Collecting Spat

Two days without having to be rescued!! Yay! Miller seems to have fixed our boat problem, for which we are very grateful!

Yesterday and today, Anne and I worked on my pearl oyster recruitment experiment. My own Ph.D. research focuses on the population dynamics and restoration of black-lipped pearl oysters, Pinctada margaritifera, at Midway Atoll. This species is the same one that makes black pearls throughout the tropical Pacific (think Tahiti!), but in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, it was heavily harvested in the 1920s for the shell and has not recovered since then.

We’ve put a lot of effort into determining the temporal and spatial patterns of recruitment (= settling from planktonic larvae in the water column to a specific place on the seafloor). Since pearl oyster juveniles (see photo above) prefer dark crevices, I modeled my recruitment devices, or “spat collectors”, after what pearl farmers use. They’re essentially black shadecloth folded like an accordion attached to a buoy (see photo at right). We’ve deployed 10 at each of 9 sites throughout the atoll, and we measure and mark every pearl oyster juvenile on each spat collector every two weeks during our field season.

Today we went to sites 187 and 172, which are on the eastern side of the atoll. We tried to go there last week, but it was too rough to really accomplish something (the tradewinds from the east generally dominate this time of year), so we appreciated the calm today. Particularly since Anne’s stomach does NOT like measuring tiny things on a rocking boat! We got a lot done, but didn’t see anything particularly fascinating.

However, I did enjoy playing with an albatross chick that swam up to investigate us. Here’s above and below the water. We’ve learned to be careful with them in the water because they like to peck anything they can get, and the top of your head is right at their level!

We also observed a small patch reef with many solitary mushroom corals (Fungia scutaria). Each oval-shaped coral in the photo is one individual, as opposed to most corals where many individual polyps live in a colony. Corals in this family are called “mushroom corals” because they grow on a stalk or stem as juveniles and then break off, so they look like the cap of a mushroom. We often see clusters of them like this, which our coral book informs me is because a small attached stem repeatedly buds off new corals.

Our Mitsubishi volunteers arrive Thursday (2 days!), so probably no more posts until then. We’re looking forward to showing this wonderful place and our work to Bret, Crystal, Michael, and Seiji.

If you’re interested in learning more about Midway, a FWS volunteer, Barb Mayer, has been documenting her time here at Midway. She has a lot of great information about the land organisms and even fun activities. However, Barb leaves on the plane this Thursday, so I imagine it will be ending soon. It’s at: foam-friends-of-albatross-on-midway.blogspot.com/.

We’re back!!!

After thankfully uneventful flights to Hawaii and Midway, we’re very happy to see spinner dolphins, the last few albatrosses, turtles, sooty terns, monk seals, red-tailed tropic birds, and all the other residents of Midway.

I think they were happy to see us too – we saw three groups of dolphins and a school of flying fish on our first day on the water yesterday! One of the dolphin groups was the largest pod I’ve ever seen – probably at least 50 dolphins relatively close to the boat, but not remotely interested in us.

We also observed a stripebellied puffer fish at a cleaner wrasse station (in Anne's photograph at left).

Of course, it’s been good to see the people too – big hugs for Pong (our head chef), Leona (wife and partner of acting refuge manager John Klavitter), and many other familiar faces. There are also a lot of people we don’t know – most of the construction crew, all the firefighters, many Thais. That’s not very surprising, since we arrived almost exactly a year after we left last year.

We’re sorry to report that Kate will not be joining us at Midway, even for the short week she was planning, because her flights were delayed and she didn’t reach Honolulu before the plane for Midway departed. We were all looking forward to hearing about her time in Antarctica, but I suppose we’ll have to catch up another time.

We’re still missing permits for most of our projects, but we’re doing what we can and preparing for the rest. Bad news: We visited some of the sites of our experiments that we deployed last year and discovered that winter storms played havoc with our cages, buoys, and spat collectors (Cage frame at left is one of very few cages left intact!). Good news: We’ve received our two new permits for sediment coring and coral restoration.

The big excitement for us is that we’ve had to be “rescued” at sea two days in a row! I’m not sure I’ve ever had to call the island for help before, but it was definitely good to know that John Klavitter, Miller (FWS boat mechanic, who’s a real character!), and others are listening on the radio and will come to help us when we need it. We think the problem's solved and relatively easy to fix, but we were glad it waited for the end of the day!

At right, Anne enjoys her first dive at Midway after finishing her scientific diving course at UC Santa Cruz this spring. Diving without a wetsuit is new to her, since all of her dives recently have been in California or Washington (Brr!!).

Returning to Midway!

Don, Anne, and I are finally heading to Midway on Thursday, August 5!!! We’re still working on finalizing our 2010 Monument permits, but we hope they’ll be complete by the time or soon after we reach Midway. Until then, we’ll work on the one permit we still have active (my juvenile pearl oyster growth and survival cages) and preparing for our various projects. We look forward to seeing our friends at Midway again and resuming our work there.

Our 2010 Mitsubishi volunteers will join us a week later on Thursday, August 12. They’ll be lucky enough to fly into Midway during the day, so they’ll see Midway from the air. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to see more than a few, if any, albatrosses, since all the juveniles have fledged and the adults won’t return until October or November.

We know that Midway will be the same in some ways and very different in other ways. For example, FWS refuge manager Matt Brown has moved to another position on Maui and former refuge biologist John Klavitter is now acting refuge manager. We’ll miss Matt, but we’re also very happy for John. FWS has also added other staff, and I’m sure the Chugach staff has changed. The albatrosses will be almost completely gone, which is partly sad because we love seeing them and partly good because we’ll be able to arrive during the day and we won’t have to worry about tiger sharks cruising inside the lagoon to eat fledglings.

Since my last post in March, we’ve all been very busy.

• I finished teaching Ecology of Reefs, Mangroves, and Seagrasses (including giving a final exam and final grades!!), went to Maui for a week for an education workshop, and completed the steps to advance to candidacy (which include a public seminar which was the the occasion for the photo above).
• Don returned from Australia, worked very hard on completing our permits, and went to Germany for two weeks to analyze the cores collected in Australia.

Anne completed her first year at UCSC with some very intense classes and her scientific diving certification, spent a few weeks exploring Seattle and the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound, and looks forward to resuming fieldwork at Midway. As you can see in the photo to the left, she also went skydiving!!

• Helen and Rachel both completed their comprehensive exams and are getting started on their own research.Helen just returned from an intense 5 weeks on Palmyra working on coral recruitment tiles with Dan Brumbaugh, a UCSC affiliate that is a scientist for the American Museum of Natural History.

• Kate returned from Antarctica and will be joining us on the G-1 plane for a short visit to friends at Midway. We all look forward to seeing her again and hearing about Antarctica!!