Science for Everyone

Updates from the Field Naturalist

Post by Ben Lemmond, UVM Field Naturalist

Just for a moment, rewind your mental tape back late March of of this year: that time when everybody starts talking about spring (because, you know, the equinox and all) but, if you live in New England, the actual idea of anything turning green anytime soon seems pretty far-fetched. It’s that magical time of year when the petrified dog poop and cigarette butts of last Fall start to emerge from underneath the ash-colored snow on city sidewalks, not to be covered up by anything green for another two months. Poet and author Ranier Maria Rilke once said “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Think back to early spring. Even in that grey season, with the gears of spring still stuck in neutral, what big moments were setting the stage so that they unfold as soon as things warmed up?

It was around this time of year when I found out that I would be working with the Hurricane Island Foundation for my master’s project, though I hadn’t a clue what exactly that would mean. Being a graduate student, I’ve learned, means constantly doing things you feel wildly unprepared to do. It’s a special kind of limbo, one where you’re constantly travelling between paradoxical versions of yourself: student and teacher, professional and newbie, expert and idiot savant. This way of life almost guarantees surprises, since everything moves too quickly for any part of it to become familiar. Suddenly I am standing in front of a lab room full of college sophomores, explaining how to pipette solutions through a channel slide with a thin slice of rabbit psoas muscle mounted on it, in the hopes of making it twitch with the right combination of solutions. In what strange spring was that vision of myself planted?

Field fashion

I’ve now been on Hurricane for four full weeks, conducting an initial ecological survey and developing my own coarse-filter map of general landscape and vegetation patterns here. This means that I’ve been spending most of my time wandering through the island with a canvas bag full of nature-nerd paraphernalia: field guides, a GPS, binoculars, a hand lens, plants to be pressed, many of these items (except the plants) cycling through my free hands and pockets or slung around my neck, depending on the terrain and the amount of backup I needed to make my way knowledgeably through it. I have to admit, this task has been more challenging than I expected, mostly because the better I feel I understand the plant communities here, the more fragmented, temporary, and in transition they appear to me.

The flip side of this apparent chaos is that every day in the field is another opportunity to be surprised. The other day, I found the island’s one and only eastern white pine next to the island’s one and only red maple on a hillside of an obscure outwash I decided to explore on a whim, after my field foray was officially over for the day. White pines and hardwoods certainly used to be a presence on Maine islands, but were almost entirely cleared for shipbuilding or lumber by the mid-1800s. On a 125-acre island where many of the spruce are ageing out, the presence of these two species is significant, even though I don’t know exactly what to make of it yet.

An interesting facet of the island is that, species-wise, there are many of these lone individuals here: in addition to the pine and the maple, there is exactly one American elm, one grey willow, one royal fern, and one steeplebush here – at least that I’ve found after four weeks of walk-throughs. The other week, a bird-banding class caught the first robin and red-eyed vireo that any of us had seen on the island. Anywhere else, many of these species would be completely unremarkable. But on this island where things are moving constantly and complexly, a place where chance encounters often teach me more than what I set out to look for, even a robin or a pine tree regains some of the magic of something seen for the first time. I know that sounds hokey, but it’s true: I have never been so excited to see a pine tree. That might not be what I write in my official report at the end of it all, but for now, I’m really enjoying the way that being on a small island brings these small surprises in to sharp focus.

Ben Lemmond is a graduate student in the Field Naturalist program at the University of Vermont. Learn more about the program at: http://www.uvm.edu/~fntrlst/

Looking out from the high cliffs

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A Bloom of Jellies Make for an Exciting Morning

Post by Olivia Lukacic, Science Education Intern

 

This lion's mane is one of three seen this morning ranging from five inches in diameter up to a foot! These jellies are most dangerous to us humans as their stinging cells can leave a harmful rash.

When Bailey, the scallop research intern, got up early to see the sunrise and get a start on processing another spat bag on July 10, 2015 she was in awe of what she saw off of the dock. It seems that overnight a whole bloom of jellies had entered Hurricane Sound. We often see mats of rockweed around our main pier with the flow of tides, but this one brought a high density of jellyfish and other wonders. In this group there were comb jellies, moon jellies, and lion's mane, all of which are routinely found in coastal Maine. But what was stumping us was that these were far and few between to the hundreds of a type of jellies that we had never seen before. These were clear to opaque jellies with a white to pinkish purple cross on their main bell. We determined that these curious jellies are white cross hydromedusa (Staurophora mertensii). Not much is known about them, with their range thought to be worldwide but specifically from the arctic to Rhode Island. A quick row out into the cove showed that these jellies were mainly around the floating rockweed and we think they are moving with a current.

A few of the hundreds of white cross hydromedusa found near the dock this morning. These are pictured with a few scallop spat bags. 

Our bloom of white cross hydromedusa is not a unique occurrence for Maine right now, at least in broad terms of jellies. This spring to summer season has already seen many areas of high density jelly blooms raising concern among the public. Although the lions mane is the only common Maine jelly that could pose health risks to humans, the large quantities of moon and comb jellies are still disconcerting. Jellies are a largely understudied group of marine species in Maine, so finding an answer for these blooms is a challenge. The best hypothesis to explaining the influx of jellies range from a response to overfishing, to oxygen depletion from land runoff, to warming waters. Although this winter was cold in comparison to the past decade or so, cold winters only affect the waters close to shore. In fact the Gulf of Maine is warming much faster than the most other oceans, raising concern in all aspects of fisheries and marine studies. We hope that here on Hurricane and in the greater scientific community we can begin to understand what is happening to our coastal waters and what each new tide brings in. 

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Desperately Seeking Spat Bags

Some of the bags were completely covered in fast growing seaweed!

Dripping with muddy water and covered with tiny dancing skeleton shrimp, we spent the day searching for and hauling up lines of spat bags. Cait deployed them this past October, so they have been collecting scallop larvae for the past 9 months. A spat bag is constructed of 2 layers of mesh; the outside green layer having very small netting that only larval stage scallops can enter and exit through, and the inside blue layer with larger netting that they can attach and grow on. 5 bags are tied to a line with a cement block on one end and buoys on the other, suspending them at different depths throughout the water column. Soon, we’ll count all the scallop spat in the bags to gain an understanding of how many scallops are entering these areas and how much settlement might be occurring around Muscle Ridge. The bags don’t select for species, so we’re sure to find lots of little clams and mussels as well. 

Keeping the pile of spat bags cold and wet with ocean water

It takes a whole team of eyes to hunt down the right color in the sea of buoys.

Lobstermen generally don’t leave their traps out during the winter and you can see why. The buoys were harder to spot with the colors washed off and some of the bags looked more like we had undertaken seaweed aquaculture! Luckily our fantastic captain, Skip, had a knife handy to clean the outside of the bags as we hauled them up. Strong winter storms can also push the cement blocks across the ocean floor, far away from the GPS point where they were dropped, making it a challenge to find them again. In the end, we recovered 5 of the 12 lines, which luckily included all 3 lines that had the HOBO temperature loggers tied to them! To keep them wet and out of the hot sun, we covered them in burlaps sacks soaked in seawater. After multiple transfers in and out of the water, the spat bags made it on the boat out to Hurricane Island, where we’ll start counting those adorable little scallops.

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Corallines for Climate

Post by Scallop Research Intern, Bailey Moritz

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.

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.

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Underwater, Where it's Dry

Post by Scallop Research Intern, Bailey Moritz

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!

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!

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