Back in the water!

I was able to start the weekend by enjoying the glorious weather we had on Friday (sunny and 27C even on the coast!!) by slipping under the waves into the silent underwater world.

I was training a couple of new students in the lab to count and measure eelgrass. Both had never done it before so it was a great new experience for them and gave them a taste of what it to come with this summer's field work in July and August.

The big white things on their arms are the slates with the underwater paper and a small pencil attached. These armbands are extremely convenient since they stay out of the way but close at hand for recording data and you are less likely to lose it! Writing underwater with huge mitts on is very challenging. Although the most challenging part sometimes can be reading it when your are back on the surface!

Recreational and Scientific diving are VERY different. Usually you have your hands full of stuff, catch bags with the various tools, armbands, quadrats (see next photo) and anything else you might need to collect your samples/data. So getting used to controlling your buoyancy while handling all these tools requires practice and this is why we had a practice day and we will have at least one more before the official sampling begins!

The quadrat is a marine ecologists' most used tools. It is a 3 sided square of a specific size that you use to delineate and standardize your sampling area. It is always helpful to have it in bright colours not typically found underwater so that you can easily see it. This one is in white and red electrical tape to contrast with the eelgrass and the bottom. The white areas also delineate a smaller area that can be used to collect subsamples if needed. It is a very simple but essential piece of sampling equipment. The two divers above were counting and measuring the eelgrass plants in the white subset. We are planning a lot of field work this summer. I will be sure to take a lot of pictures of us working and the various tools we use to do our work!!

We also got to test our newly repaired research vessel! It worked beautifully and is ready for another season of research. This vessel has a long history with me and I am preparing a post about it.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend!

Hiatus OVER!

Obviously, things have been crazy busy for me to ignore you all since September and I have so much to tell you. The most important piece of news is that I AM DONE MY PhD!!

I successfully defended my thesis on Dec 7 at 10 am. The defense is an oral exam where you present your thesis to your committee, supervisor, an external examiner and because it is open to the public...an audience. My presentation lasted 20 minutes and the question period was only an hour!! I have been to defenses where it has lasted 2-3 hours! I was lucky, I had a great committee with interesting and thought provoking questions... it was actually FUN! Not too many people can say that about an oral exam! I also had great support from friends, colleagues and family. There were about 25 people in the audience and even my parents came for the defense and the celebration afterwards! Now we can look forward to even more fun at my convocation in the spring!

The best part of finishing up was my reward. We went to Mexico for 3 weeks over the holidays! We spent most of our time eating and snorkeling in a marine reserve in Puerto Morelos, a small town of only 3 streets parallel to the beach and separated from the main highway by a huge protected mangrove. As Frank Sinatra said it...This is my kind of Town... Every day that we were there we indulged in delicious food, happy hour, family and of course LOTS of snorkeling!

 Who can resist this assortment of sweets brought to your table by vendors that just walk up and down the beach selling their wares from a tray that they carry on their head!

 We had Arracherra, or skirt steak at least 5 times while we were there...if you like beef, this is to DIE FOR!

 

 We went to a restaurant that served authentic cuisine from the Yucatan region and had panuchos (the first of the 3 photos) which are fried tortillas with beans, some type of meat, pickled red onions, avocado and of course salsa. The second photo is of papadzules which are corn tortillas dipped in a pumpkin seed sauce then filled with hardboiled eggs, topped with more pumpkin seed sauce and a bit of tomato based sauce. Lastly, the soup is called sopa de lima. Lima is a type of citrus that is the size of a lemon but greenish and sweeter than either lemon or lime, it is sometimes called sweet lime. The soup has chicken and pieces of fried corn tortillas and is delicious!

We also ate at a lot of street vendors that were recommended by locals...Tacos, chile relleno (stuffed chillies), tamales and all kinds of other amazing street food! If in doubt, ask a taxi driver where he/she eats and you are guaranteed to get something good. When we showed up at one cart in Cancun we were surprised that there was actually two different ones...how did we know which one to eat at? When a truck load of police showed up to eat at the one cart, we knew that was the right one! It was delicious!!

 

The AMAZING thing about a marine reserve is that they actually work to protect large predatory fishes and other sensitive species. There was not a day that we did not see at least 10 or more barracudas that were as large or larger than me!!!! The above photo is of a school of 30!! The smallest one in the school was at least the length of my arm (or about 60 cm long!).

 This is a school of snappers (predatory fishes that are very tasty so on unprotected reefs you almost never see even one and here they were schooling by the hundreds!!!

 We also had the pleasure of seeing at least 2-3 turtles everyday with the largest one being about the size of a smart car!

 Sting rays (top photo) and spotted eagle rays (bottom photo) were VERY common, almost a daily occurrence and on some days more than one at a time!

 We saw a number of lobsters hanging out under coral heads which are very rare outside of marine reserves.

 We saw a lot of coral and the health of the reefs themselves was patchy. Some areas were in great shape while others were covered in algae (bottom photo). The reefs in the Caribbean have taken a beating with hurricanes, eutrophication (high nutrient levels in the water from run off and sewage) due to coastal development and climate change. The high nutrients stimulates algae growth that then either smothers the corals or prevents them from recolonizing and phytoplankton in the water shades the corals and can cause bleaching and loss due to lack of light.

The seagrass pictured here can help to act as a filter by taking up a lot of nutrients but we are putting more than it can handle so there is obviously enough for the algae too. The seagrass beds were extensive and healthy so the eutrophication has not yet started to affect them but more nutrients and the seagrass beds could disappear too since they are also sensitive to light reduction and overgrowth by algae.

 Another very common sigh was this beautiful lionfish. On one day we counted seeing 12. You might think wow, what a great fish to see but in fact, it is not native to the Caribbean. It is from the south Pacific and was likely introduced by people with marine aquariums that no longer wanted them so they released the fish into the ocean. This fish is a voracious predator and is affecting local fish populations because nothing eats them and they eat everything! There is an active bounty on these fish in the Playa del Carmen region of Mexico but sadly it is not enough of an incentive to fish them and since they are underwater, they are out of sight and out of mind. You can read about lionfish control and management measures in the US here. Hopefully this will be a coordinated effort among all Caribbean countries.

Of course we spent a lot of time with family over the tree weeks we were there. We did all of the typical Christmas and New Years traditions with all 30 family members that were visiting this year!! So that is it in a nutshell.

I am looking forward to catching up with all of you!

EYCC: Decreasing Tree Products

About 2 weeks ago I joined EcoYogini's Earth Yoga Challenge for Change (EYCC) challenging us to truly connect with our environment, with ourselves and to make a change rather than just think about it. It is a truly inspiring initiative that I signed up wholeheartedly for...thinking this might just be the sort of thing I need to take my eco-game to the next level.

Typical Nova Scotia Forest

First item on the Challenge: Decrease our dependence on unnecessary tree products. So I went over the things we already do to decrease tree products in our household.

1. Cancel all deliveries of flyers or junk mail
2. Reuse both sides of every envelope (great for lists!) or other scrap paper
3. Don't buy processed foods
4. Don't buy paper towels or tissue paper
5. Reuse all gift wrapping
6. Print on both sides of my paper at work or re-use it as scrap
7. Buy only post-consumer recycled paper and toilet paper
8. Encourage my students to print double sided or re-use paper already printed on one side
9. Read all my references for my PhD as a .pdf on my computer

These are all great and have reduced our paper consumption to one recycling bag a month! I realized that our biggest consumption of paper was toilet paper used for its intended purpose and as tissue paper. Ever since I heard about family wipes or cloth toilet paper I had been seriously thinking about it. Well here it was something I had been thinking about doing but never actually did it...

As most of you know I was pretty sick over the weekend and I was appalled at the amount of paper I was using to blow my nose! All of the garbage cans in my house were filling up with used tissue! That was the straw (or tissue) that broke the camel's back. So on Sunday I set out not only to make cloth TP but also some handkerchiefs.
I read a few websites to get sizes and materials for my two items and settled on ~4-5" for the cloth TP and ~8" for the handkerchiefs. You can make your TP and handkerchiefs out of anything you want but the thickness of the material, especially for the TP, can be an issue. Most sites I read also re-purposed old clothing for this new function. T-shirt material being the thinnest usually needs 3-4 layers to be absorbent enough. You also want to consider the softness of your wipes, whether for your nose or other you definitely want it to be soft...so I opted for fleece. I had the remnants of the sweater I used to make my tea cozy to be used up... so out came my machine and I was determined to stop using paper that very day.
I only had the top half of the sweater left but managed to make 16 cloth TP wipes (small grey and blue squares) and 6 handkerchiefs. Of course I had to decorate my handkerchiefs. The Calgary logo is where the sweater came from, Diego drew the two sharks for me and I made them out of bits of blue fleece leftover from the sleeves, the sea stars are bits of t-shirts that were kicking around and the flowers are from the same t-shirt my fish on my tea cozy came from! The only new material in all of this was the thread! :) It took 5 hours to make because of the detailing on the hankies but also because I stitched the edges of each of the cloth wipes and hankies to keep them intact even though fleece is not supposed to fray...plus it looks nice to have a border!
The seastars are my favorite. They are anatomically correct (leave it to a marine biologist!) albeit a little crooked...they were quite fiddly to sew! They were made in the image of a sea star found here in Nova Scotia, Asterias vulgaris or the Northern Sea Star.

Photo from:http://www.coastalsafari.com/SEASHORE.htm

As you can see they have many different colour variations but they all have one thing in common...the white dot. This is called a madreporite and is where they take in seawater for their muscles to work against in their tube feet so they can move. It is also part of their circulatory system and they extract oxygen from the water they take in and release wastes. It is called a water vascular system.

Photo from: http://echinoblog.blogspot.com/

Ok...enough of a tangent...back to the issue at hand cloth TP and handkerchiefs. You might be asking yourself...how has it been working so far? Well, I fell in love from the first wipe! They are so soft!! The handkercheifs are great, I can use the up to eight times before I need to wash them and I love the TP too...up to 3 wipes per square if you are adept at folding! I will continue to use them for at least a week and report back on my methods, techniques and the outcome in Part II of the cloth TP and hankie saga!

Re-vamped!

It has been a while since I posted a photo of our favorite fish tank...much has happened in our lives the last year which means it got a little neglected. I still changed the water but it was starting to look sad. So over the Holidays Diego and I decided to dedicate some time (and $$) to making the kitchen tank look beautiful again!
Diego and I built the canopy (the top part that holds the lights) and stand in 2005...our 1st carpentry project together! It took 2 weeks because the tank is 6 ft long and 2 feet wide (and 2 feet tall!), so it needed to be huge and well...we didn't know that a 2" x 4" is actually 1.75" x 3.5" so we had a few issues. Regardless, it turned out and now we have a beautiful stand and workstation...this is my workstation, so I am looking at this as I write! I love it! It makes me HAPPY! :)
This is our giant clam (Tridacna squamosa) which we have had for a year in another tank but decided it was high time for it to be front and centre (it is the size of a football!)! This is not your typical clam, most live in the sediment and filter particles out of the water for food. This one does filter particles BUT it also photosynthesizes like plants! Which means it needs light to survive! In it's beautiful mantle (the purple part) it hosts symbiotic algae cells. Symbiosis describes a relationship between 2 organisms where both organisms benefit and in this case the algae (called zooxanthella) provide sugar (product of photosynthesis and the basis of metabolism) to the clam in exchange for nitrogen and other nutrients the algae need to grow! Corals have the same relationship with the same type of algae and they too capture particles to supplement their diet. I think they are among the coolest things ever! (**Note: I say this A LOT when it comes to anything alive in the sea or on land...I LOVE the natural world and am fascinated by it...so no matter how often I say it, I mean it!).

Here is a little tour of our tank. The blue fish you see perched at the beginning is a bicolour blenny, the only other fish we have are 2 clownfish and a Hippo Tang (that is very shy so is not in the video).

The other REALLY COOL thing we got recently was a rock that is covered with a species of hard coral called Porites that has Christmas tree worms, barnacles and (here it comes...) the COOLEST filter feeding crabs! Check out the video! (My apologies for the blurry parts...).

The crabs live in holes in the rock/coral and have modified antennae that look like combs that they sweep through the water to capture passing particles!!! They then take their "net" to their mouth and just clean it off and stick it back out to catch more! They are so CUTE! The video gets in nice and close to one of them. We have 4 living in our rock. Two that have spotted claws like the one in the video and the 2 others have stripes!
The Christmas tree worms, are tube building filter feeding worms. They come in many colours, on our rock we have blue, white and brown, and red ones. You cans see a blue one at the beginning of the video on the bottom right of the rock. You will see some blurry and not so blurry close ups of some of the worms. You can see that they have a spiral top that is wide at the base and tapers as it gets to the top. If you have seen Avatar, you have seen these as terrestrial plants that when touched retract into their tube. These "plants" in the movie look EXACTLY like these worms. Although, I was perplexed at what these "plants" fed on in air...the delicate feathery top of these worms is designed to capture small passing particles in the water, not in air. The entire surface of the feeding appendages (feathery top) are covered in tiny hairs called cilia (the same kind that line your lungs) that move the food down to the worms mouth at the centre of the base of the feathery top. They actually do retract very quickly into their tubes, like the plants in Avatar, to avoid being eaten by passing fish. They are actually light sensitive (as well as motion), so if a fish passes overheadand and casts a shadow they will retract.
Last but not least, the barnacles! You can see one feeding on the bottom left of the screen as the video zooms in on the crab. It too is a filter feeder...can you tell that there is lots of food in the water column in the ocean? So many organsms make a living capturing suspended particles from the water column! Barnacles are cool in that they are a crustacean, like the crabs, but they have built an outer shell that houses a little shrimp-like animal inside. The little barnacle lays on his back inside the shell and uses a modified arm that acts like a giant fan that they stick out to capture passing food. Also, relative to their body size, barnacles have been deemed the organisms that have the longest penis in the world! Why is this you ask? Well since they live attached to the bottom, their nearest neighbour could be quite a distance away (ie: a few centimeters) so to be able to reach them...they have a really long penis!

Although marine tanks are AMAZING, there are many sustainability issues that surround the industry. Suffice to say in this post that we only buy tank-bred or sustainably harvested fish, corals and other invertebrates. The majority of our corals were grown here in Halifax and our rocks handmade by a close friend. I will save the issues and more eco-friendly options for another post.

Well that's it for today! Have a great weekend!! :)

A picture worth a thousands words.

Title:Breaker

Artist: Owen Freeman

Narrative: “This artwork is meant to convey not only the similarities between life about and below the ocean, but also to reflect the cyclical nature of water in a tangible visual way. By allowing ourselves to consider that the ocean floor is as important as the land we walk, the hope is that the notion of disconnectedness can dissolve and we can begin to think from within the ocean, rather than simply above it.”

The other winners of the ocean artwork contest open to students of all ages at aquariums across the U.S are found here:

http://community.csc.noaa.gov/coastalamerica/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1589&Itemid=197

Intertidal Ballad

I just wanted to share a song one of my students' wrote for the Intertidal Ecology and Diversity class I was teaching. He wrote the lyrics to a Tom Petty tune and here are the students singing the song after class one day. It is brilliant! The song is called Being the Tide.



Here they are signing it during an end of class party that I unfortunately could not attend! There is much more gusto in this version! :)



I will post the actual lyrics here tomorrow.

Coming to an End

The class I am teaching ends tomorrow. It is a small class of 14 students that runs 6 days a week at least 8 hours per day... which means you really get to know each other over the 3 weeks and we had such a great time!

We traveled around the Province to 4 different beaches and mudflats and collected sediment and animal samples.
This is the first beach and mudflat, near Kingsport Nova Scotia. This beach is on the Bay of Fundy, and for those of you not familiar with the Bay of Fundy, it has the highest tides in the world (15m or 32ft)!! Here we have just arrived and the tide is WAY out!! To collect the samples we used what is called a sediment core (aka. a PVC pipe). We stick the core into the sediment the dig a hole around it so we can get the shovel underneath to keep the sample from falling out when we pull it out.
Then we stick it in a bucket, take a couple of handfuls to bring back to the lab. Then, they have to sieve the sample. Which means, pass it through a fine mesh so that everything smaller than the mesh passes through and all the larger andimals and sediment are left behind to be sorted through back in the lab.
We did this at all 4 beaches and mudflats. Two on the Bay of Fundy and two on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. The second site we went to was called Bear River and was also on the Fundy side of NS. This was a beautiful site. The students had a great time playing in the deep and sticky mud!
We sampled this site early in the morning after camping overnight in a small town called Annapolis Royal, NS.
This town had one of the world's first tidal power generating stations and we got to take a tour!
The third beach and mudflat we visited was on the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia near Liverpool and here the tides are a modest 2m or 6ft. The beaches are beautiful light grey sand and the mudflats are a little less messy!
The last site we visited, is in my opinion one of the nicest beaches on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. It is called Martinique Beach. It is the closest thing to a white sand beach in these cold waters and it is a Provincial Bird sactuary.
We were lucky to have a local expert with Birds Canada come and talk to us about the endangered Piping plover, a little shorebird, and their efforts to protect and educate about these little summertime visitors.
Although we focused all of our sampling on the sandy beaches and mudflats for their major project. The coast of Nova Scotia is dominated by rocky habitats. So we went out to Peggy's Cove, which is near Halifax to see the different species that are found there.
The rocky shores are dominated by seaweeds which creates a completely different habitat to the sandy beaches and mudflats! Here the 3rd dimension of the habitat is above ground rather than below. So, you get more snails, crabs and the fun things you always associate with the ocean, whereas the sandy beaches and mudflats are dominated by worms and clams and there aren't too many things living above the sediment when the tide is out!

It wasn't all work though! We did have some time to toss around a frisbee and relax in the sun.
Although it is a ton of work, I absolutely LOVE it and am always a little sad when it is all over. I hold a special place in my heart for all of the graduates of Intertidal Ecology and Diversity! You have all done a great job!! :)

The Eelgrass Story Part I b: Where is it Found?

Click here if you missed Part I a: What is eelgrass?

Where is Eelgrass Found?

There are nine different species of the genus Zostera which span the globe but are notably absent from the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean waters as well as the coast of South America. The most widely distrubuted Zostera species is Zostera marina which can be found along all Northern temperate coastlines and even in some arctic zones like Groenland, around Iceland and northern European countries like Norway.

Global distribution of Zostera marina in purple. From The marine life information network of Britain and Ireland (marLIN) http://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/adult_distrib_Zosteramarina.htm

Zostera marina is the dominant species found along the coast and in estuaries of eastern North America, from Labrador in Canada to North Carolina in the United States. It occurs predominantly as monocultures called beds, especially in the more northern latitudes, this is definitely true in Canada and some Northern US states but can co-occur with other seagrass species in the more southern latitudes of its range. The green areas in the image are States and Provinces where Zostera marina is present (white = absent) along their oceanic coast.

Taken from United States Department of Agrculture Plants Database (http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ZOMA).

It can occur subtidally, which means that although the leaves can touch the surface at low tide, the entire plant is never out of the water. These were the types of beds I worked on. But it can also occur intertidally, which means the entire plant is out of the water at low tide, as seen in this photo from a West Coast population.
Image from James Douglas (http://jimbodouglass.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html)

Subtidally, they can occur to depths of up to 12 m but this depends on water clarity for the same reasons as variation in leaf length (discussed here). In Newfoundland and Labrador, the water is so clear that eelgrass can get enough light to inhabit depths of 12 m but it is more typically found shallower. In Nova Scotia, it is generally between 2-3 m.

Because they have an extensive root system, these plants live in soft sediment that ranges from mud to coarse sand and cobble. There are some species of seagrass that can attach to bare rock, but eelgrass is not one of them. The can also live in a range of wave regimes, from very protected like all my sites in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island that were behind barrier islands or more wave exposed like my sites along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia.

They are not typically found very high up in estuaries where there is a lot of freshwater input, they can tolerate a range of salinities (5 to 35 ppt) but grow best in 20 -26 ppt. They can also tolerate temperatures from freezing to 35 degrees C. These are perennial plants, which means that they persist year round and only die back (ie: lose their leaves) when it gets too hot or are physically removed. In many areas in the northern part of its range, the shallows are covered in sea ice that moves around with the winds and tides. This scours away much of the leaf tissue and sometimes even the roots and rhizomes but if there are rhizomes left behind the bed will regenerate!

Sea ice in Nova Scotia. From Nova Scotia Photo Album Blog (http://www.novascotiaphotoalbum.com/blog/2009/03/watching-the-sea-ice-float-away/)

The same is true if it is too hot, which can often happen in the shallows of more southern parts of its range. The leaves will die off but the roots and rhizomes will remain to fuel the growth of the bed when the temperatures return to tolerable levels.

So as you can see, eelgrass is very versatile and resiliant! It can and does inhabit any area where there are suitable conditions (ie: enough light, soft sediment, etc.). This is a persistent and widely distributed feature of the coastal ocean. However, 60% of the world's population (3.6 billion) lives within 60 km of the coast and this is expected to increase to 75% (6.4 billion!) over the next 30 years. Also, 16 of the world's 23 mega cities (> 2.5 million inhabitants) are within the coastal belt and their populations are growing by 1 million people PER DAY (!!!) making coastal marine systems around the world the MOST IMPACTED by human activities.

How does this all fit together? What does this mean for eelgrass? What does this mean for us? Stay tuned for more installments of the eelgrass story!! :)