winter in the intertidal

I was out in the sub-freezing weather in Rhode Island this weekend to set up succession plots and settlement plates to measure barnacle recruitment, which has already begun! (See a slideshow of last year's recruits here.) There's nothing like seawater freezing on your double-gloved hands to make you feel alive!

I expected the rocky intertidal fauna that had the option to ride out the extreme cold buried in the mud, but I was surprised to see many of the mobile critters out and about during the extreme low tides (-0.5 m or -1.6 ft, nearly 0.5 m lower than the predicted low tide, probably due to wind). Seastars were remarkably abundant, and I also saw a lady crab, Ovalipes ocellatus, a swimming crab that I rarely find in the intertidal (the Kunkel lab at UMass Amherst has a good lady crab photo here).

SEASTAR TRAPPED IN ICE IN THE HIGH INTERTIDAL


BARNACLES ENCASED IN ICE

clam seed

I took a trip to the newly expanded shellfish hatchery at Roger Williams University over the Labor Day weekend. Karin Tammi, the hatchery manager, gave me a tour and tutorial on how to spawn, settle, and grow oysters and quahogs, from larvae to spat (newly metamorphosed bivalves) to juvenile and reproductive adult. (FYI, I have a new fascination with bivalves, and, if you frequent maritima, you're sure to hear more.)

It's hard to avoid an interest in quahogs living in Little Rhody, the Ocean State, home to one of the most productive quahog fisheries in the country (8% of the national market share in 1997, down from 25% in 1985, Source: Rice et al. 2000). You can find families digging seaside at many public access beaches, and any real Rhody has their favorite quahogging spots and techniques, though they may not be willing to share these secrets.

You might be surprised to find out that the quahog fishery is supplemented in several ways. Quahogs are moved from the Providence River, where water quality is poor, to areas in Narragansett Bay where water quality is better. Collected quahogs have also been used to found spawner sanctuaries in grounds closed to shellfishing. Additionally, hatchery reared juveniles are added, or seeded, in areas, notably Greenwich Bay, where I collected the quahog below. You can see a distinct color change in the shell indicating a change in the environmental conditions where it was living (e.g. from a hatchery to the Bay).

From maritima

all washed up, reproductively

From maritima

While walking to our field site at Mt. Hope Farm in Bristol, RI on Friday, we found this jelly-like egg mass washed up in the high intertidal. I don't know if it is indeed an egg mass or what type of organism it belongs to. The photos capture it fairly well - it was nearly two feet in diameter, and made of many translucent, nodular strings. Anyone have any ideas?

From maritima

Spring means unkempt lawns

As any New Englander will tell you, spring is much better after a long winter. Everything comes back to life, and that includes the weeds. I love lawns this time of year, before people rouse their lawnmowers. The weeds grow tall and in rosettes, and flower and seed - a suburban tallgrass prairie. A few photos from my pedestrian commute:

Bizarro Fungus

When my friend Andrew Altieri pointed out this bizarro structure in the cedar trees at Hundred Acre Cove in Barrington, RI, we had trouble even identifying it to the plant or animal kingdom. Prof. Doug Morse, at Brown, who has helped me identify strange maritima creatures in the past, helped us place it - in the Fungi kingdom...We should have guessed it. Fungi is a happy home for many weirdos that have never fit neatly into plant or animal designations.

Our mystery organism is a cedar apple rust, Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae, a fungus that spends part of its life cycle in red cedars, and the other half in apple or crab apple trees, to which it does much more damage. This time of year, during the spring rains, the rust's woody galls on cedar branches begin producing these bright orange telial horns which contain the spores that will infect young apple leaves later this growing season. You can see more info on the cedar apple rust, found at least as far as Texas, here and download a fact sheet here.

like sesame seeds in a sandbox

Field season has not yet truly begun here in New England (we're still anxiously awaiting budburst!), but I have been spending some time in the field, investigating barnacle recruitment in Narragansett Bay. Here, the intertidal barnacle Semibalanus balanoides reproduces in the fall and broods its larvae until the winter. Larvae are released in January and develop in the water column for about a month and begin to settle in February and March. They settle as cyprids, a larval stage that looks an awful lot like a sesame seed (see photos). In the cyprid stage, the barnacles decide where on the shore to settle and attach, based on chemical cues from adult barnacles and surface texture. This is a critical moment in a barnacle's life - after metamorphosis, it will be stuck in the same place for the rest of its sessile adult life.

Click here for full size photos.

pollen slick

Observed: June 9, 2008

Out and about in Narragansett Bay, RI, last summer, near a field site on Hope Island, Joey Bernhardt (pictured below) and I spotted what looked like a film of pollution on the surface of the water (see photos). Upon closer inspection, the material looked organic. I can't be completely sure (no samples were taken), but I think it was a slick of pollen, taken from the shoreline by the tide. Many types of pollen are the same shade of yellow. I wonder if it came from synchronized flowering of a single high-pollen-producing species, or if it is the result of a high tide carrying off a mix of pollen from the shoreline. In the second week of June, we were coming off a spring tide series, one of the largest of the year, and it is an active flowering time in the area. Seen something similar?

From Blogger Pictures