Ocean Water

“Water is good for taking away your troubles. The ocean is best because it’s big enough for all of them.”

“On any given morning, the caffeine levels in the Puget Sound spike at around nine.”

Two random thoughts for the Ecotone Wiki’s March 1 entry on Ocean and Sea.

The Unknown Worms

I just read The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, a new book by Amy Stewart. The author is a gardener who got entranced by earthworms and wrote this account of their natural history. Oligochaetology, as the study of earthworms is known, starts off with Darwin’s last book, written in 1881,The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits. The field, however, remains tiny, making ornithology look like the path to riches. I am amazed, but at some level am not surprised, by how little we know about the systematics and biogeography of earthworms. The field is reminiscent of 19th-century natural history: of the several earthworm systematists in North America, most don’t make their living as biologists. One is a computer tech, and another is a truck driver manager. There are probably a half-dozen new species to be discovered in California alone, but who will ever do the needed surveys?

But we like worms anyway. Pica regularly rescues them in rainy weather, and the author, who has been tending several thousand worms for the past seven years, feels there isn’t a finer pet anywhere. Or to quote Darwin: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”

The Doom Of Digital Data

These past couple of days I’ve been at a meeting for this research project I’m involved with that is trying to make the nascent Semantic Web useful to ecologists and environmental managers. So far it has been an exercise in attempting to get the biologists and the computer scientists to speak a common language. We scruffy ecologists and biogeographers hail from Northern California, and the computer scientists are mostly in Maryland. Oddly, both groups have a high fraction of vegetarians.

In an effort to expose the computer scientists to a bit of field science, today we went on a trip to the PRBO bird observatory out on Point Reyes. There we learned about mist netting and field forms, got a good look at a merlin before he flew from the top of a dead pine tree to chase a flock of dunlin on Bolinas Lagoon, and saw a group of harbor seals hauled out on a mudflat a little over a hundred meters off, many of them about to have pups next month.

At the field station we looked at their library of field notes from some thirty years worth of monitoring projects. The computer science students were soaking it all in, but the government agency tech folks, grizzled from a career spent wrestling databases, were aghast at all the paper records. What if there’s a fire? they thought, and started conjuring up ways to directly collect these notes in digital format. Tablet PCs, perhaps?

Our guide explained that such a transition would be a long time in coming. After all, paper is a great technology for notetaking. It doesn’t run out of batteries, you can drop your notebook in the creek without losing all your data, and it’s easy to put side comments and sketches in the margins.

The calligrapher and librarian in me is wary of directly capturing field data digitally for another reason. Bearing in mind that these are long-term ecological records which will be immensely valuable if they survive a century or two, digital records seem much more ephemeral than paper and pencil or ink. Between the certainty over time of data corruption (those pesky cosmic rays), change in hardware technologies for storage, and obsolescence of file formats, I’ll place my bets on acid-free paper and Higgins Eternal ink.

On Alert

In 1953 a cargo ship named the SS Jacob Luckenbach sank off the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Mystery oil spills in the 1990s were eventually traced to the Luckenbach and a costly removal of some 100,000 gallons of fuel oil was undertaken in 2002. There’s plenty left, though, and every time there’s a big storm—like the one we had yesterday—some of this fuel oil escapes and wreaks havoc on wildlife in the general area.

My new colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center are standing by for notification of the first oiled wildlife, most likely to be Common Murres. They will then coordinate a vast network of volunteers who will most likely give up their weekend and converge on San Mateo to start cleaning and rehabilitating these hypothermic birds.

There were 40-foot swells out there yesterday. The likelihood of the Luckenbach sitting peacefully at the bottom ignoring the currents seems small. Let’s hope we’re wrong.

Anchoring in Gaia

A pair of great egrets flies overhead. About eight horses negotiate the puddles and mud, seemingly quite happy in the mire (as long as they’re fed). A black phoebe sings and flycatches from a perch. A red-tailed hawk moves right to left pursued by a crow; the California ground squirrels are emerging from a long hibernation.

This is the view from my new window at work: a meadow, then a paddock. A friend came by yesterday with some congratulatory marigolds and thought it was great that the office was on the ground floor. There were good vibes, she said; it seems good to be anchored in Gaia.

And so it is.

A Break In The Clouds

We had a clear evening for the first time in five days, which meant it was time for some more astronomy. Having recently acquired some astronomical observation planning software, I am back in the game of trying to see all the Messier objects.

A brief bit of explanation. Charles Messier was an 18th-century French astronomer and comet-hunter who made a catalogue of some 110 deep-sky objects that one might mistake for a comet. These objects are some of the most spectacular telescopic sights in Northern Hemisphere skies. Indeed, amateur astronomers have their own equivalent to a birder’s big day. In mid-to-late March it is possible to see all the Messier objects in a single night, an activity called a Messier marathon.

I am hardly fanatical enough to try to do a Messier marathon (or a big day birding event, for that matter), but February is a good month to start trying to see these over the period of several months. Last week I managed to sight M74, a galaxy which is very difficult to see in light-polluted skies. This evening I went the easy route and looked at the Orion Nebula (M42 and M43) and the Pleiades (M45). But high clouds in the west stopped me from trying to find the difficult galaxy M77 in the constellation Cetus.

I looked over towards the east at rising Jupiter. All four of the Galilean moons were in a line on one side of the planet—spectacular!

Invasives Get a Boost

The Glory Hole at Lake Berryessa is spilling over again, especially with all this new rain we got today. I went with a friend to Calistoga for some hedonism (mud baths) before starting my new job tomorrow morning; our route took us over the ridge into Napa Valley and we stopped to take a photo of the overflow mechanism for this reservoir.

The tiny New Zealand Mud Snail has been spreading in this part of the watershed. It is believed to have been introduced on the boots of fishermen. The worry is that, since the Glory Hole has been overflowing for well over a week now and flushing the snails from the muddy bottom, they’re well on their way to the Delta.

They have no predators here, and are very likely to end up causing environmental havoc. What to do? There’s apparently a species of fluke that feeds on them. But nobody knows what introducing this fluke might do to the rest of the ecosystem. Look at what happened on Hawaii when they introduced mongeese to extirpate the introduced snakes: mass extinction of native birds. Copper might control them, but what would it kill in the process?

We may have to live with this one, folks.

Feasting On Blossoms

This white-crowned sparrow has been chowing down on almond blossoms along with his buddies. (Numenius took this photo yesterday morning.) Most of the sparrows, which spend the winter here in the Central Valley, have now moulted into adult plumage. They will be heading north over the next six weeks or so. The storm system that put so much water in our vicinity was warm and this, along with the increasing light, will be triggering the various synapses that cause birds to get up and go.

I think they like almond blossoms the best, not just because they’re the first ones. The blossoms smell just like honey.

My last day of work in Graduate Studies was today. I’ll be starting my new job at the Wildlife Health Center on Monday…

Creek In Flood

Putah Creek has turned into a lake. It’s as high as I recall seeing it, and would be in our living room if it weren’t for the levee. And there’s more rain on its way.

Marking Place

For the Ecotone wiki’s joint topic on Stones and Rocks.

Ever since our paleolithic ancestors started painting on stone, it has been the material of choice for marking, in a more or less permanent way, a geographic location of particular significance. The art of Scottish sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay explores this neoclassically (a commission at UC San Diego shows a 1987 example), but cairns on mountaintops are as interesting in their way as the Trajan column. Stone: permanence. Human interaction with stone: human attempt to project permanence.

Gravestones are the markers most of us will encounter, but even they are less than permanent what with acid rain and ordinary erosion. When my father was cremated, my mother scattered his ashes to the waves from the northern California clifftops by their home. At the time I missed the lack of a stone that would give me a place to visit, to mourn. A series of rocks guards the inlet where the ashes scattered five years ago. They are bigger, more imposing, than most gravestones, and during our visit there this weekend I was able to touch my father’s memory by a visit to the cliff and the rocks below. The pelagic cormorants are coming into breeding plumage; California gray whales are migrating north. The surf pounds the rocks and the cycle continues. One day these rocks will be sand.