seaweeds ~ 09/01/12 ~ Asilomar Beach

delicate sea lace
Microcladia coulteri

posted 09/10/12 - As I was looking for barnacles the other day in a beachcomber's guide (Thanks, Jennifer!), I found a picture of a red algae that looked very much like this one. Finally, here's an easy ID... or so I thought. I took the name winged fronds, aka winged rib (Delesseria decipiens), from the book to obtain links for my blog post, but what I found online didn't look anything like what was pictured in the book. Bad photo or incorrect ID in the book, I can't say for sure. However, I discovered there are an almost identical form of Microcladia californica and a similar looking species Plocamium pacificum to what I have pictured here. It's difficult to know with certainty, because IDing a small piece of algae washed up on the beach is like trying to ID a plant solely on one dried leaf blown in from who knows where. Both Delesseria decipiens and Plocamium pacificum are saxicolous, meaning they grow on rocks, whereas Microcladia coulteri and M. californica are epiphytic on other algae.

giant kelp and Turkish towel

Macrocystis pyrifera or M. integrifolia and Chondracanthus corymbiferus or C. exasperatus

Geez, I only wanted to show the amazing different textures of these brown and red algal blades. I didn't realize there were different spp. found locally. Without seeing the entire seaweed, it's difficult to know for sure. Note the epiphytic Microcladia on the Turkish towel. As an aside, many brown marine algae are known as kelp. Seaweed is an informal term for marine green, brown, and red algae.

feather boa kelp

Egregia menziesii (now includes E. laevigata)

Finally, a seaweed that I absolutely know the ID. This post took me several mornings to research (click all the blue highlighted links), and I ended up feeling like I was banging my head against an intertidal rock. There's an incredible world of underwater life that very few people appreciate unless it happens to wash ashore in its dying and broken form. I'd love to take up scuba diving or go out on marine watching boats, but alas the hole in my eardrum keeps me from going underwater at any depth and I get terribly seasick. I probably should resign myself into simply saying, "Oooh, pretty seaweed."

red abalone ~ 08/11/11 ~ Wharf No. 2

red abalone

Haliotis rufescens

About 4 years ago my husband and I were watching the boob tube and caught sight of Mike Rowe in a skiff on what looked like the Monterey Bay. Come to find out Discovery's Dirty Jobs was doing an episode on abalone farming and kelp harvesting at a local business. We were surprised to learn the Monterey Municipal Wharf No. 2, aka the commercial wharf, housed an abalone farm. What? Really? Where? I mean, we've walked out there numerous times and never would have suspected there's an abalone farm. We even went out on the nearby touristy Fisherman's Wharf for the sole purpose to see if we could get a better look across the harbor at anything underneath the main deck of the commercial wharf. Nothing doing.

There's very little evidence of the Monterey Abalone Company, except for a small sign, one door, and one window tucked in between larger fish companies. Usually it's closed when we walk by, but I happened to be walking over there yesterday morning and they were open. I stopped and briefly chatted with the nice fellow in the office.

I left with my mind on other sights I had just seen on the commercial wharf, particularly a squid boat unloading its catch onto conveyor belts and hordes of pelicans helping themselves to the moving buffet. After the squid fellas were done packing ice, they fed the pelicans dropped squid as if they were people merely feeding pigeons bread crumbs in a park. I wish I had pictures.

Now, I usually don't carry the camera with me on my morning walks. I've frequently regretted this as I've seen so many amazing sights I would have liked to have included on Nature ID, like mola molas, dolphins, whales, night herons... but I do try to remind myself I have a life outside of this blog.

Ha! With that said and with hopes to capture the amazing squid boat unloading/pelican ritual, I made sure to bring the camera with me this morning. Doh! I didn't see the lighted squid boats last night on the bay and should have figured there wouldn't be a catch this morning. So, armed with the camera, I stopped by the abalone company to take a picture of an old specimen they had in a tank next to the door. Turns out the nice fellow Trevor Fay is a partner of the Monterey Abalone Company, and he asked me if I'd like to see the farm. Oh, yes, please, and thank you very much!

They don't breed the abalone here. They get 1 year old abalone the size shown above from a land-based hatchery in Cayucos (The Abalone Farm), south of Big Sur and just north of Morro Bay. I found this blog post on The Other 95% and I think the video might be from that hatchery. There are only a handful of abalone farms in California. Commercial fishing was banned in 1997, although sport fishing continues in some areas with restrictions.

Down a small hole in the floor I went, clinging dearly to the ladder. It was dark under there like a cave. There's a narrow wooden walkway with low overhanging cement beams. Off to the sides there are ropes hanging down into the water. Each rope is attached to a wire cage. They currently have 200 cages with 200,000 abalone. They now have the capacity to raise 500,000 abalone, but first they had to solve the problem of feeding so many animals during the winter.

giant kelp
Macrocystis pyrifera

So, what do abalone eat? Kelp! And lots of it. As I mentioned before in a previous blog post, there's a seasonal nature to kelp. In the summer it's quite prolific and as the season progresses it can easily be seen floating on the surface off the shore in Monterey and Pacific Grove. Once autumn hits much of the kelp starts washing ashore. Through a grant, the Monterey Abalone Company has experimented with various ways to preserve kelp during the lean winter months. I believe they salt the kelp and store them in giant plastic bags which they stack in bins on the wharf. Unfortunately, curious passersby try to open the bags to see what's inside, which ends up ruining the preserved kelp. I like the fact they use nature-made food, rather than artificial feed formulations. I imagine the company has to comply with all sorts of regulations for harvesting kelp considering Monterey Bay is a National Marine Sanctuary.

They use a 22 foot skiff to hand-harvest the kelp with a kitchen knife. I'm not kidding - no fancy tools. They go out several times a week and fill the skiff to capacity, which takes about 45 minutes each trip and yields about 5 tons every week. Man, here I thought feeding a handful of caterpillars fresh plant cuttings was a chore; this is that multiplied by 32,000. Add in the ocean motion (I get sea sick) and the sheer weight and that's a lot of hard work (and apparently dirty work). Funny enough, after the Dirty Jobs episode aired, most of the calls the company received were from people wanting to know how to get a boat like the one they have.

While I was there, they had just pulled up a cage to check, clean, and feed the abalone. The ones above are about 3 years old. Interestingly enough the abalone grow at different rates, so they move them around and save the fastest growing abalone for the larger sizes they sell.

Here's one of the workers, with kitchen knife in hand, putting fresh kelp into one of the cages. They have to stuff in enough kelp to feed the abalone for a week, and yet not stuff it so full the gastropods suffocate. It's a full-time operation rotating through the 200 cages. At the end of the walkway there was a sea lion, but apparently they're not too interested in the abalone. The sea otters on the other hand are "like kids in a candy store." Thanks to the cages, they don't eat up the farm. I immediately thought of those wire cages people put around the roots of their garden plants to keep gophers from eating their fill.

I asked loads of questions, but I don't remember most of what Trevor shared with me since I didn't take notes. Shown above is a fairly young red abalone at around 3 years old, too young to be able to determine its sex. From an e-mail Trevor says, "The color of their gonad changes when the animal is ripe, fertile and ready to spawn, green for girls and white or cream color for boys." Here's a good link to abalone anatomy and life cycle. The one thing the farm has to watch out for is some kind of disease.

Here's a picture of an order of abalone getting ready to be delivered across the harbor to one of the restaurants on Fisherman's Wharf. They get rinsed in sea water and stacked one on top of the other. They have a handy-dandy flat device that looks like a spackling tool to pick up the abalone off the table. Most of their customers are local. I asked if they shipped to Asian countries. Trevor said they wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand. Plus, the cost of shipping overseas is fairly prohibitive. However, Trevor also provides specimens to an aquarium in Taiwan, which has no problem paying for shipping. They actually have an exhibit of the Monterey Bay. Funny how something so familiar and practically outside my back door has international appeal. There are 8 species of abalone along the coast of California. I think most, if not all, are protected, but I'll have to look that up later as this is getting to be my longest post to date. Are you even reading this still?

All in all, I was very excited to get a personal tour of our local abalone farm, simply because I wanted to virtually collect a new species for this blog. Very cool. I may have to break down and patronize one of the spendy touristy restaurants on the wharf to taste some properly prepared abalone ($60 a plate, more than lobster!) since my favorite local seafood market/restaurant only orders per special request. I like mussels, oysters, and squid, so maybe I'll also like abalone. Trevor says it has a very unique taste. We'll see.

To see the Dirty Job's episode of abalone farming, check out the links on Monterey Abalone Company's media page. It aired October 20, 2007 and is not included in Discovery Channel's online episodes.

ps 08/15/11 - I made a few minor corrections above after an e-mail from Trevor and added/changed embedded links.

grunion greeting, 2011 #3

grunion greeting
new moon, 10:45-11:30, clear skies

This was the last of our grunion greeting for the year. Admittedly, we didn't put much effort into it after only seeing 2 grunion in the past 2 years and 9 visits. In 2009, we went out a total of 15 times and were marginally successful in finding grunion. That year we didn't mind the sleep deprivation that comes from late nights on the beach, often as late as 1:00 in the morning. As our schedules have become increasingly demanding, it's been harder and harder to keep the enthusiasm going. I've submitted all my findings... er, non-findings to Dr. Karen Martin's grunion greeting study at Pepperdine University.

Despite the lack of grunion sighting success, I'm glad we participated in the study. It got us out on the beach on a regular basis, something we never would have done, let alone at night. We've been able to notice the subtle changes on and around the beach, such as the flattening out of the beach surface itself and the addition of the neon blue lights to the pub building at the commercial wharf this year. I wondered if the bright lights affected the grunion runs on this particular beach as it is so bright and reflects in the water right where we used to spot grunion.

Above is the cement structure that I've mentioned so often in previous posts. It was our marker for where to turn around on the beach and head back to the commercial wharf. I didn't like hanging around, because people were often sleeping on the beach right there in the total darkness.

giant kelp with eel-grass and surf-grass
Macrocystis pyrifera with Zostera pacifica and Phyllospadix sp.
Zosteraceae

I had never heard the term wrack before participating in this study. Thankfully we didn't have to ID it to submit reports. We only had to make a general estimation of how much was present, if at all. Generally there was very little wrack during grunion greeting nights, which I think had to do with the calm summer waves. As a side note, many sites still recognize eelgrass as all belonging to Zostera marina, which technically has skinny leaf blades of only 1.5-12mm wide, whereas Z. pacifica has wider leaf blades 12-18.5mm.

monkeyface-eel
Cebidichthys violaceus

I think the most fun was having a chance to talk with local fishermen who we wouldn't normally meet. One fisherman told me the fish was a "monkey-faced spine fish." Thanks to the power of google I found the ID. It's a prickleback, not an eel, so spine fish is a good descriptor. There's something really fascinating about how information is passed from one fisherman to another in a verbal way complete with stories (and exaggerations). There's a whole subculture to fishing. Names and such are not always correct, but when it comes down to it, all that really matters is, "Is it good to eat?" I suggested to Karen that she might consider recruiting the local fisherman for watching grunion in Monterey. They're out late at night anyways. Who knows, we may or may not go grunion greeting next year.

ps - While searching for monkeyfaces online, I found this wacky, zany fishing music blog, the kind of gotta-love-people-who-are-real-yo: The Monkeyface News.

kelp ~ 09/28/10 ~ Asilomar Beach

giant kelp with feather boa kelp
Macrocystis pyrifera with Egregia menziesii

bull kelp with surf-grass
Nereocystis luetkeana with Phyllospadix sp.
Zosteraceae

wrack

Usually, this beach is totally clear of debris with the softest sand around (the kind that squeaks beneath your feet). Asilomar is located on the ocean side of the peninsula and is often very windy and chilly; this is why we rarely stop to get our toes sandy or wet. However, the surfers in their wetsuits don't seem to mind.

I had an epiphany about the seasonal nature of the ocean and beaches while figuring out how to write this blog post. I liken the wrack as an oceanic version of the fall of the leaves back east and elsewhere in the northern hemisphere (see my list o' links of autumn leaf colors). This past Thursday morning, I noticed the sound of the waves crashing, even though we've been experiencing very warm, non-stormy weather. Yep, I know, we live less than a block away from the Monterey Bay and you would think we always hear the ocean waves... but, we don't. In fact, for most of this summer it was very calm and quiet, hence why the constant crashing noise that started last week stands out. I had always assumed the sudden appearance of wrack had to do with storms, and yet there are no storms in sight. I've been trying to look into why we have bigger waves right now, but I haven't found much online information.

ps 10/07/10 - For added reference, Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 8:09pm PDT marked the autumnal equinox. Also, September's full moon hit its peak Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 2:17am PDT. Not only is this a harvest moon, it's a super harvest moon because of the timing all in the same night. For more information, see bigsurkate's blog post or National Geographic's daily news.

pss 10/22/10 - For a nice blog post in a similar vein as this one, read Bread on the Water.

pss 07/31/11 - While doing another post, I discovered there are actually 2 species of Phyllospadix found locally: P. torreyi and P. scouleri. There is no way I can tell the difference. I've made the changes in the embedded links. Also as a personal choice, I've decided to keep the seagrass family name of Zosteraceae, rather than list the surfgrass under the pondweed family name of Potamogetonaceae.
pss 09/22/11 - It's that time of year again. The sound of the waves woke me up. Again, no storm in sight. We've actually had very sunny days since 09/12/11. Before that it had been the usual summer coastal fog. I noticed the waves were louder sometime last week. I'm still wondering where to go to look up information about the seasonal changes of the ocean.