Corallines for Climate

Post by Scallop Research Intern, Bailey Moritz

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Branwen (left) and Cait (right) get ready to plunge into the cold Acadia waters in search of coralline algae.

Collaboration in science is really useful for carrying out successful research. Maybe you don’t live in the same place as what you are studying. This is the case for Dr. Branwen Williams, a researcher and professor for the Claremont Colleges in California, who is investigating coralline algae from its southern limit in Maine all the way up to the Arctic. Cait has collected samples for the past couple summers to send back to Branwen, but this year she made the cross-country trek to dive for the algae in Acadia National Park herself. The Schoodic Institute was generous enough to host us while we carried out a total of 5 dives to first find the algae, deploy a temperature probe at depth to monitor the algaes growing environment, and collect about 140 coralline samples to be shipped live back to the lab.

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Field work can require a lot of gear and talent to pack it all in.

A “modern paleo oceanographer using marine organisms as tools to look at environmental change,” Branwen is interested in the calcium carbonate skeleton of the domed, deep-pink algae that can be used as a proxy for reconstructing past climate. Tropical corals are commonly used to understand how climate has changed in equatorial regions, but less is known about paleo climate in the mid to north Atlantic region, an area particularly susceptible to modern climate change. Depending on the water temperature, the algae will substitute Mg for Ca when building its carbonate skeleton. The Mg/Ca ratio serves as a proxy for the temperature of the ocean when the algae were growing. Similarly, analyzing boron isotopes provide insight into past pH conditions. The coralline algae can be 100’s of years old and Branwen hopes to reconstruct a record of ocean conditions back to the 1700’s.

Coralline algae, which form a crust-like cover over anything from rocks to mussel shells, may be threatened by warming waters as they grow best in the colder climes. This could take an ecological toll, as they are substantial habitat builders in more northern latitudes. We’re excited to hear what Branwen and her colleagues discover from these little corallines! The more we understand about how climate change is impacting marine creatures, the better we can prepare ourselves and our local environment.

Underwater, Where it's Dry

Post by Scallop Research Intern, Bailey Moritz

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When you’re in a tropical place like the Caribbean, there’s nothing more refreshing than taking a dip in the sun-warmed, 80 degree water. But for those of us doing underwater research in Maine, where even summer water temperatures don’t typically exceed 60 degrees, submerging yourself in the water can be somewhat less enjoyable. That’s where dry suits come in. Available in a variety of materials, they are essentially like a loose, thick bag worn over a layer of cozy fleece. Throughout the dive, you add air to the suit both to adjust your buoyancy and to keep you warm. Your body heats up the air that gets trapped in the undergarment and acts as insulation. The air moves around in the suit, eventually venting from a valve on the shoulder when needed. Properly adjusted neck and wrist seals are critical so that the suit doesn’t leak.

Dry suits allow a diver to keep diving into the winter and early spring when water temperatures and surface conditions would be really treacherous to experience in a wet suit. Dives can also be longer in cold water because you aren’t experiencing the direct cold of the frigid water. This makes dry suit diving a good alternative for commercial fishermen diving for scallops or urchins here in Maine. And if you ever have the desire to dive in the Arctic, a dry suit is a must!

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In order to add to our diving repertoire, Cait and I just completed a dry suit certification with Aqua Academy in Portland. Our instructor Jim Dock took us to Kettle Cove State Park for our first dry suit experience. Beautiful and varied kelp swayed in the shallow current, revealing lobster, hermit crabs, and several small rock fish. Tiny periwinkles clutched to eelgrass as we made our way out with the tide. Other than being a bit more difficult to remain neutrally buoyant at first, the suits worked great. And its hard to describe the unnatural feeling of the fuzzy fleece reminding you that even 20 ft below the surface, you aren’t at all wet! Of course, as we maneuvered out of the suits and packed up gear on shore, it started to rain. So much for staying totally dry!

Learning from Shells

Post by Scallop Research Intern, Bailey Moritz

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Toni Chute and I start the task of aging the first scallop of several boxes of scallop shells

Bustling with research vessels and ocean scientists, Woods Hole, MA is a fitting location for the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, located right on the water. Toni Chute, one of their scientists specializing in all things scallops, was generous enough to give Cait and I a run-down on how to determine the growth of individual scallops based on their shells. Cait will be using these data as part of the collaborative scallop research project she is coordinating. Scallop shells are formed from calcium carbonate that the shellfish precipitates over the course of its lifetime. Depending on what region of the ocean it grew in, pigments vary, from a rich pink to deeper purple to the rusty red color seen on most scallops here in Maine. The shell-building material is laid down during a period of the year when conditions, such as temperature and food availability, are favorable. Then growth stops for awhile. This pattern creates rings, or visible line markings on the shells surface, that indicate each year of growth the scallop has undergone. By measuring the change in height between rings, you can elucidate how much the scallop grew from year to year. But be careful! As we learned, false “rings” can form if the shell cracked, or was damaged slipping through the large rings of scallop dragging nets when they were still below legal harvest size.

     Measuring a shell with each of the  
      growth rings marked off in pencil.

Determining growth rings can be a tricky task. The surface of some shells have a heavy cover of barnacles and limpets that make it difficult to see the patterns. Often times you can turn to slight changes in color to pin-point the rings, and getting the shell wet and holding it up to the light helps to bring that trait out. We practiced on a number of our shells collected from Muscle Ridge and were still somewhat hesitant in distinguishing between growth rings and cracks. But Toni reassured us that familiarizing ourselves with the shells patterns makes finding rings easier. It’s also perfectly alright to eliminate a shell from your sample if you’re finding it’s just too difficult to tell where the annual growth rings are. So, next time you come across a scallop shell on the beach or at the market, try your hand at finding the growth rings and you’ll be told a story about the creatures path from small spat to adulthood. 

Monitoring Phenology on Hurricane Island

Post by Chloe Tremper, Science Educator

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Newly broken leaves on the Horse chestnut. Taken May 15, 2015 

Since arriving on Hurricane earlier this month, I have been focusing on the phenology, or what I like to call the FUNology, of Hurricane Island.  Phenology is the study of the timing of events in the growth and life cycles of plants and animals.  When we monitor phenology, we are observing and recording the seasonal changes that occur in the natural world. In this day and age, when climate change is at the forefront of the scientific community, it is becoming more and more important to regularly record changes because overtime those data can unveil larger trends like flowers blooming a day earlier each year or birds arriving weeks earlier than they did in the past.  While it may not sound like the most exciting thing to do, monitoring the phenological changes happening around us opens up an entire new world of discovery and brings awareness to how climate change is impacting our own backyards.

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First blooms on the Horse chestnut, taken June 3, 2015

Last year, we established four phenology monitoring sites on the island.  One in the flywheel field, one near the Ice Pond, one at Gibbon’s Point, and one by the lab.  At each site we have designated plants that we go to regularly and record observations for.  The species we monitor include trees such as red spruce, balsam fir, apple, and quaking aspens; shrubs like red-berried elderberry, snowberry, lilac, and beach rose; and wildflowers including orange hawkweed, starflower, beach pea, and Canada mayflower.  Some of the key phenological changes we monitor in plants are when leaf buds break, when flowers bloom, when fruits are produced, and when leaves begin to fall off.

This year, we have made some tweaks to improve our phenology monitoring, and in order to have time to make more frequent observations at the other sites, I decided to eliminate the flywheel monitoring site.  In addition to adding a few new plants, we have also started monitoring the phenological changes of birds on the island.  As you probably know, many of the birds that call Hurricane home during the summer migrate south for the winter.  By going out every few days to each phenology site, identifying and counting birds heard or seen nearby, and recording behavioral observations we get a better idea of how bird populations fluctuate throughout the seasons – what species arrive when, when chicks begin to fledge, when species leave for the season, etc. 

By collecting the same data every year on the same individual plants and monitoring birds at the same spots, over time we will have a huge database of phenological information that we can use to monitor long term changes in the life cycles of plants and animals on Hurricane.

All of the phenology observations we collect are entered on Nature’s Notebook, an online database of phenological changes across the United States.   Data entered onto this website is also used by scientists around the globe for phenology research.  Nature's Notebook has a great app available for iPhones and Androids, as well as a website, where you can start your own phenology monitoring sites or trails.  So get out there and enjoy this beautiful world we live in while also collecting valuable data to help scientists!

Ahh-choo!

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new needle growth, and immature female seed cones on a white spruce bough

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Male pollen cones from a white spruce

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Immature female seed cones on a white spruce

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pollen sometimes blows out onto the ocean

While I was working in the lab on Hurricane this past week, I spied a beautiful little Northern Parula (Setophaga americana) foraging and darting in between the bough's of a nearby White Spruce (Picea glauca) tree. Every time the warbler emerged, it was followed by a cloud of yellow pollen. While many of the flowering plants (angiosperms) on Hurricane Island have yet to bloom, this is the season where conifers or evergreens (gymnosperms) are releasing pollen, and dusting everything in sight. 

Hurricane Island has three conifers that dominate the landscape: red spruce, white spruce, and balsam fir. At first glance, all of these evergreens might be hard to tell apart. I always remember the difference with the following mnemonic:  the "sharp, square, spruce" and the "flat, friendly, fir." Spruce tree needles are square and can be rolled across the palm of your hand, but fir needles have just two sides. Spruce needles are also shorter and tend to grow forward from the stem rather than perpendicular to the stem like balsam fir, which means that if you give a spruce tree a handshake it feels a lot more prickly or sharp. The other major difference between spruce and fir trees is that spruce cones grow up from the branches and fir cones grow down from the branches. 

But back to the pollen. For a very short period of time, the evergreens on Hurricane form a different cone in addition to the large, scaly, female seed cones that you are probably familiar with. Male pollen cones are much smaller (just about 1/2 inch long), and last for just a few days. Their purpose is to release pollen and fertilize the female seed cones before they fall off the tree. 

Along with releasing pollen, Hurricane's evergreens are also in the process of developing new needles which form on the tips of each branch and stay a lighter green color well into summer. After this flurry of activity in the spring, the conifers will not be changing much except for the newly fertilized female seed cones. These will continue to grow and develop for several years before releasing the seeds. 

One part of the research that we do on Hurricane is to monitor the phenology, or timing, of life cycle events in the plants and birds on the island. We use Nature's Notebook to record data on when events like new needle growth and the presence of pollen cones happen to the conifers on the island so that we can compare the timing of these events to other parts of Maine or the US. Other scientists can also create scientific models from these data to predict the impacts of climate change on the timing of when these events happen, which can also help us understand other things like changes in Maine's growing season.

Take a look around you at your home! Notice any new things blooming or growing? Have the conifers already released their pollen?