by Rich Ross | May 14, 2014 | Events, Fish, Science
There are two Academy groups currently in the Philippines for the 2014 Biodiversity Expedition: one from Research, and the other from the Aquarium. Though we’re staying at different locations, we collaborate when we can, like tonight. It all started with a 90-minute night dive at Anilao Pier to try to collect a Bobbitt worm—a creature that lives in the sand, has jaws like a bear trap, and might be several meters long. It shoots up with lightning speed to catch fish and other animals, yanking them down into the muck like something out of a nightmare. In the 1990s, Academy Senior Curator Terry Gosliner named the Bobbitt worm after Lorena Bobbitt (and her legendary attack on her husband), and Academy crews have been trying to collect this animal both for display and for our preserved collection ever since. One look at the photo shows you why catching this animal isn’t easy, but take a look at this video for an even better demonstration. Tonight’s effort was unsuccessful, though I did get my hand on one of the worms—yes, my hand. My wife is less than thrilled about these attempts, but she understands that we have to do what we have to do for science. More efforts are planned, and hopefully there will be success. Hopefully. After the worm hunt, there was a party—a party that started without us. Apparently it began with a whole roast pig (enjoyed by both Research and Aquarium Staff), but by the time the worm hunters arrived, things had changed drastically. Let’s just say that while there was still much fun to be had, there wasn’t much pig. Expeditions like this are an amazing amount of work, similar to running a triathlon. Instead of the events being swimming, running, and biking, the events are collection, processing, and animal care. The endurance needed to put out so much energy every single day is huge, but it’s also incredibly fulfilling when everything’s going well. Tonight’s party was a short break from the draining but rewarding work of the expedition … and the only picture I can find of the event is this one of me gnawing on a pig’s head. Ah, science—we love you. —Rich Ross, Aquatic Biologist by Rich Ross | May 12, 2014 | Corals, Equipment, Fish, Science
Checking in for a 14-hour flight is always a good time. Checking in for a 14-hour flight with 11 items (three suitcases, five Action Packers, two bags, and Steinhart Director Bart Shepherd’s guitar) between three people is an amazingly good time. We started planning for this expedition in earnest five weeks ago, and considerable effort went into making sure our bags were under size and weight limits—a not insignificant task when equipment needed for the expedition includes Bobbit-worm catching devices, a series of newly designed hyperbaric chambers (for decompressing fish hand-collected below 300 feet), a ton of SCUBA and rebreather gear, and myriad other critical items needed to collect and ship live fish and corals from the Philippines back to Golden Gate Park. As it turned out, our packing efforts were worth the time we put into them, as all of our luggage was deemed to be within weight limits. Sadly, though, there was one piece of luggage that stayed in San Francisco because it couldn’t be hand-carried onto the plane, and we were scared it wouldn’t make it through the checked baggage experience. Oh guitar, we will miss you. The first aquarium team arrived safely at the Anilao Beach Club and enjoyed a delicious breakfast overlooking the Verde Island Passage. As soon as our luggage (which arrived in Manila in great shape, but is currently stuck in traffic) arrives on-site we’ll begin setting up scuba gear and animal holding. Then, the real work begins. —Rich Ross, Aquatic Biologist by Reef To Rainforest | Mar 14, 2014 | Conservation, Fish, Science
How close are we? “This Close”! It occurred to me that sometimes we use the phrase “this close” in idle conversation, often holding up our fingers perhaps a centimeter apart, as if to give an actual indication of dimension when what we’re really trying to convey is is not something so physically concrete. Instead, we’re talking about missing the mark by “that much”, 9/10ths of the way, the slimmest of margins. We’re talking about a cry from the back seat, demanding to know “are we there yet?” with 10 minutes left on the car ride. In other words, “This Close” might be something best summed up as simply a goal not met, an accomplishment narrowly avoided, also known as hearbreaking disappointment, but on the edge of greatness all the same. Or my personal favorite twist on a classic phrase, “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” (yes you read that correctly)! The recent butterflyfish larviculture accomplishments by Frank Baensch & the Hawaii Larval Fish Project are nothing short of groundbreaking, but a captive-bred Butterflyfish is not here just yet. by Fused Jaw | Mar 5, 2014 | Conservation, Fish, Science, Seahorses
Hippocampus mohnikei found during Thailand survey. My name is Lindsay and I’m a PhD candidate and researcher with Project Seahorse. I study seahorses in their natural habitat to understand threats to seahorses and ultimately aid in conservation efforts. I’m currently working in Thailand and wanted to share a little bit about my current research. Last year I spent eight months in Thailand gathering baseline information on seahorse populations along the Andaman (western) coast. The first month I spent building relationships with my new Thai partners and training my research assistants. In the three months that followed, I searched for seahorses by diving and snorkeling at various locations to determine several ideal locations for future research. The results of our intensive searches for seahorses yielded only eight individuals, an unexpectedly low number for the area surveyed. On a positive note, two of these individuals were sightings of a seahorse species never before seen on the Andaman coast; the Japanese Seahorse Hippocampus mohnikei. This was a very exciting discovery – and I’m in the final stages of submitting a paper discussing the increase in range of this species. Hippocampus mohnikei among seagrass. The overall low numbers of seahorses found in our initial survey lead me to question why we found so few seahorses. Was it because we were surveying in the wrong habitats? Using inappropriate methods (Even though they had worked elsewhere)? Or was there so much fishing, and therefore accidental capture of seahorses in fishing gear, there were few seahorses remaining in the areas surveyed? Understanding how to answer these questions has now become the central question to my PhD research. Not to be discouraged, I spent the next four months interviewing fishermen, asking for their input on how often they catch seahorses, what habitats they live in, and creating maps where seahorses can are found. With this information, I have been able to identify many locations on the Andaman coast where fishers report high occurrences of seahorses. I’m now starting my second field season, in which I will test the efficiency of different underwater sampling methods. By searching in areas where divers and fishers have reported sighting seahorses, I can evaluate what conditions increase the likelihood of finding seahorses as well as determine which methods are the best for sampling. Hippocampus trimaculatus found during survey. By combining the data from fishers regarding the incidental capture rate of seahorses along side the mapping of fishing grounds; I will now be able to estimate how many seahorses are captured by fishers each year. This finally allows me to assess if there is a link between fishing and low numbers of seahorses. I’ve just returned to Thailand and have started my second year of research (diving) this week. Our first site is a place in Phuket called Kata Beach – where several dive instructors have reported constant seahorse sightings over the past six months. We’ve been diving here for a week so far and have seen six seahorses – mostly Hippocampus kuda and Hippocampus spinosissimus! Looks like this season is off to a good start. Thanks again to everyone who helped support my research last year. It was an exciting and challenging year and I’m looking forward to more seahorse adventures in 2014. Lindsay is raising funds to support her assistant’s salary. Assistants are the unsung heroes of conservation research and dedicated field assistants are priceless. They willingly put up with the demands of field research – long hours, remote locations, and physical exhaustion with little financial reward. Working in a foreign country can challenging; a local assistant knows his or her community, and will help build bridges between researchers and their communities. Donate ifyou can, and please share the link:https://experiment.com/projects/searching-for-seahorses-sustainability This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2014 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Conservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. by Reef To Rainforest | May 14, 2013 | Fish, Invertebrates, Too Cute
Whelks, Anemones, and Sea Urchins I am back to continue with my posting after an unexpected absence due to bodily self-decomposition. A word to the wise, don’t get old. Or if you do, don’t let your body know. It might just not like the process. Anyway, on with my tales from the slimy lagoon… In an earlier discussion, I mentioned that aeons ago I saw large female whelks depositing egg capsule masses on one of my research sorties to “my” intertidal study site near Homer, Alaska. I found this to be very interesting, at the time I was casting around for some research to do, and here a potential easily-done project dropped into my lap. Normally I don’t trust to luck, but I wasn’t about to overtly examine the buccal anatomy of this presentation equine. I was able to identify the animals, but, at that time, there was no record of them depositing egg capsules in a mass or otherwise. In point of fact, virtually nothing was known about the natural history of these beautiful whelks, an artifact of being found in an out-of-the-way place where the accumulated knowledge of such critters was minimal. In fact the only reason I knew the whelks were at this area was that I had taken some students down to the site the previous autumn on a class field trip. Neptunea pribiloffensis whelks on the study beach. The substrate is sandstone, and the “fuzzy” clumps are masses of a feather duster worm which is one of the common prey of the whelks. Figuring that the presence of essentially unknown animals that I was interested in learning about would lead to an easy publication, the following spring I decided to do a little bit of basic research on the snails, and went down to the site to make some field observations as well as to collect a few animals for gut analyses. Having examined some other Neptunea, including some specimens for this species, I knew I had to look at the gut contents to determine what they were eating rather than simply examining their feces, which was a technique I had perfected for some other snails for my doctoral research. Fecal analysis is a much preferred technique when compared to gut analysis, as the animal is not harmed in the process. However, fecal analyses require that the animal’s foods leave some indigestible and identifiable trace in all the feces, and that was not the case with these animals. They could eat a wide variety of things, including carrion and animals possessing no hard parts at all, as well as some polychaete worms having chaetae, which would be passed through the gut undigested. It was during a trip for the collection of some specimens for the dietary study, that I noticed the ovipositing females. Several female Neptunea pribiloffensis depositing egg capsule masses near a large sea anemone. Obviously, this was an immediate serendipitous chance for some more and different research. As with every other aspect of Neptunea pribiloffensis life, virtually no aspects of their reproduction were known. I had budgeted a couple of days of “research” time on the beach. I figured I would need about fifteen minutes to collect all the animals I needed for the gut content work, but the site was beautiful and in the spring the weather was often gorgeous. I had been told that when the Russians owned Alaska, their anecdotal name for the Homer region was “летом земля or Summer land” for the nice climate- a distinct contrast to effectively everywhere else in the region. Consequently, I truly considered it a terrible hardship to have to make the four or five hour drive to Homer to do field work. Given how low the tides needed to be for my research, the field work time each day didn’t amount to much time being spent, which meant my assistants and I had plenty of time to work up our samples in the motel we stayed in while working there. After wandering around the study area on the couple of days I had budgeted for that research, for a total of maybe five hours of field work time. I came away from the site with some facts in hand. First, there were a number of old egg capsule masses in the area. Second, the new egg capsule masses were being deposited near the old ones. Third, most egg capsule masses were being deposited near individuals of large sea anemone, Urticina grebelnyi, referred to at the time as Tealia crassicornis. Egg capsule masses near a large sea anemone. Note the whelk to the upper right. And my experimental marker is indicated by the arrow. A couple of fundamental questions immediately presented themselves. Is there any benefit for the whelk to place its egg capsule masses near the anemones? Likewise, is there any benefit for the anemone to have a whelk egg capsule mass near it? Today, it seems obvious that the answer to either or both of these questions would almost certainly be yes, but in the late 1970s very little was known about boreal marine symbioses, in general, and specifically interactions between spawning whelks and anything, let alone anemones. At the time, there were no hard data either supporting or rejecting a hypothesis of benefit to either party for such an interaction. And here I was, standing plumb in the middle of a wonderful opportunity in a beautiful area with the chance to address this question. So!!! Boy-Scientist, at the ready! I grabbed some buckets, my camera, my voice-activated tape recorder, a meter-stick, and kazango! I was research bound! Obviously, I didn’t go into this situation as a naïve biologist. I had just spent several years working at a laboratory where many researchers were studying a wide variety of marine research topics. As one might expect, there was a lot of cross-pollination of information and ideas. For example, one of my acquaintances during that time was completing the scientific description of one of the larger, previously unknown, sea anemones from that region. He told me that it would be called “Tealia piscivora”, a name meaning “the fish-eating Tealia”, an apt name because specimens had been found with their gut cavity full of fish; herring, as a matter of fact. Those data told me that the nematocysts of a sea anemone closely related to the one I was seeing in Alaska could pack a really potent sting. And, therefore, the anemones might well be able to protect the snails’ developing progeny. Two egg capsules (white arrows) near a protective anemone are intact. The green arrow indicates my experimental marker. Also, I knew from other researchers that individuals of the sea urchin species, Strongylocentrotus franciscanus, would eat the egg capsules of other whelks, and that those whelks protected their spawn by attacking any urchins that approached their egg capsules. Given that the “green sea urchin” Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis was common in this Alaskan intertidal habitat, not only was it was possible, indeed, it was likely, that it would eat the egg capsules and the eggs they contained if given the opportunity. An egg mass that is about a year old. The top has been eaten off by sea urchins. My working hypothesis was that the snail obtained some benefit from depositing its egg capsules near the sea anemone. I anticipated that I would find that the sea anemone protected the egg capsules from predation by the sea urchin, and perhaps other predators as well. I thought it was also likely that the sea anemone would obtain some benefit from the situation; potentially it could benefit by eating sea urchins that would be attracted to or eating the snail eggs. I immediately set about collecting some animals and egg capsule masses, and setting up some experiments both in the laboratory and in the field. Some of the experiments were long-term, running about a year in the field and lab, others were of shorter duration. When I was finished with all of the work, I thought would be able to answer many of the questions necessary to be able to assess the hypotheses. An experimental egg capsular mass is completely gone after the anemone’s removal. All that is left is my marking washer. This Snail Has Babysitters!! I found a series of statistically significant results. First, the snails were more likely to deposit their egg capsular masses near the sea anemones. It takes about a year before the snails hatch from the capsular masses. At hatching times the capsular masses near sea anemones were bigger, had more capsules remaining in them, and fledged more juveniles than those capsular masses a short distance away from the anemones. The anemones could deter predation on the egg capsule masses in the laboratory experiments and certainly appeared to do so in the field. My lab tests showed that the anemones can protect the capsular masses from the sea urchin. Finally, the sea anemones can eat the sea urchins. In the lab tests and field observations indicate the major cause of capsular mortality is urchin predation. Lab and field experiments and observations support the hypothesis that the anemone babysitter protects the capsular masses from predation by urchins by eating the approaching urchins. Newly hatched whelks fresh out of the capsule. All six came from one capsule. And each “corncob” like mass would average about 50 capsules. The scale is mm. This neat little series of interactions started me down the road investigating a number of significantly more interesting anemone interactions that just happen to have some of the most beautiful animals in the world as the actors in the various plays. More on that in the near future. Reference: Shimek, R. L. 1981. Neptunea pribiloffensis (Dall, 1919) and Tealia crassicornis (Müller, 1776), On a snail’s use of babysitters. The Veliger. 24:62-66.
