay. She will compare here findings at the two sites to see if differences in seal health exist.
To learn more about the seals in Tomales Bay, Gregg and a team of researchers from all over North America round up young seals that have just been weaned. On a foggy morning, Jim Harvey, a scientist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, gives instructions to the biologists, veterinarians, and volunteers who have come to lend a hand. He explains the process: two boats approach the beach where the seals haul out. A crew member on one of the boats throws a buoy attached to a long net toward the shore. That boat then sweeps back away from the beach, stretching the net as it goes.
Jim Harvey: The net boat then does an arc in front of the haul-out site.
JC: The net has small floats on top and weights on the bottom to help it stink to the seafloor.
JH: So [unintelligible] 15 feet or so deep, um, so it gets set around, presumably creating a curtain around the seals.
JC: The wetsuit-clad crew jumps into the water at the prescribed time to secure the net. Small sub-teams of scientists and volunteers weigh each seal in a sling suspended from a tripod on the sand. The seal gets a mild sedative, making the process a little less stressful. Then, blood and blubber samples are taken using an anesthetic medication to numb the area, similar to having a mole removed.
Erin Flynn: They’re doing the work-up right now. The most recent thing they did was they took...um...a hair sample from near the fin area so they can use that to test for certain types of contaminants.
JC: That's Erin Flynn. She’s an AmeriCorps volunteer with the National Park Service. She spends most of her time observing seals from the cliffs above popular haul-outs. Greg and other scientists use the data she gathers to determine the best time to capture the weaned seals, tag them, and collect samples.
EF: You do it too early, you disrupt the moms and the pups, which is a really critical time for the seals. But if you do it too late, all the weaned pups go off to exotic places, like Monterey Bay.
JC: Once the teams have all the information they need to take back to the lab, they release the seal. It can be a little unsettling for the seal, like being poked and prodded at the doctor’s office. But, in the long run, the data the team gathers could provide valuable tools to understand how things we do every day--such as driving our cars--affect our environment.
So far, Gregg is finding what she'd expected: the harbor seals in Tomales Bay carry lower contaminant levels in their bodies than the harbor seals near San Francisco. Her larger study on human-induced effects on seal is still ongoing, however, so she doesn't have her final results yet. Where the lives of humans and seals intersect is certainly a fascinating part of the research for Gregg but equally as captivating are the lives of these commonly seen but still mysterious animals in Tomales Bay.
DG: The Tomales site is interesting as a control site for many of the contaminant tests, but it's also an area where we know very little about the harbor seals. So, it's really exciting to have a chance to work out here in the park. But we don't know where they go after they’re born. We basically don't know very much about them at all. So, they're interesting in their own right.
And the more we know about the animals we share our planet with, the better we can take care of all the creatures that call it home.
Gordon Shetler was our on-scene reporter for this podcast.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in Point Reyes National Seashore, I'm John Cannon.
[Exit music]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Park Science Day
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which John Cannon interviews Marcus Koenen, the San Francisco Bay Area Network's Inventory and Monitoring Coordinator, and two other participants the first San Francisco Bay Area Park Science Day.
Credit / Author:
John Cannon / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Park Science Day
[Intro music]
John Cannon: This is a special edition of The Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for San Francisco Bay Area national parks. It's Thursday, January 15, 2009, and I'm John Cannon coming to you from the Bay Model in Sausalito, California.
Today, at this one-and-a-half-acre scaled-down replica of San Francisco Bay, built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1957, parks' staff from across the region have gathered for the first ever Park Science Day. For the next few hours, park scientists and interpretive rangers will learn about and discuss a cross-section of the science happening at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, John Muir National Historic Site, Pinnacles National Monument, Point Reyes National Seashore, and other parks in the San Francisco Bay Area Network.
A national park's science office can feel like a beehive. Researchers buzz hurriedly in from their field work to enter data and replenish supplies, only to get back to their project sites to collect more data. That data is the honey that drives the scientific machinery of the national parks, allowing biologists, for example, to assess the population of coho salmon, or to determine what effect of the southward creep of the barred owl population is having on threatened spotted owls native to this region.
As you might expect, wildlife and factors like the weather don't conform to a predictable schedule, so these scientists are often very busy with little time to share what they are finding with their colleagues. And rarely do they get the chance to discuss their work with interpretive rangers who are tasked with his distilling these mysteries to park visitors.
Marcus Koenen: I'm Marcus Koenen, the Inventory and Monitoring Coordinator based at the Marin Headlands of Golden Gate National Rec Area. But I cover the whole network.
JC: The program that Koenen coordinates supports many of the parks’ biological inventories and long-term scientific monitoring efforts. Its aim is to bring diverse projects under the same leadership, from water quality monitoring to surveys of the species of lichens and fungi present in the parks. Scientists can then look at all the data and trends put together to help assess the health of both individual species and entire ecosystems protected by national parks.
This program also recognizes that these scientists often face similar challenges in their research, regardless of what they are studying. And they benefit from working together. But to accomplish this mission, the program's leaders realize that they needed to explore new avenues for researchers and other park staff to communicate with each other.
MK: And there was a real strong consensus that we really needed to put on a workshop like this to give people a chance to hear the presentations, to support what was being written, and to give people a chance to ask questions.
JC: So, they came up with Park Science Day. On the agenda is a host of little-known projects, such as a fossil survey spanning 200 million years of geologic history.
Will Elder: My name is Will Elder and I work at Golden Gate National Recreation Area as an interpretive ranger.
JC: Elder also wears the hat of a scientist. For this project, he interviewed other scientists and combed the literature to determine what fossils are in the parks, how old they are, and what we need to do to protect them.
JC: What can fossils tell you about the geological character of this area, which seems to be very diverse.
WE: Well, number one, fossils tell you how old the rocks are. And that's very important, obviously, in developing a historic timeline for the area. And they also tell you what the environment was where the rocks were deposited, whether it's open ocean or coastline or, even, terrestrial deposits...streambeds, etc. And, so, using that...knowing the age and the depositional environment you can develop a history of how the coast of California evolved for the last 200 million years, basically.
JC: The end result was an expansive database providing what Elder called a baseline of paleontological material. I thought this study sounded a bit like another presentation I’d heard earlier in the day. And, apparently, I wasn't the only one to make the association.
MK: During lunch I was sitting at the table with Joe Kinyon, one of the data managers and researchers with the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center and I asked him if he ever heard of Will Elders presentation on the fossils that were found along the coast. And he hadn't, he wasn't even aware of that project, but he automatically started thinking of ways that they could meld their two databases together. So, there's a...that's a really cool thing that come out of this.
JC: Kinyon presented a project called the Coastal Biophysical Inventory, which stock of present-day organisms and habitats along 161 kilometers of coastline between Tomales Bay at Point Reyes National Seashore and Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco. From the baseline created by this project, scientists and managers now have a powerful tool to evaluate the ecosystem's health. What's more, they are better prepared when, say, a tragedy, such as an oil spill besets a stretch of coastline. Those parallels between disparate projects continue to crop up throughout the day.
Bobbie Simpson: I'm Bobbie Simpson. I work at Point Reyes National Seashore and I am the liaison for the Exotic Plant Management Program in California.
JC: Most of Simpson's work deals with how to cope with the spread of invasive plants in national parks throughout California. She was quick to find a common thread in the dozen talks given at the workshop.
BS: It's interesting to me that almost every single presentation had some mention of the impacts associated with invasive plants—invasive plants or invasive animals. And as those threats seem to be ramping up in today's world, I'm very interested to see how people are actually coping with that, how they are dealing with it, what their solutions are, how they're monitoring it, and how they're getting their communication out.
JC: But beyond just seeing the work of others through the lens of her own experience, Simpson also noted how important it is for scientists to get together and share methods, strategies, and approaches.
BS: As I develop my projects, it helps me a lot to see how other people have developed theirs. And I learn very much through conversation with people. And this is a perfect venue for that.
JC: It's a venue Koenen says he hopes will continue to grow and foster this kind of communication.
MK: My main vision is not to have the same kind of event, but to really expand it. So, it's not just presentations from the Inventory and Monitoring Program, but, really, from all of the different natural resource programs in this network. There's just so much that happens and you could easily turn this into a week-long event, which is probably too much, but, definitely, we could expand this type of event.
JC: From the Bay Model in Sausalito California, I'm John Cannon for the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center at Point Reyes National Seashore.
[Exit music]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: White Sharks of the Northern Pacific
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2008 in which John Cannon interviews Taylor Chapple, a graduate student at the University of California-Davis who has been studying sharks at the mouth of Tomales Bay.
Credit / Author:
John Cannon / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: White Sharks of the Northern Pacific
[Intro music]
John Cannon: This is The Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for San Francisco Bay Area national parks. I'm John Cannon.
JC: There are worse places to live than the coast of Point Reyes National Seashore, 30 miles north of San Francisco, if you are a sea lion. [Sea lions can be heard barking in the background.] The cool waters support many species of fish, octopus, and squid that top the list of these noisy characters' favorite prey. And the weather is relatively nice, if you have a very layer of blubber and a fur coat that stays warm when it's wet. It's chilly at times, but rarely too hot There are lots of places to rest: sandy beaches, rocky outcroppings, and even the occasional weather buoy.
JC: But every fall, the waters around Point Reyes get a little more dangerous. From the open ocean, great white sharks make their way to the coast. They're on the hunt for food. And pinnipeds, the group that includes sea lions and their cousins, harbor seals and elephant seals, carry a nice ribbon of energy-packed blubber, making them an ideal source of nourishment for a hungry 1500-pound predator.
JC: I recently spent some time with a team of scientists studying sharks near the mouth of Tomales Bay at the northern tip of the park. I found out the great whites aren't always easy to find. And sometimes, they're preoccupied with other things. It was pretty clear that the first shark we saw wasn't at all concerned with us. So, we had to go after the shark.
Taylor Chapple: Um, yeah, so we just...we just had, basically, a pile of water that had some red color to it and I guess it was an attack.
JC: That's Taylor Chapple. He's a graduate student at the University of California-Davis and the group's leader here at Point Reyes. In four years studying sharks here most days each fall, this is the first evidence of an attack Chapple has seen out here. When the team first saw the blood in the water, they race the boat to the spot to find only a flash of fins in the bloody aftermath quickly dissipating in the churning water.
TC: [Unintelligible] was a sea lion 'cause the sea lions don’t float once they get chomped on. Elephant seals or harbor seals will float on the surface ‘cause they have a lot more blubber, but the sea lions, unfortunately, sink. So, we can’t really tell where the animal is [unintelligible] and it doesn’t bring the shark to the surface, obviously, if they don’t stay up.
JC: That's one of the challenges that all shark researchers run into. Unlike whales, sharks and other fish have gills and don't have to come to the surface to breathe. But, as this attack illustrates, it’s often where they come to find their air-breathing prey.
JC: So, to learn more about sharks, Chapple and his assistants have a few strategies to bring the sharks up from the depths.
TC: Sharks love Johnny Cash.
JC: While Cash’s crooning might not be the most effective or scientific tact, a sea lion-shaped decoy made of carpet stitched around the buoy usually does the trick. It sits bobbing in the water about 30 meters behind our stationary boat.
TC: And the idea is that we attract, you know, the shark to the surface just using that visual display. You know, we don't have to go through the whole process of chumming. We don’t do any chumming, or, you know, throwing blood or anything in the water.
JC: Instead, they rely on the shark's innate attraction to the decoy, an instinct hardwired into the shark's brain by millions of years of evolution. It's that instinct that tells the shark that this black object about four feet long with flippers and floating at the surface, just might make a tasty meal.
TC: So, once an animal comes up to the decoy, we shoot photos of it 'cause each of the dorsal fins of a white shark, the trailing edge of it is basically like a fingerprint so we can ID an individual start from that. So, we take photos of that and then reel the decoy towards the boat. As the decoy gets closer to the boat, we use an underwater video camera and take shots of the animal, trying to get sex and any more basically distinct markers on the animal. And once we feel like we have enough information that we can ID an individual, then we'll put a tag in.
JC: Those tags provide biologists with a host of information. When a tagged shark is in the area, a small receiver on the boat tips the team off to the fact that it is close, even if there's no evidence at the surface. And the receiver registers the tag's unique number, so Chapple can actually identify that individual shark. By correlating its number with photos and data from the past, you can tell how big that shark is, its sex, and the last time you saw it. Special satellite tags also provide scientists with information about the movements of sharks on a larger scale. These revelations allow Chapple and his colleagues to home in on the mysterious movements between areas like Point Reyes and places far out in the Pacific where many of these sharks aggregate. This effort involves researchers who study other species in the ecosystem with similar monitors placed at various locations along the coast.
TC: And what’s nice is that these monitors are present for a number of different species. So, they have these monitors for salmon, for sturgeon, for sharks, and for, you know, a whole list of other species. So, in a collaboration, we can all get information about our animals being at somebody else's array of stations. So, you don't...we don't necessarily have to put 5000 of these listening stations around. We can just collaborate with other researchers.
JC: The data collected by all of these researchers will be compiled into a much larger ten-year undertaking known as the Census of Marine Life. This project aims to catalog the quote diversity and abundance of life in the oceans unquote, looking piece by piece at this grand web of ocean life.
JC: For now, Chapple will continue researching the strand of that web he knows the best: the white sharks of the Northern Pacific. And right on cue, a sail-shaped dorsal fin appears next to the decoy. This shark, an untagged female just a few feet shorter than the boat we're on is inquisitive, but it's not the violent eruption of activity I'd expected. Chapple says this cautious behavior is more typical than the bite first, ask questions later approach that white sharks seem to be notorious for.
TC: You know, it's not this horrific attack scene like you, you know, you see in the movies or they put on the Discovery Channel. It's usually pretty...pretty mellow, like, she came up once just past the decoy, and then did a circle under water and then came up just kind of nudged it to check it out. Very rarely do you get them that they come up and they, you know, attack the decoy or even...even bite it. And it's pretty rare that that happens. It's usually really...uh...kind of a mellow interaction. I guess as mellow as you can be being 16 feet long.
JC: But mellow is not the word to describe the great white's effect on its environment, and us. As an apex predator, this species is a critical component of a functioning and healthy ocean ecosystem. The World Conservation Union has listed white sharks as vulnerable and they're likely impacted by climate change, overfishing, and other changes brought about by humankind. But the truth is: we know very few basic details about their lives—where they go to breed, the size of the population, and how long they live, to name just a few. So, we're just beginning to understand what must be done to protect this remarkable ocean hunter. These questions only make the research that Chapple and others have taken on that much more important as we begin to uncover the extent of our own interdependence with the world's oceans. For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center at Point Reyes National Seashore, I'm John Cannon.
[Exit music]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Paleotsunami at Point Reyes National Seashore
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2008 in which Kelly Reeves interviews Liam Reidy, a researcher looking for evidence at Abbotts Lagoon of a tsunami that may have washed ashore in 1700.
Credit / Author:
Kelly Reeves / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Paleotsunami at Point Reyes National Seashore
[Intro music]
Kelly Reeves: This is The Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks.
[music]
KR: Today, I join a researcher looking for evidence of a paleotsunami. He thinks that it might have sloshed onto the central California coast 300 years ago.
[The sound of someone using a manual air pump to inflate a raft.] Liam Reidy and his crew are on the rocky shore of Abbotts Lagoon and they're assembling a seaworthy craft of two leaky rafts, flimsy plyboards, and two-by-fours. Liam is the one who looks like a soccer player and his clothes are splattered by green and white paint. He's hunched over the raft, concentrating hard on screwing wood together. [The sound of an electric drill.] Had he been working on the same spot on January 26 in the year 1700, he might have looked up to see the ocean shrink backwards, and, moments later, surge right at him.
Liam Reidy: The whole thing would [Liam makes a loud shhhh noise] slosh into the marsh here and drain back down.
KR: Liam's talking about how the massive tsunami of 1700 would have hit Abbotts Lagoon. This tsunami was caused by one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history, an estimated magnitude 9.0.
LR: Tsunamis sweep up a lot of material from the bottom of the ocean as they approach shore, and much of that is just dumped on the landscape or dumped into a lagoon, and can be preserved as long as it isn’t eroded away.
KR: Liam plans to core the sediments of Abbotts Lagoon, today, and he hopes to find a layer of sand preserved between the mud. That layer may be evidence of a huge paleotsunami. No one has found evidence of this tsunami yet in central California, only in Washington and Oregon.
LR: It's kind of like the Rosetta Stone. We're hoping that something like this might propel you onto greatness.
KR: Liam says that with a wink. He likes to wink at you when he is kidding. This is a guy who says, "Think with your head; dance with your feet.” To fund his graduate work at U.C. Berkeley, he paints apartments part-time, but he’s not in a rush to finish his dissertation. Tenure and a cushy research position, that doesn't matter to him. He just wants to do the science.
LR: Okay, shipmates, let's move out.
KR: We shove off and use our stubby paddles to propel our craft toward the center of the lagoon. Liam wants to get away from the edges where the lagoon could have dried out in the past. He eyes a likely spot and drops the metal anchor.
[The sound of an anchor dropping through the surface of the water.]
[Unintelligible talk in the background.]
KR: Liam is like a forensic scientist. He seemed to gather the story of a crime from scattered clues. Liam finds the clues to the past in humble lagoon mud. If he finds a clean layer of sand and if he can date it close to 1700, that's it! That's likely the tsunami. We'll find out as they get ready to core.
[Unintelligible talk in the background and the sounds of banging tools.]
KR: They push down hard on a meter-long metal tube through a hole in the wooden platform.
[Unintelligible talk in the background.]
LR in the background: Pull up.
KR: And when they pull it back up, watery sand spills out the open end.
LR in the background: Hey, I've got to put it down on the deck like this.
KR: Liam bangs the sediment out on deck and and rubs a pinch between his fingers. It feels grainy.
[The sound of sandy fingers rubbing together and more unintelligible talk in the background.]
KR: Not only is sand too hard to core, but he won’t be able to see the signal of the tsunami in all this sand.
LR: [Unintelligible mumbling.]
KR: But he's not despondent for too long, even though one of the rafts is squishy, already, and we're liable to sink if we don’t stay us ourselves apart just right on the plyboards.
LR: That's an interesting [unintelligible]. Let's go check it out, folks.
Crew: Aye, aye, Capitan.
KR: Over there is a marsh. We can see, even from here that the plants are growing on dark mud. The wind has picked up, so we slowly paddle across wavelets toward the far end of the lagoon.
[Unintelligible talk in the background.]
KR: At the edge of the marsh, here, Liam finds an exposed cross-section of the sediment. The sediment here looks like rich, dark chocolate, full of organic material. If there was a tsunami, we'd find it here.
LR: But hang on here. Look at this. This sand is just sitting on top.
KR: Liam's slashing his paddle through swirls of caramel sediment that contrasts with the darker material.
LR: Look. Here's the thing. If this was a tsunami deposit, you’d see this, you know, sand lens that would probably be cleaner than that.
KR: Liam might yet find evidence of the 1700 tsunami in other lakes and lagoons, but not today. All in all, days in the field could go worse.
LR: When we were in Mexico last November around Thanksgiving attempting to core a crater lake and we actually came across a dead body.
KR: They left that mystery to the police authorities to solve. This is Kelly Reeves from the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center and Point Reyes National Seashore.
[Exit music]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Tracking the Coho Salmon
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2008 in which Kelly Reeves interviews Michael Reichmuth, a fresh water fisheries biologist at Point Reyes National Seashore about endangered salmon that reside in the streams that flow through the park.
Credit / Author:
Kelly Reeves / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Tracking the Coho Salmon
[Intro music]
Kelly Reeves: This is The Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. Today, I learn how biologists keep an eye on the endangered salmon that live a quiet life in the streams that flow through the parks.
Casey Del Real is standing knee-deep in a narrow creek. He's holding a metal rod into the water and he's about to shoot 175 volts of electric current through it.
Casey Del Real: If you stick your hands in the water, you will be shocked.
KR: Casey is a certified electrofisher. For him, electrofishing is not sitting back shocking the water and then calmly collecting hundreds of belly-up fish.
Unidentified fisheries biologists: There you go, there you go. Oh, a big one! Two big ones! Nice!
KR: It's a bit more vigorous.
[Unintelligible talk in the background.]
KR: When Casey stuns the fish, the shock only slows the fish to, maybe, a fast crawl. A flash of silver on the creek surface is all you see. Netters on either side of him stab the water to scoop up the fish. The netter plunks each fish into a white holding bucket.
Unidentified fisheries biologist: What did we get here?
Second unidentified fisheries biologist: Uh, it looks like one coho and a couple steelhead.
KR: Which one is the coho?
Second unidentified fisheries biologist: It is the smaller one right here.
KR: The coho is silver is big dots on its side. Casey grabs for it in the bucket. The coho's head sticks out from his fist about an inch. Like all newborns, its eyes seem a little too big for the rest of its body.
Unidentified fisheries biologist: Oh, oh, right there!
KR: Coho salmon are endangered in this area of California and steelhead trout are threatened. National Park Service biologists track these two types of fish, coho especially.
Michael Reichmuth: Coho would be a good indicator of the overall health the system. Not only does coho use the creeks, but also uses the estuary and all parts of the system, all the way from the tributaries all the way down to the mouth.
KR: That's Michael Reichmuth. He leads the crew that monitors stream fish in San Francisco Bay Area national parks.
MR: Coho have a three-year life cycle and they are born in the springtime and then they rear in the summertime.
KR: Right now, the fish are hanging out in the creek, gaining weight so that springtime next year they can make a break for the ocean. When they returned 18 months later, they spawn eggs and die. Mike and his crew keep track of all these life stages. They're in the creeks pretty much year-round.
MR: So, it's pretty intense.
KR: Park Service biologists have monitored stream fish since 1997. But, since the coho salmon have a three-year life cycle, biologists have so far only tracked six cohorts from birth to death. From so few cohorts, they can’t really say have the coho are doing. But Mike says they do know that more coho need to survive before they are no longer considered endangered.
MR: Ideally, we’d like to keep monitoring the populations until they get to recovery. To have a viable population you need around 2,000 spawners a year. So, we're actually well below what we would need to actually consider the fish stable. So, we have a lot to work for so I think we're going to be monitoring for quite a long time.
KR: Mike say that, in 2007, more coho one-year-olds survived the winter to swim to the ocean than normal, probably because few storms swept the coast this winter.
[Unintelligible talk in the background.]
KR: Mike measures and weighs all the fish netted today. At the end of the day, he pours the fish swimming the recovery pocket back into their home. Mike, Casey, and their crew will be electrofishing twice a week until October and then they'll start observing adults from the class of 2005 returned to their home creek to spawn. This is Kelly Reeves from the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center.
Supported by Point Reyes National Seashore Association
Support for The Natural Laboratory comes from Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA), whose mission is to work with the National Park Service to preserve and protect Point Reyes National Seashore for current and future generations. Each year, PRNSA funds vital projects across the park, including those explored in this podcast series. We couldn’t do this without them, and they couldn’t do it without support from generous donors. Visit their website to learn more.
Last updated: January 28, 2024
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