habitat ~ 11/12/12 ~ Frog Pond Wetland Preserve

Frog Pond Wetland Preserve 

November 12, 2012

When we walked down the steps from the newly fortified roadside parking area and looked toward the pond, our jaws dropped.  We have never seen the Frog Pond practically dried up. This year's drought has seriously taken its toll on local ponds and streams.  The shallow puddles that were present, perhaps from the previous week's rains, looked fairly recent with healthy land plants poking out and cracked mud.  The last picture above is from the middle of the pond area looking back at the dock where I usually take pictures of the water for past habitat posts (click and scroll down to see other posts). We had enough rain by this date that fresh green grass was starting to show along the trails.

CA bulrush ~ 11/12/12 ~ Frog Pond

California bulrush / southern bulrush

Schoenoplectus californicus (formerly Scirpus californicus)

Cyperaceae

edited 11/15/12 - This is not a sexy post.  I've been off my blogging routine the past few weeks thanks to major headlines occupying my morning internet time:  Giants winning the 2012 World Series, Sandy, elections, Petraeus resignation, all interspersed with gruesome murderous plots. I've wanted to write about Buster Posey's incredible comeback one season after his horrific leg injuries, big companies and local neighborhoods utilizing the reach of social media to provide immediate help in the aftermath of Sandy, like Duracell's Rapid Responder, Google's Crisis Map, and Occupy Sandy (ARC could learn a thing or two), Nate Silver's statistical forecasting of elections, post-Petraeus implications for the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and how cooking human flesh has become the fashionable way to murder (case in CA, case in NY)... but they're not appropriate for Nature ID.

One thing that has hit home for me is "news" these days is mainly compiled of opinions, speculation, and reporting other's reports.  It becomes a real-life game of telephone.  The facts are few and far between, and by the time they're reported, in many cases in a matter of a few hours in the race to be ahead of the competition, they're disturbingly distorted from the actual truth.  It's unfortunate, but I've seen this with nature information, too, albeit at a slower pace. What one author states clearly in a scientific paper is a wild guess gets referenced, second referenced, down the line until finally another group states definitively that what was once a guess is indeed fact.  Then it gets put into textbooks and field guides. Lovely, eh?  Because of this spectacle, I consciously try my best to focus Nature ID on my first-hand observations rather than rewording "facts" from books or sites.  This practice makes my blog appear to lack content, but at least it's original.

So, getting to CA bulrush.  I've largely ignored grass-like plants on Nature ID, since I have a mental block around them, like with trees, and find them very difficult to ID.  I had to look up the difference between grasses, rushes, and sedges just so I knew which families to search.  I narrowed down the above ID by using the published plant list for the Frog Pond.  It's impossible to tell how tall these bulrushes are from my pictures, but here's a comparison photo with a small human.  Now that I have the basics of this sedge ID, I can look into more information, like these amazing Peruvian tortora horses made out of this plant (tortora is the name for a South American subspecies of CA bulrush and the horses are actually reed boats).  Cool!

blue-eyed darner ~ 11/12/12 ~ Frog Pond

possible male blue-eyed darner

possible Rhionaeshna multicolor

This post is for Graeme at Imperfect and tense for our friendly blogging Odonatathon wager across the pond (so to speak) to see who spots the latest in the season for 2012.  As of this date, I have him beat by 1 day.  My last sightings in 2011 were December 10 at Los Padres Dam (sorry, no pictures).  His last sighting in 2011 was November 27 at HESC, although he says someone else saw the same dragon there December 5.

This is also a tester post.  I've never edited or posted a video before.  It took me a while to figure out how to stabilize and trim the above crappy clip in iMovie.  Google's automatic file reduction makes the video play even worse on the blog.  Oh well.  For both the video and heavily cropped picture above, we tried out a spanking new borrowed point-and-shoot Canon (don't know which one) in a search to upgrade from our crappy photo point-and-shoot Minolta.  While I kind of like the larger file sizes to crop, the touch screen focus features of the Canon did not work at all for close-up shots, even in the macro setting.  Our trusty 8-year-old Minolta still seems to do a better job.  So, our search continues.  For now, I will remain green with envy at the patience and gorgeous dragonfly photo captures other people manage to get with seeming ease.

ps - Oooh, interesting.  The video doesn't show up in Reader.  Hmm?

Humboldt squid ~ 10/27/12 ~ San Carlos Beach

Humboldt squid / jumbo squid

Dosidicus gigas

Very cool!  While I've seen plenty of hand-sized CA market squid (Loligo opalescens, aka Doryteuthis opalescens) offloaded from the squid boats and displayed in, well, the local fish markets, this is the first time I've seen a Humboldt squid alive (i.e., not jarred or dissected at Hopkins).  There were two of these washed up on the beach, slowly flapping those triangle shaped fins.  I would guess this one was a little over 2 feet in length, which apparently is less than half the size they can get in 2 years or less.  

A scuba diver gently lifted them up and returned them to the water.  Another diver told us these good-sized squid have been close to the shore for the past couple of days numbering in the hundreds. Then, yet, another diver proceeded to authoritatively tell some wild story about how these were "queens" and were the only ones that reproduced.  Ha!  I think there's quite a bit of myth surrounding squid, and for good reason.

Humboldt squid have only been seen with any regularity in Monterey Bay for the past 10-15 years since the big 1997-98 El Niño event.  MBARI has been using their ROVs to video and record marine animals and have collected data on Humboldt squid.  There are various guesses as to why they have been moving northward from their breeding grounds off the coast of Mexico.  I'll have to read more about them in the coming days.  What impressed me most about these molluscs were those mammalian-like eyes that seemed to convey thought and intelligence.  Their colors were beautiful, too!

 ps 11/02/12 - The Humboldt squid have made our local news at Monterey County Herald and KSBW with about 100 washing ashore near Hopkins on Tuesday.  Both links contain videos.