Many animals in the ocean have found ways to hide or protect themselves from predators. Some defenses include matching yourself to your surroundings to camouflage, and hiding during the day when predators are active and coming out at night instead. Here we see examples of evolving a skeleton on the outside of your body (called an exoskeleton) or using stinging tentacles to help protect yourself from hungry predators, like fish or people!
It’s relatively easy to orient yourself back to Moss Landing from anywhere in Monterey Bay, as long as you can catch a clear glimpse of our iconic smoke stacks. MLML students can take in this unique ocean-side view of the town when heading out to sea on class research cruises. Looks like the Drop-In has the start of a photographic study on the many faces of the Moss Landing smoke stacks!
As the school year winds to a close, Moss Landing students get ready to unleash their post-finals jubilation on the time-honored Lab Olympics. These contestants from last year have survived a pie-eating contest, one of may challenges facing the would-be Lab Olympic champion. This year’s event is approaching next week – what daring feats of skill will come to pass? Stay tuned to find out!
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
The fishing practice of bottom-trawling, which involves dragging a weighted net across the seafloor to scoop up deep-dwelling fish, has some obvious downsides: the net often indiscriminately collects everything else in its path. Despite its potential destructive consequences to marine habitats, scientists sometimes use trawling on a small scale as a collection method, and to survey what animals are present in deep areas that are otherwise hard to access.
This haul from a government fishing survey near southern California yielded a bonanza of basket stars, a type of brittle star with many branching arms. You can also spot rockfishes, urchins, crabs and sponges amongst the catch. Though trawling may clear a swath of the seafloor, there are few other means to collect deep-sea animals to inspect an study them. Advances in underwater robotic technology provide one avenue for less destructive studies.
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
This bright white crustacean is a squat lobster pulled from the deep during a government fishing survey in southern California. Squat lobsters aren’t actually lobsters at all (they’re more closely related to porcelain crabs and hermit crabs), and are much smaller than lobsters (note my finger in the photo below). Their tucked-under abdomens and extended claws always make me imagine them doing some kind of yoga pose. Flipping this one over indicated that it (or rather, she!) was closely guarding a clutch of bright red eggs. Holding them close is probably a good idea – they look like they’d make a tasty snack for some predator swimming by!
by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab
Sea slugs, or nudibranchs, are some of my favorite marine animals. While an undergraduate at UC Davis, I participated in the awesome summer program at Bodega Marine Laboratory and did a research project on these sponge-eating squishies. I spent many an early morning on hands and knees in the rocky intertidal zone, searching for nuidbranchs to use in my experiment (I was trying to test their movement in response to chemical cues from their sponge prey). Despite being bright yellow, these buggers can be hard to find, and I often had my boots filled with water from trying to nab them in hard-to-reach crevices.
But occasionally a nudibranch will turn up in an unexpected place, like on a fishing boat! This little guy got taken for a ride when snagged by an angler’s hook during marine protected area monitoring surveys conducted by the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program. Though I thought it was quite the catch, we were really after things like rockfishes, so we released it without a tag. The poor thing had probably experienced enough trauma for one day!
Congratulations to Phycology Lab student Paul Tompkins, who will be defending his thesis this Tursday, May 19th, at noon. Paul’s thesis is entitled “Distribution, Growth, and Disturbance of Catalina Island Rhodoliths.” What’s a rhodolith, you ask? If you can’t come hear the scoop on Thursday, check out these photos belows, or browse around the Drop-In:
Unlike most seaweeds, rhodoliths are algae that have a hard skeleton made out of calcium carbonate. The structure of a rhodolith bed creates a habitat for many types of organisms, like a mini coral reef or kelp forest. Beds like the one shown below were the subject of Paul’s thesis.
Hook-and-line monitoring surveys of central California’s new Marine Protected Areas yield catches mostly of different species of rockfishes, but every once in a while we reel in a surprise. Ichthyology student Katie Schmidt shows off a King Salmon (the only one of the whole survey!) caught at Año Nuevo in 2009 during a survey by the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program. We released the fish, despite the hungry looks of Captain Tom Mattusch, who is possibly envisioning some fillets served with a lemon wedge…
Congratulations to Ichthyology student Jon Walsh, who recently defended his thesis: “Habitat Use of Striped Bass (Morone saxatilis), estimated from otolith microchemistry, in the San Francisco Estuary, and its effect on total mercury and heavy metal body burden upon capture.”
Jon used the chemical composition of otoliths, or fish ear bones, to track where a fish had traveled throughout its lifetime in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. He also looked at heavy metal contamination in the fish fillets and found high levels of mercury had accumulated in the fish. Luckily, this striped bass cake creation by Diane Haas is mercury free!
Here is a sped-up video for anyone who missed the MLML Open House or part of the Open House. Be careful and buckle up as you will be traveling at intense speeds on this virtual tour! Hope to see you all next year!