Billy's Sabbatical Blog 2009

LastDayOfSabbatical

2010-08-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Last day of Sabbatical

So, just to catch you up. Two weeks ago we had a splendid “dock party” for Siwash. Here’s her cake made by the most wonderful bakers at Angel Maid in Culver City.

It was all very festive, and yet sad. We were at the dock that used to belong to my Mom and Dad, but that is now for sale. Everything is in flux. And yet somehow, all those present felt a palpable comfort in being able to gather and muse about this old boat that survives everyone.
Science is starting to ascend through all the bubbly stuff of life, as it reliably does. Unanswered questions on several fronts still titillate my students and me.

Here’s a cool one. Kind of a research update from the weeks we spent on Catalina Island last Fall.

Remember, if you will, that our hypothesis to explain the value of sensitization, the increase in defensive behaviors that we observe in sea hares following a lobster attack, is that this hypersensitivity helps protect the sea hare from future attack. By the way, we got the original research, showing sensitization after lobster attack, published in a cool, highly visible journal, the Journal of Neuroscience.

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/33/11028?etoc

To me, this paper was fairly straightforward. Entice lobsters to attack sea hares. Separate them before too much damage is done, and then test the sea hares for enhanced reflex withdrawal. No big deal, really.

But this paper has made more of splash than I ever thought possible. Lots of folks emailed me to congratulate us. The paper may get mentioned in other journals as a “hot” paper. Pretty cool. The best part is that the research was performed by so many students over several years.

Ok. But showing sensitization still doesn’t answer the question of what good it does for sea hares! Does it really help sea hares protect themselves from future attacks? Well, Dan and John and I went back out to Catalina Island a few weeks ago and actually tested this hypothesis!

We put out the same enclosure cages we used before. Then we went back to the lab and marked sea hares with little plastic tags. Then we gave half of the sea hares “standard” electric shock treatment to induce sensitization. Then we planted sensitized and naïve animals in a cage. Finally we did our usual dive protocol with bait sea hares in order to identify attacking lobsters. We planted a hungry lobster in each of the two cages, and checked back in the next day to see which sea hares the lobsters preferred. We hypothesized that the naive sea hares would be preferred because they were not pre-sensitized.

As so often happens in science, our hypothesis got roundly defeated. Every one of the 5 lobsters that ate 1 or two sea hares consumed ONLY the SENSITIZED ones. Previous sensitizing attack seems to make sea hares more, not less, vulnerable to subsequent attack.

Now dear readers, you can email me or post ideas to explain these results. Clearly this professor has no clue what good sensitization is doing these slugs!

On this note, we end the sabbatical. Perhaps I’ll continue with the Wright lab’s research adventures, but we shall see.
Thanks for reading this stuff. Writing about research and life clears my head in ways I still don’t really understand.

Two Parties 50 Years Apart

2010-08-07T23:16:00.001-07:00

7 August 2010.

100 years old, and still kicking.

How did it happen that I’m now the custodian of a 100 year old boat? I am still trying to figure that out.

The way I see it, I may be the legal owner, but Siwash is just passing through me, like she did my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.

We celebrated her 100th anniversary at Catalina last weekend, and it was very cool.

50 years ago, Mom and Dad, much younger than I am now (33 and 38, I think), rowed all around Howland’s cove, dressed up in 1910’s garb to invite everyone. Bird and I did the same thing for last Saturday. Note the dingkitten is the same in both photos.

Here’s Dad reading his proclamation about Siwash in 1960 (note Grandad farthest to the left, drinking, and Mom right at Dad’s knees lighting a cigarette.

Here I am giving the anniversary proclamation in 2010.

Here’s Siwash, loaded to her waterline with well-wishers (photo by Fin Beven, a legend in his own right).

Here's Siwash's intrepid crew!

And, of course, just to show that Siwash is sailing as hard as ever, here’s Bird “holding her down” in hurricane gulch on the way home.

If you missed this party (or if you liked the rum and want some more), you can still come to the "docksider" party next Saturday starting at 2PM (and you are all invited).

2010-07-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

100 years is a long time ago.

A few months longer ago than that, my dad’s dad was a snotty-nosed teenager hanging out in the cockpit of a new yacht being built right down in Wilmington harbor, the guts of the Los Angeles harbor area then, and now.

The new yacht had not yet been finished. Grandad said he could see right through from the cockpit to the bow. The yacht was launched that August. This weekend we celebrate that launching with a “cocktail party” at Howland's Landing on Catalina Island.

This yacht came by her name in a funny way. The builder, Charlie Fulton, had just attached the transom (the board that covers the aftermost part of the boat). Some disgruntled worker in the yard had had some kind of issue against Charlie, and chalked the moniker “Siwash”, which was a slang (semi-deprecatory) expression in those days for someone with native American blood.

Charlie had, indeed, some native American blood in his veins, but he also knew what every sailor does: changing the name of a boat is bad luck. So he PAINTED the name clearly on the transom.

Siwash is in my blood too.

We will be handing out rum drinks to anyone who comes aboard. Best not to wait too long after the sun is over the yard-arm. Sailors develop a might thirst by the time noon comes round.

Grandad’s dad had already given him a 28 foot sailboat when he was thirteen. Now less than 4 years later he wanted a 47 footer! He worked on his dad every day for more than a year. When Charlie Fulton went bankrupt, Grandad’s dad, Walter Savage Wright, a successful lawyer, couldn’t resist. He bought the boat and it hasn’t been outside the family since.

Here’s a challenge. I challenge anyone to identify a presently floating yacht that was built in Southern California longer ago than 100 years. I’ll give you a rum drink, and you can stay aboard for dinner!

For those of you that can’t make it to Catalina this Saturday afternoon, come instead to our dock party on the 14th of August. Contact me for details!

Memes and the celebration of life

2010-07-24T17:23:00.000-07:00

Mom displaying the genes (but not the memes!) of her first born, Howard C.

24July2010
Death is really just like a candle coming to the end of its wick. The flame gets weaker and weaker till finally, poof, it disappears, leaving behind something new, the smoke of the extinguished flame.

When my mom died, she too left a cloud of smoke. Some of this smoke is made up of “memes.”

A meme is kind of like a gene. It is a cultural memory. Language is a repository of memes. The old memes are just the language, the new memes are slang.

Any “culturally transmitted” behavior is a meme. For example, sometime after the milk deliverers in England figured out how to put aluminum-foil lids on the milk they delivered, small birds (blue tits) figured out how to pull off the lids. Each tit didn’t employ his/her own trial and error process to learn how to remove the lid. Rather, he/she watched other birds successfully get the tops off, and then imitated them. Behavioural ecologists tracked the spread of this cool meme from its source, all over England. This is a classic meme. It is a culturally transmitted idea that works.

We all leave meme’s behind when we die. One of my favorites from Mom is what she says when things are getting intense: “Oh, gosh”.

But at Mom’s “celebration of life” (this term is a classic meme that tons of individuals picked up on and re-used) I was amazed at the richness of the meme’s attributed to her.

For example, people were uniformly impressed by Mom’s frankness. This honesty sometimes hurt, but ultimately, it gave comfort because it meant Mom wasn’t hiding anything (this is the extreme version of that meme). I kind of expected this one, and it was widely expressed by her near and dear.

But what surprised me was the apparent strength of Mom’s memes. Women referred to Mom as a role model! Really? My Mom? Mother of 3 boys? A role model for young women? Yes, indeed! Lots of women (young and old) told their stories of how Mom was their role model. You could see other women in the room involuntarily nodding their heads. Everyone saw the nodding, thereby strengthening the meme even further.

I had NO IDEA that Mom’s memes would be so strong. Pretty cool, really. From that extinguished flame came some meme smoke hardly visible (at least to me) while the flame survived.

It is kind of sad, but true, that most memes, like most genes, eventually go extinct. Virtually all memes that do survive lose the connection of the meme to its originator. Exceptions include, e.g., Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?”; Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”; Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Yet, some memes survive for a very long time. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand what I am writing.

But the fact remains that most of us will die without leaving many memes behind. Most of our memes will be unrecognizably swallowed up by the culture we live in, or perhaps just go extinct on their own.

Oh, gosh.

I don’t know how long Mom’s memes will survive. But, there are at least some of us living today, that won’t forget her crazy notions.

Trust the trail

2010-06-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

The Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory, where I am doing research right now, is the most amazing place. Besides all the water and the diversity of sea creatures, there is this drop-dead wow beauty. It is set on a peninsula of maybe a couple of square miles of just amazing old-growth pine forest. They have a hiking trail that goes through this forest. Everywhere you look there are giant pine trees, but even more amazing are the fallen trees. No one can take anything out of the forest, so the fallen trees just get covered with moss and gradually rot.

So I’ve got my running togs on (I forgot my hoody in California, so it’s just my shoes and socks and shorts and t-shirt). First day. Jogging up the main trail. I see a sign “Shoreline trails.” Yup, that’s the one for me. I’m trying to keep a decent pace (cause I’ve been lazy recently and not run enough, so I’m trying to compensate), but the trail gets thinner and bushier, and I have to bend down low to get through the underbrush, and suddenly I realize that it is just a deer trail. Not meant for humans at all. Then I realize that this trail is not trustable, unless you are a deer. I reach the shore and turn left, go for 15 min or so, flush a bald eagle out of a tree (I’m not kidding here, the national bird, huge, beautiful). But now there is really no trail at all. So I realize I probably ought to head back. So I decide to walk through this old-growth woods without a trail (I could try to retrace my outward path but nah). It is overcast and the sun is almost down anyway. Ok, I’ll just walk back in the general thataway direction and find the trail I was on.

Man there are some stickery, beautiful, thorny, shrubs in those woods. I’m getting my legs cut up pretty bad, and I’m going pretty damn slow. Nobody anywhere. I’m not sure if I’m going the right direction. This is not going too well. And then I start looking for fallen trees aligned in the direction I want to go, and getting up on them, and avoiding the brambles that way. But some of these trees are 10 or 15 feet off the ground, and I become aware that if I fall off one and break my leg I’m in a pickle.

So I’m up on a huge tree trunk about to traverse its length. And then I stop. What the fuck are you so nervous about, Bill? You are in the most beautiful woods you’ve ever seen and you're worried cause there is no trail. What is wrong with you? Breath! Look at this place. Just look around. This is amazing.

But I can’t shake being nervous about what is going to happen to me. I get tangled up in briars and nettles, and it goes on and on. Getting up on fallen trees, balancing and testing them for rot and going very slowly along. I realize I am not as agile as I used to be. Not so much spring. Not so much balance. I’m dying. We are all dying. We trust this trail we are on, but ultimately at the end it betrays us. We just don’t know when. Maybe today is my day.

But maybe it isn’t.

Whoops. There’s the trail. Of course it is. So I turn right, heading for the main trail, which I will take back to the labs, leaving this existential crisis in the nettles. So I’m walking along expecting the main trail any time now. Then I meet a couple of students from the labs. We’re talking, and they inform me that I’m actually already on the main trail. I've been walking in the opposite direction from the labs. Oh. Oh well, I might as well continue this direction then.

Jeezus, this story is long. The point is. That even when you’re on the fucking trail, you might be going the wrong direction. So stop being so damn nervous and look around! It’s so easy. Just look around. Just absorb the scene. Breath. Your trail will end soon enough. Just breath.

The earth breathed

2010-05-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

My mom died at 2 AM this morning.
The earth breathed, and the heavens moved over a notch.
Fare thee well, Mom.

Friday Harbor Labs.

2010-05-27T10:09:00.001-07:00

Sitting on a bus creeping through downtown Seattle on its way to Anacortes, a port on the east side of the Puget Sound. There I will climb aboard a ferry that will take me to one of the most amazing marine labs ever.

I first fell in love with Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories (FHL) in Fall, 1985, a month after defending my Ph.D. thesis at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I had managed to finagle a 1-year FHL postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Richard Strathmann, one of the most creative larval biologists of all time.

My family (daughter, age 9; son, age 6; wife, and I) just rolled into Friday Harbor, and I started coming in every day to do research.

It was unbelievably cool. I became a part of the small family of scientists that work at FHL year round. My job was to do research there, and when summer came around, to organize the weekly seminars. Not a bad job. I was in heaven.

Summer comes to FHL, and there is a steady stream of really interesting, deeply involved scientists. The people I met that year keep popping up in the who’s who of science (is there such a thing?). Many of them have become long-term friends.

But just the place, itself, is magic. The ocean there is just teeming with wildlife. A visit to the tidepools is just enough to blow your mind. Gobs of kelp of myriad different kinds. Huge chitons, big-ass barnacles, limpets of all shapes and flavors. Our friend, David Duggins, was skippering the research vessel, and he would put down a net and bring it up with hundreds of different species. In one trawl. It was like the jewels in the dragons cave. Just grabbing a handful of a net full of marine creatures; creeping and crawling all over the place, was breath-taking.

So here I am about to go to be part of the summer scientist influx (actually I’m part of the “pre-summer” crowd).

I am meeting up with crazy Leonid again. We are returning to our research on slug brains.

Now I’ve just arrived and found my studio apartment. Here’s the view outside my window. Pretty cool, eh? Work starts tomorrow. Tonight I sleep.

The intimacy of care-giving. Dear moments.

2010-05-23T19:40:00.001-07:00

I said goodbye to Mom a couple of days ago. My little brother had just arrived to take over the night watches. She barely registered my adieu, which is a good thing, because I would have melted if she had fussed. I had told her repeatedly during the previous nights that we were changing sons and I would be gone for three weeks. This interval pretty much guarantees I won’t see her alive again.

So, four separate watches (around 1 week each) I had, each one with a Mom in a very different state. I will always remember these watches. It was the first time my Mom and I had been so engaged since I was a little boy in her care. The fact that I was taking care of her (rather than she taking care of me) hardly matters. The emotional connection was very strong. The intimacy of these nights was really good for a couple of reasons.

First, the intimacy reminded me that I really do love my mom. You kind of forget this when your life is forging ahead and she is doing just fine in her own life. When an adult child gets together with his parent in normal circumstances it is usually just about exchanging narratives about your lives; her Alaska trip; my research trip to Catalina.

But now, there we were, Mom and I, many nights in a row. Physically engaged in a common project; the task of taking care of her immediate needs. There were some really cool moments during this project.

One thing I really liked was how she responded to being uncomfortable (e.g., a new pain, or getting tangled up in the bed-sheets). “Oh gosh,” she says. Nothing more. Just, “Oh, gosh.”

I mean, I would be saying “Goddamnit, I’m stuck again. Or “Shit I can’t move my foot.” But Mom always says simply, “Oh gosh.” It really sounds like what she might have said as a 7-year old. It sounds like something my granddaughter would say.

Another cool moment happened on my fourth watch (ending two days ago).

Mom was going through many long periods without saying anything. Now and then, I would ask her if she wanted to sip some water or “liquid food” through a straw. “No thanks.” Or, “Yes that would be nice.” But mostly she was very quiet. Sometimes, perhaps much of the time, this was because she was checked out, maybe perusing what was coming, maybe simply sleeping. But the quiet of my last night with Mom, middle of the night, was broken when she suddenly said,

“That bottle of beer looks really good.”

Bottle of beer?

I put my head next to hers and peered the same direction as she was looking. Perhaps there was something there that looked like a beer bottle. Nope, nothing there.

“Do you see a bottle of beer there, Mom?”

“No, but I’d like to.”

This just completely cracked me up. It was pure Mom.

“Would you like to split a bottle of beer with me, Mom?”

“That’s a great idea, Bill.”

So I poured her a glass of beer from the fridge (this was the only time she drank beer during the entire two months since I came back from Costa Rica).

We toasted each other. Mom used a bendy straw, and sucked her beer right down to the bottom.

“I’m going to miss you, Mom.”

“I’m going to miss you too, dearie.”

Breathing

2010-05-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

I hate jogging. All I feel when I run is the pain. What’s the point? And still I do it. I’m on sabbatical and there is a part of me that knows that the exercise rules and habits I adopt now might add decades of quality to my life.

I found a soccer ball while on a beach run a few months ago. Now, I push it ahead of me when I run on the beach. It makes me forget my pain. I kick it as far along the beach as I can (not very far; I played my first real soccer game in my 30’s), and run after it. Sometimes I kick it crooked, and it starts to roll down the beach slope into the ocean. NOooooo. I can’t let it go. This ball is saving my life! I sprint to catch it before the briny does. Almost every time I succeed, but the effort creates such an oxygen debt that I stand there at the seaside, arms akimbo, breathing hard, just trying to catch my breath, softly kicking the ball with my foot straight toward the high-tide line, and walking to where it rolls back down. Over and over I repeat this little kick-and-retrieve exercise till I catch my breath, and then start kicking it down the beach again.

Breathing hard.

Breathing hard is not what it used to be. I used to think, shit, what the hell did I do so wrong that I’m breathing so hard? I really blew it. Whatever I was doing, stop doing it.

But now I realize that breathing hard (short of a coronary) is exactly what you must do, at least once a day to keep from going down hill.

The last few weeks, I’ve been studying my Mom’s breathing. She’s going through bouts of breathing really hard. Not the good kind. This is the breathing hard that lung and liver cancer make you do.

Last week she was tossing and turning in her bed. My older brother describes it as her just wanting to crawl out of her own skin. Kicks off the bedclothes, breathing so hard you think she will burst. Jumps up. I gotta pee. Then she quiets down. Then she gets cold. I put the covers back on her and the cycle starts over again.

But the last few nights, she has taken another ratchet downhill. She is not getting up anymore. She can’t. She’s too weak to stand.

But still I listen to her breathe. Soft, peaceful; followed by labored, heavy, pained breathing. Cycles go on and off. Maybe 5-10 minute interval.

The other day, in spite of my best effort, my poorly kicked soccer ball rolled into the sea. It immediately floated away. I watched for a moment hoping it would come back, but I soon realized that the wind and current and waves were taking my ball farther out.

Somehow, this made me totally desperate. I swam out after this silly ball, soaking my brand new running shoes and shorts, totally ruining the rest of my run. But I saved the ball.

I still have it.

Honored Travelers

2010-05-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

These days, I am escorting an honored traveler. I am escorting her as far as I can.

I’ve done this before. Decades ago, two honored travelers came into this world. but they came from the other direction. Through the membrane between death and life they burst, like magicians appearing in a cloud of smoke. Then, they were the honored ones.

First, my daughter; then, my son. They emerged completely helpless, and their mom and I did everything humanly possible to keep them alive and comfortable as they moved away from that membrane.

Now, some 30-plus years later I am escorting another honored traveler, my mother.

She is traveling through that same membrane, but this time in the opposite direction. As before, my job is to perform the nitty-gritty tasks on this side of the membrane. The feeding, the butt-cleaning, the consoling. This nitty-gritty work is strikingly similar to 30 years ago; so is its purpose, which is to keep the transition true for the traveler.

My kids needed that nitty-gritty work to start them down the path of the living. My mom needs it so that she can cleanly, gracefully, make the transition to the dead.

Obviously different, birth and death; but being the escort is striking similar in both cases. Somehow in both cases, there is a strong connection to what it means to be human. This is what we do, we humans. I find a palpable sense in both cases that the nasty thankless work I am doing is bigger than I am. I can’t really explain it. But I’ve been struck by the similarity of these transitions. When things start getting really out of control, you don’t say screw it I’m out of here. You say ok, I am going to do this. That’s all there is to it.

There just aren’t that many activities where that mind-set ascends so clearly. So, yes, the feeding, the cleaning, the changing; everything; is all ridiculously, amazingly, similar. But even more similar is the feeling I have while I’m actually doing these things. I think in both cases I feel a sense of awe to be escorting an honored traveler.

Peer Review

2010-05-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

During the last 4 weeks or so, I’ve been (in the background) engaging our “Scientific Peer Review System” in an effort to get some of the research my collaborators and I have been doing out into the literature. In short we are trying to get a paper published.

Peer review is an amazing process. It is frustrating, maddening, enlightening, inspiring all at once. It is the bane of my existence, and it is my only claim to legitimacy. It is the core of science.

Many of my colleagues spend unending hours railing against the anonymous reviewers of a manuscript or grant proposal. If only the reviewers had read the paper! If only they actually knew the literature! If only they weren’t so caught up in the fashion of the day, they could see the work’s brilliance and originality.

I submitted a paper a while ago with my first undergraduate collaborator at Chapman as a first author. She did a great job of learning a new technique, of coming into the lab day after day and running experiment after experiment. She got “significant results”, which means that she found that something is going on. She wrote a first draft. I rewrote it, then she rewrote my rewrite, and back and forth for, well years. The data are good, the experiments “worked”, but the question of what they mean was not really clear. This is the critical question of all science: What do the data mean?

She got into graduate school in Japan, a very gutsy move, and has learned junkloads of new science there. She is fully committed to the science pathway, a commitment that is not for the faint-hearted. The second author is also presently in graduate school, and going great guns. She is also a toughie.

So that kind of toughness breeds reciprocal toughness (from the undergraduate mentor, me). We have to usher this study into the light of day. Into the light of peer review. Bright, startling, hot light. This is really hard. Like a sharp rock.

Because we had presented the data in a variety of scientific meetings, we had a pretty good sense of what the data meant.

Our peer reviewers did not share that sense. The paper is 11 pages of double-spaced text. The critiques we got back from the three reviewers covered 16 pages. All the good and all the bad of the peer-review system is throbbing in those 16 pages.

Science is not for sissies. This kind of a review makes you just want to beam the fuck up. Get me out of here. Give me a real job. Don’t make me look at this paper again. Really? I have to get in there and entertain every one of the 16 pages of small and large criticisms?

Yep. That’s right. That’s what you have to do. Stop whining and get to work.

And now we are almost done with that. Every single critique, large and small is in our 10-page (single-spaced) response letter. The manuscript itself has been reworked, not beyond recognition, but to the point of “wow, that is a shift.”

Revising a manuscript is a little like the rough side of being married. Someone, more or less just like you, doesn’t agree with what you are doing and thinks you should change it. If you don’t respond at all, there will be consequences (you won’t get the damn thing published!). Doing nothing is not an option. So you grab each aggravating, sometimes embarrassing (it isn’t uncommon for a critique to make you realize how little you actually know), comment, and work it. Think about it. Look up articles that deal with it. Write and rewrite.

Then a little magic happens. As you get more familiar with it, you start to see the critique for what it actually is. Not for what the damage it can do you, or for the biased perspective of its perpetrator, but for the strength that it can give your work. To know the way 3 or 4 smart people think about your work is a gift from the gods. It makes it much stronger. You have to preserve its core with love, but these changes are little miracles of science.

So. All that is fine and dandy, but will the paper get published? Stay tuned.

Teamwork

2010-05-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

All hands! All hands on deck! Let’s go.

This is the start of a night-time sailboat drill. I write “all hands” cause I know that is the cry of the crew on deck. Yet I have no memory of hearing it from my bed. I’m being pulled out of the deepest sleep into a flurry of coordinated, precision teamwork. I am still sound asleep for the first few moments as I head for the main hatch. Got to take down the spinnaker, quick before the wind tears it to shreds.

But here’s the thing. I’m not in a sailboat race here. I am taking care of my dying mom at night. Her labored breathing on the monitor cues me that she needs help. I am rushing through the door that separates us, not sure what I will find.

Night time is scary and beautiful and tranquil and terrifying. All at once.

Just like a sailboat race, I’m called out of the deepest sleep.

Just like a sailboat race, I don’t exactly know what is going to greet me as I come onto the scene. Is she rising to get out of bed, is she out of bed, did she make it to the commode without me, did she fall on her face in a pool of pee and anguish?

Just like a sailboat race, I will need to integrate myself into a working team (my mom and her addled brain), who may not be doing things the way I would. Ok, let’s get you over to the pottie. Mom, you’ve got to move your feet just a little bit (the pottie is right next to her bed). That’s it. Good. Close enough. Now sit down. Good… she pees… The crisis settles a bit. Everyone knows what to do next. Let’s put on a new set of undies, Mom. Here they are. Mom, you awake? Ok, then, let me get it started. Lift your foot. Step in. I’m going to pull it up a little. Ok. How bout you stand up now. Mom are you awake? Let’s stand up so you can go back to bed. That’s it. I’ve got your nightie, so pull up your panties… that’s it…back toward the bed…put your butt down, Mom… lie back. Bella (the cat), you’re in the way… brush her away... Ok, Mom I’m going to lift your legs onto the bed. There we go. Good. ..pulling on the covers. You OK, Mom?

I look out at the moonlight on the water outside her window. It is perfectly calm out there. Not a ripple on the bay. A beautiful May night.

It makes me consider what I’m doing here. That’s a long story.

Good night, Mom. I love you. Don’t forget to call me when you need to go again.

Just like a sailboat race, this campaign of care; the nightly pattern of peeing and pantie changes; will end.

Just like a sailboat race, I look forward to the end.

Just like a sailboat race, I know I’m going to miss it when it is over.

Unlike a sailboat race, when it is over, my brothers and I are going to quietly let the vessel sink. And step back onto our own vessels, and sail on.

Adrenalin

2010-05-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

Adrenalin

Just got back from presenting the lobster attack-in-reserve story to a bunch of evolutionary biologists at UC Santa Cruz.

I was an undergraduate there a million years ago and did a (for me) seminal piece of research under an amazing Marine Biologist, John Pearse, who, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, encouraged me to keep on being a marine biologist. Instead, I sailed with my first wife and big brother and his first wife on their little boat for more than a year.

Anyway, back to my visit to UCSC on Tuesday. Giving a talk is really nerve racking, especially if your data are new, as yet unpublished. Not sure if your story will survive the scrutiny of peer review. Plus, my night work taking care of Mom had depleted most of my concentration stores. But I managed to get it together, in the San Jose Airport actually, where the quiet and high-speed internet are awesome.

I was hosted by one of the coolest scientists on the planet, Jim Estes. This guy studies the ecological effects of cute little furry sea otters. They, like lobsters and sheephead inside the reserve, are what we call keystone predators. They eat urchins, which if unchecked, will eat a kelp forest right down to the bed rock. Add a population of sea otters to an urchin barren, and within a couple of years, viola, a beautiful kelp bed full of big fish and lots of new invertebrates.

The chair of the department at UCSC, Pete Raimondi, and another faculty, Mark Carr have pretty much written the book on marine reserves, so my coming in and telling all these guys that “it’s the behavior, stupid”, was a little unnerving.

Very unnerving actually. Giving a talk is a little like what I imagine rock musicians go through. Lots of adrenaline pumping through your veins. Your are up there naked, vulnerable. The scene in “Blues Brothers” comes to mind; when the band is pelted by beer bottles and anything else the angry mob can get their hands on.

Back to the sail-boat ride with my brother. When it was all over (January, 1975), my first wife and I were kind of shell-shocked. Months on end of idyllic sailing and surfing were over.

“So,” I said, “What do you want to do with the rest of our life?”
“I dunno,” says she. “What do you want to do?”
“Well,” says I, “I think I want to be either a rock musician or a marine biologist.”
To which she answers, “Well your voice isn’t very good.”

That is how I came to be a marine biologist.

But last Wednesday noon I felt the adrenalin surge of a rock musician going to the cyclone-fence bar for a gig.

But the mobs liked it! They asked great questions. Made me think. Made me wish I could be at a graduate University where lots of good scientists are talking about their work all the time. Saw some pretty stressed-out graduate students, though, which reminds me why I like Chapman so much. Everything is a trade-off

Looking to the Side

2010-05-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

My Dad taught me how to find a distant light house when at sea on dark nights. “Look” for it to the side of your gaze. Sounds weird, but it works. You can be staring right at a dim light and it isn’t there. Shift your gaze 10 degrees to the left, and pop, there it is.

My mom looks at her needs that way (-my words preceded by dash).

-Mom, do you have any pains?
No, I’m fine.
You know, I’ve kind of been wondering if my liver is stretching or something.
-Does your belly hurt?
No.
Well maybe a little.
-So, on our pain scale (1-2 tolerable, 10 excruciating) how would you rate it?
I don’t know.
-Really, Mom? Cmon, give me a number, so I know what kind of pain medicine to give you.
I told you I don’t know, Bill.
-Ok, is it a 7?
Oh, no.
-Ok, how bout 3?
Well, no, it is more than that.
-Ok. How bout a 5?
No, actually it’s a bit more.
-6?
No, more.
-How bout 7?
No, I already told you it isn’t that high.
-Ok, then it is a 6 ½. I’ll give you some Tylenol with codeine. Is that alright?
That would be fine.

Now, readers, I would ask you to be a little like my mom. Don’t just stare blindly at the fact that she is dying. Look to the side. If you talk to her or visit, make it seem spontaneous. The direct approach just makes everyone uncomfortable, and blinds the flow of information. Looking to the side opens up the channels. You can much better see the depth of things.

Why is there cancer?

2010-03-25T22:22:00.001-07:00

Evolutionary biologists are constantly wondering why things are the way they are. I’ve bored you all with a rather esoteric example: Why would a slug lose its ability to learn?

Here’s another one, a little closer to home: Why wouldn’t the human body evolve mechanisms to fight cancer? Why hasn’t natural selection eliminated cancer long ago? Surely a mutation that prevented cancer would confer an advantage. This is pretty puzzling.

First, I have to hasten to say that our bodies DO have cancer fighting mechanisms. Lots of them. They are found at many different levels (molecular, cellular, immune system). These mechanisms do a really good job. It is actually quite amazing that we live so many decades. Such longevity is very rare in nature.

But why do OLD people get cancer more than young ones do? In fact why do old people get feeble at all? In short, why do we senesce? Surely individuals that don’t senesce should be better at surviving that those that do! Makes sense right? If you don’t senesce, you live longer cause you don't die of old age. But if you are smart (which I’m not), you realize that ,,, it depends!

One of the greats of evolutionary biology, George C. Williams realized this back in the 50’s! Williams proposed the idea of antagonistic pleiotropy.

This is a mouthful, but the idea is quite simple. These are genetic “deals with the devil.” If my actuarial table says I am on average going to be eaten by a saber-toothed cat sometime before my 30th birthday, then genes that improve my chances of fighting cancer when I’m in my 80s don’t do my lineage much good. They will not spread very quickly by natural selection.

On the other hand, if a mutation comes along that actually INCREASES my chances of dying of cancer in my 80’s, but, at the same time, ENHANCES my ability to fight saber-tooth tigers during my first 3 decades, this mutation it will have a big advantage. Cause the bad part of the deal (cancer in my 80s) is hardly ever seen (cause I’m usually already eaten by a saber-toothed tiger long before I’m 80), while the good side of the deal is ALWAYS realized. With my new mutation, I, and my descendents, are able to better avoid saber-toothed cats, thereby living on average 5 years longer till the grand ole age of 35 (and produce a couple of more kids). If we happen to be lucky and live to be 80, the devil takes us and we die of cancer. But overall, we have more babies than the lineages that didn’t get to take the deal, so we have more babies. Now each time one of these "deal-with-the-devil" mutations arises, natural selection takes the bait. Thus, lousy genes that kill us when we are old build up. Viola, senescence, i,e., ower fitness when we are old.

Williams posed this possibility as a very logical, very powerful hypothesis. Of course, in science, this doesn’t make it right.
More later.

A Gift

2010-03-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve been given a gift from the gods. I am on sabbatical and my Mom is dying. This means I can arrange my work schedule so I can be with her. Functionally I can help by watching out for her at night. Metaphysically I can process her decline and maybe finally become a grown up.

Because I have to admit I have not really experienced death so much. I was at sea when my dad died. My grandparents’ deaths were pretty much hidden from me. My sweet wife was very much present for each of her two parents’ deaths, but I wasn’t really there. Although watching her live through those passages gave me a sense of what it is all about.
So here I am. I’m using you, mister blog, and you blog readers, as a crutch. Perhaps writing from the perspective of the professor-on-sabbatical that I am supposed to be will give me a stable platform.

Biologically, cancer is a strange affair. It is really all about a cell of your body staging a revolution; reverting to its ancestral state, a single cell trying to grow and divide faster than all the other competing cells in its neighborhood. Somehow, this cell manages to slip past a huge number of checks and brakes put up by your body to prevent this evolutionary reversal. These checks and brakes work very well when we are young, but they tend to wear out as we age. Seems like everything wears out as we age.

Actually, recent research is finding that cancer has a wide variety of forms. Remember me writing about the “transcriptome”? The list of all the genes that are activated in particular cells? Well, cell biologists are now frantically categorizing particular cancers by their transcriptomes. It seems that each clone of cancer cells (e.g., tumor), be it a lymphoma or brain cancer or colon cancer, has its own distinctive transcriptome. The hope is that by characterizing these cancers’ transcriptomes, we can ultimately design therapies, specific to each cancer, that can re-instate the discarded checks and brakes, and stop the cells from their incessant growing and dividing.

Most of you know this, that cancer is a multiheaded monster. Eventually, maybe even in my lifetime, scientists will know enough about how to fashion specific weapons for any ugly headed cancer cell that crops up.

But not in my mom’s lifetime.

Not in the brochure II

2010-03-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been here with Mom for a week plus. I’m here during the nights, Milan, Mom’s caregiver is here during the days.

Mom is very weak, but still very much alive. She has received a steady stream of visitors. They all go away scratching their heads a bit. Mom is on hospice, meaning that she is not relying on medical doctors to help her fight her cancer. There’s way too much of it multiplying way too fast, and her 82 year-old frame cannot take the chemo. But she doesn’t act at all like a dying soul. So her friends leave their from these visits perplexed. They expect to see Death’s cold hand on her, but don't. She is kind of a live wire on a death bed.

But that cold hand is not far away. Her balance is deteriorating daily, her appetite is minimal, her breath is short, and her concentration episodic.

So, we are starting down the waterslide, and this one has no safety net.

Not in the brochure

2010-03-21T22:17:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following around 10 days ago. I’ve delayed posting it till now.
_______________________________
Here it is, the 10th of March. My mom’s had cancer for 2 years. Now it is starting to get the better of her, as cancer so often does. She’s got it in her spleen, colon, lymph nodes, liver, and lung. That is a significant fraction of the viscera available to take down. She’s 82 years old, and gone through the gauntlet of chemotherapies, and this is where she is.

She is dying. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe next week, or the next week, or the following. We don’t know.

I arrived in Costa Rica, heard her voice on the telephone as she got worse, and realized I was in the wrong place.

I missed my dad’s death. I’m not going to miss my mom’s. I will be there with her. Somehow I have to suppress the dread of empathic recognition, and the palpable feeling of a hole where she will be exiting. Or maybe I can just live in all of it. But I will escort my mom out of here.

On the flight home, I sat on the plane with a young woman whose dad had died 3 years ago of Wegener’s disease. I think that is the name she used. I’ve never heard of it. Neither had she. She had only a few years before been let in on the fact that her mom had multiple sclerosis. So she and her sister and dad were all watching out for mom, when her dad got pneumonia as a consequence of his disease, and up and died. Now her mom is transitioning from barely walking to not walking.

This shit isn’t in the brochure.

I watched a Robert Dinero tear-jerker on the plane out of the corner of my eye. I saw it coming from a long way away and didn’t purchase the earphones; there would have been a flash flood if I had. This is a turbulent time in my life. Not a bucolic sabbatical, but a tumultuous one.

The director of the biological station in Costa Rica had some keen insights to all of this. First he said, “you are doing the right thing”, that is by cutting my research month short at 10 days to assure that I am there when Mom dies. He had missed his mom’s death 40 years previously and is still not over it.

Through all of this, I try not to lose track that this is the natural order of things. The same director also recalled his days in Ghana. There, the death of a parent is a cause for a happy celebration of a natural milestone. By contrast, the death of ones child is considered a dark, dark day. I like this dichotomy. I hope when it is my turn my kids and I can mark my imminent passing in a spirit of celebrating all that is natural.

But all this natural order of things doesn’t much change the hole I’m feeling.

Getting Wet

2010-03-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

Allright, enough molecular already. Hopefully you at least got a sense of what we are doing. Something in the brains of Aplysia (California) and Dolabrifera (Costa Rica) is different, because the former learns and the latter doesn’t. We want to find out what. That is the how question.

But we, that is I, also want to figure out why.

This question is much trickier. Why don’t these Dolabrifera show sensitization? Why don’t they learn? Part of coming to Costa Rica is to get insights. How do we do this?

You know what Yogi Berra says, don’t you? You can observe a lot by just watching.

Put your head in their world and just be there. Here is Leonid putting his head into the world of Dolabrifera.

Here is what he sees.

An active, responsive slug. Dolabrifera movements are quicker than those of Aplysia. During low tide in the noon-day sun, these slugs are all over the tidepools doing this. They are anything but dullards. The intuition I get from watching them is that they couldn’t have LOST sensitization, like an absent-minded professor. Rather they would seem to be actively suppressing it. If these slugs were sensitized, a wisp of water current would stop them in their tracks. Reduce them to a little ball of slug jelly. That’s what happens to Aplysia. But Aplysia’s ecology seems much slower paced to me. Maybe they can afford to be a slug ball some of the time. Here’s a representative video from you-tube.

Aplysia in situ

This guy covers much less ground, and his muzzle (called proprodium) is not nearly as quick. He won’t be slowed down much by a strong withdrawal reflex. How bout you all? Do you see any differences that might explain no sensitization in Dolabrifera, and lots of it in Aplysia?

What's Going On In There?

2010-03-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

I first met Leonid at a huge Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta I think. I had read a little of his molecular magic. That is where I first heard the term “transcriptome.” This is similar to a genome, which is the entirety of the genetic material stored in the DNA in the nucleus of the cells of a particular species. The first genome to be sequenced was the human genome, an effort that was HUGELY expensive, but totally cool. Bottom line: a genome represents all the potential genetic instructions of an individual.

By contrast, a transcriptome refers to all the genetic instructions that are actually being sent out to the rest of the cell (by the process known as transcription). Transcriptomes are species specific, but they are also tissue specific, and even cell specific. These instructions represent a subset of the genome, but they also represent what the cell does. For example, the Beta-cells in the islets of Langerhans in your pancreas have one job, and that is to produce lots and lots of insulin to be used by your body. The genome of these Beta-cells is the same as all the other cells in your body, and very close to the now-registered “human genome”. Again, the genome represents genetic potential. But your Beta-cells shut down almost all of those potential genes. Their single function is to make insulin, so it is the insulin gene whose instructions are sent out in huge volumes for manufacture into insulin.

The transcriptome is different from cell to cell. We know that much. We don’t know much about how transcriptomes of particular cells changes across evolution. For example, we don’t know how the transcriptome of different parts of the brain change across evolution.

Here's a part of the brain of an Aplysia (borrowed from Wikipedia). Each little yellow sphere is an individual nerve cell. This is the focus of our research.

The Seduction of Reduction

2010-03-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

So, sensory nerve cells (neurons) in the California sea hare increase their signal strength after they are exposed to serotonin, thereby causing sensitization. Finding this out several decades ago started a furious research effort by a bunch of competing and collaborating laboratories. This discovery is the portal into what Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize, 2000) refers to as the seduction of the reductionist program. Because the next question is how does serotonin do this to sensory neurons? Well there are a slew of special “receptor” proteins all over the outer membrane of sensory neurons, receptors that bind to the serotonin and activate a signal INSIDE the neurons. What kind of a signal? A second messenger called cyclic AMP. On and on this reductionist program meanders, asking more and more mechanistic questions to uncover each of the diverse links that lead to the ultimate increase in signaling that causes the increased withdrawal behavior that is sensitization.

Now many of you have probably glazed over by now, but if you did you’d be making a big mistake. It turns out that a huge number of these links are very similar or identical in YOUR neurons when YOU learn (but if you glazed over, it didn’t happen, so go back and read it again!). Neurobiological research on Aplysia has really pushed forward our understanding of learning and memory. So much so, that the really big researchers in this field are patenting “memory” drugs, based to some extent on the knowledge gleaned from work on this California sea hare.

But here I am in Costa Rica, far from the insanity of biomedically motivated research wanting to know something far more fundamental: How do learning mechanisms change across evolution? This particular example is the disappearance of learning. How did that come to be? To do this we have to go inside the neurons of Dolabrifera and search around for a smoking gun. A difference between Dolabrifera and Aplysia, that can account for the difference in the response of their sensory neurons to serotonin. Or a difference, totally unrelated to the sensory neuron difference, that is the real cause of their lack of sensitization.

This is where Leonid comes in.

Driving into the biological station, San Miguel

The Science of Collaboration

2010-03-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

Here’s Leonid coming into the airport in San Jose. This guy is a crazy Russian, in all the right ways. He is incredibly knowledgeable about virtually everything, but not in a Mr-Know-it-all way. Talking science with this guy is just as rich as rich can be.

I invited Leonid to come down to Costa Rica to make sure I correctly processed the brains of my favorite sea hare, Dolabrifera, so that he and his lab collaborators could do modern molecular magic and push forward our understanding of what genetic mechanism might account for this species singular inability to show “sensitization.” Sensitization, you might recall from earlier posts, is when an animal’s withdrawal response to a mild stimulus gets much larger following a “noxious stimulus”, traditionally, a strong electric shock. Sensitization happens in the California sea hare, Aplysia, but is completely lacking in the tropical sea hare, Dolabrifera. Two questions emerge:

What mechanism prevents reflexes in Dolabrifera from getting stronger after an electric shock?
What good does it do Dolabrifera to shed a perfectly good trait that all other sea hares seem to have?

These are the classic how and why questions one can ask of any biological phenomenon. These are where my research on Dolabrifera lies: figuring out how Dolabrifera fails to learn, and figuring out why it fails to learn.

I already have the faintest trace of an answer to both questions. Back in the 90s, my students and I tested 7 different sea slugs for a robust physiological correlate of learning. What the heck is that? Well, it is a careful term to describe something that might be a MECHANISM of learning.

It’s pretty simple, so here goes. Sensory neurons bring information from a light touch to the brain. If the signal is weak, the brain sends out a muscular response that is light. If the signal is strong, the brain says “pull hard”! The theory for what increases the reflex withdrawal in sea hares after they’ve been traumatized, is that the signal from sensory neurons in response to a light tactile stimulus gets much stronger after the animal is traumatized by say electric shock or lobster attack.

How does the sensory neuron tell the brain “pull hard“ when it is getting the same tactile stimulus that made it whisper “pull weak” before the trauma? It is pretty clear that the neurotrasmitter, serotonin is critically involved. When the sea hare is traumatized, this transmitter is released all over the nervous system. Serotonin changes the nervous system in so many ways, we are still making lists. But for our discussion, serotonin’s important effect is to cause sensory neurons that get a weak tactile stimulus to double or triple the strength of their signal to the brain. This makes the sea hare increase the strength and duration of its withdrawal response to the same weak tactile stimulus. Voila, sensitization.

In the 90s, my students and I decided to use neurophysiology to study this sensory response to serotonin in a variety of sea hares. In virtually all species, sensory signaling was increased by serotonin, just like it is in Aplysia californica. But there was one species, embedded in the family tree, whose sensory neurons were completely unchanged by serotonin. You probably guessed the name, Dolabrifera, the very same species we are studying here in Costa Rica.

So now, because of my research in the 90s, we know that Dolabrifera fails to show sensitization, most likely because its sensory neurons fail to respond to serotonin. This is not the end of the mechanistic questions, but rather the beginning. We know that sensory neurons in Dolabrifera don’t respond to serotonin. Now the question is what is it that is changed in Dolabrifera’s brain that prevents its sensory neurons from responding to serotonin?

That is where Leonid come in.

Good Omens

2010-03-11T07:49:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I drove down out of the clouds around the Arenal Volcano to pick up my molecular biologist collaborator (and now friend), Leonid Moroz. The drive was hellacious. They had closed the easy road and sent me to the busy busy road, and oh my gosh what a lot of slow trucks on a two lane road.

But I made the 4+ hour trip with at least 5 min to spare. Picked up Leonid, as well as two students (Heather and Sheldon), and headed back west toward the coast. We stayed at a hotel along the way, got up early the next morning, a couple three hours to the ferry and 2 more hours of dirty road, and we finally arrived.

Travelers take notice of omens. This is because there are so many things that can go wrong, and we want to know if something will. Of course add on the importance of good luck in research, and you have at least two very superstitious scientists.

We had omens galore to view. First was the fact that 4 different people coming to the airport by different means (two airplanes, a taxi, and a car) actually defied the odds against the rendezvous, and found each other without mishap.

Second was something that at first blush seemed like a bad omen. At the ferry, my three fellow travelers walked and I drove onto the boat. Lots of backing and filling and brusque ticans waving and shouting. I must admit to being a bit flustered by the operation, but in any case got out of the car and cleverly locked my only keys into the car. Aaargh.

I bet I was the brightest red of reds at that point. I sheepishly approached the “foreman of parking” or whatever they called him, and in my best Spanish explained what happened to my llave. Did I notice a smirk? He pointed me toward a grey-haired gentlemen, and shouted to him something unintelligible (to my ears), although it was perfectly clear what kind of things he might have been saying. “Hey Juan, another bungling tourist locked his keys in the car.” I walked over to Juan who told me to wait a minute.

10 min later Juan returned loaded with tools. A piece of cardboard (to prevent scratching), two good sized screwdrivers, and a magic wire already formed into a little wedge to capture the lock.

What I realized, as this guy miraculously slithered the magic wire into the narrow gap in the door held open by the screwdrivers, was that this apparently bad luck was actually good luck. People probably do this mistake “all the time” on the ferry. Well maybe not all the time, but the point is that because every car blocks out a bunch of other cars, ferries cannot afford to have any car stopped on their deck by some flustered soul locking in his keys. So they have a special guy who breaks into cars very well. If I had locked my keys in the car anywhere else in Costa Rica, it would certainly be many hours before I got back in it again. Bottom line: It was a good omen that I happened to lock my keys in the car in a place where the fix was right at hand.

Here we are, arrived, on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, set to start doing some serious science.

Fun and Wild III

2010-03-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

The next morning I finally, after all these years, went on a Canopy Zip Line. This ride was apparently invented during the logging days, when loggers would be way up to hell and gone high on a mountain cutting down old-growth giants. At the end of the day they just didn’t feel like struggling down the steep slopes, so they devised these wires, strung from tree to tree, and rode down on a pulley attached to a harness. Nowadays, this is huge business for the tourist industry. I’m guessing property owners can make orders of magnitude more money by zooming tourists over the trees than they do cutting the trees down. So I joined the industry and ante’d up my $45 (all for science you understand).

Once again (like the water slides), a big hunk of the adrenaline is knowing that you aren’t in well protected Disneyland again. You immediately see this is not disneyland any more by the happy and VERY dirty faces of the previous group.

The main assistant (There were three assistants and a photographer) gives us instructions, that were more him making jokes than useful instructions. Up we walk up on a man-made platform at the top of a ridge. Very high. Lots of Texans in the group. Everyone, including me, gasping a little. The guide making more jokes, this time very much more appreciated.

So who goes first? Of course, a guy that had done it before. So very cool to watch him float off the platform down the forest to the next platform. When my turn came, it was really exhilarating. Wind on your face, green everywhere. Just like your best flying dream. I used to do this as a kid from the highest avocado tree in our neighbor’s back yard, but this ride was orders of magnitude higher and faster. We zipped our way down a very high mountain. Here’s a movie of the middle. You can see one guy zipping way up high from right to left, followed by his fiancé coming right into the platform we are sitting on.

This was all fun and games, but everyone knows it isn’t safe. I mean the guides are really experienced. You are never untethered, so you can’t really fall to your death. But one of the women in the group somehow let go of her right hand, which is bad for two reasons. One is that letting go means your head goes down till you grab onto something else. Two is that your right hand is your braking hand. So suddenly we see something not right as Pam zooms toward us waiting at the platform. She has her head down by her knees, and she’s just going REALLY fast. I immediately looked at the guide, and watched him prepare for a “catch”. He braced himself for the collision, and caught her body with his right arm and shoulder and cradled her head with his left hand. Her out of control momentum drove them both back a meter or so. He crashed into the tree trunk (on which the platform was built) a little, but she was unharmed. Scared shitless, but unharmed.

I have never heard of these zip rides in California, I’m guessing because they just aren’t safe enough for our litigious society. But here they are everywhere. Again, the Costa Ricans have imposed layers of security on an otherwise really dangerous ride. But my point is the same. In Costa Rica they work hard to create an illusion of safety, whereas in California they work hard to create the illusion of danger.

Here I am thoroughly enjoying everything, illusions and all.

FunAndWildII

2010-03-09T11:54:00.000-08:00

The night after my water-slide adventure I stayed at a hotel (Arenal Paraiso) with acres of thermal pools. I wandered around looking for a good pool by myself, to soothe my aching knees (from scrambling over lava during the day). Found a good hot one at the very top. No one else there. Lowered myself in. Felt really good. Started to relax. Started to almost fall asleep.

Suddenly whoa! A snake. In the water. What the hell is it doing here? Then it started swimming toward me! Up I erupted, like a boulder flying out of a crater. Jesus. It was little, but isn’t it the little ones that eat you?

So that’s what I would call a “natural” hot springs, one that has an ecosystem. What if there were white sharks, and part of the fun was your participation in the food web? I went to a lower pool, but somehow I just couldn’t relax much. Here’s a movie peek at two of the well-hidden hotprings. Can you find a snake in the movies? Don’t tell me if you can.

So, would YOU ever expect to find anything alive in a 100-degree pool? No. Never. But that’s California. Here, anything is possible. I can really see how Michael Crichton started his novel Jurassic Park in Costa Rica. If a snake goes hunting for its meal in 100 degrees, anything, including T. rex, is possible.

Fun and Wild

2010-03-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I paid money ($39) for dinner and a soak in a hotsprings at the Baldi Hotel (I actually stayed in the Hotel Amistad for $25 dollars!) The Baldi is as ostentatious as you can imagine, but it has lots of hotsprings. And the thing that caught my eye at the tourist information booth when I saw the pictures, is that they have water slides that empty into the hot springs! Really? Water slides at a thermal hotsprings? I drove out there, paid my $39 dollars, ate my dinner a little too quickly, and changed into my bathing suit and started wading around and around and around. People, sidling up to bars, kissing in the shadows, laughing and talking in groups.

Baldi

I, skulking past them, looking for what? Warmer water? A pretty girl? No, the frigging water slides. Eventually I asked, and found they were even farther up the hill. Up I went, and there they were, three giant water slide exits into a giant thermal pool.

I casually slip into the water, a bunch of overweight 50-year old frenchies wading around socializing. I sidle over to the three slide exits, two of them covered tunnels, the third open. Where are the laughing 20-year olds? I saw a bunch down lower. Cmon, isn’t anyone going down this thing? Nope. I asked the apparent guide of the frenchies, is the water slide closed? No, he said, relieved (He was bored to tears, I found out later). You want to try it? Sure.

So up we walk. Up and up. Now it’s been a few years (actually a couple of decades) since I last went down water slides, and they were much smaller than this one. The man, who was a Tico (slang for Costa Rican), LOVED water slides. Oscar was his name. I asked him about this one. Well there is one easy one, one medium wild one, and one really really wild one. Sounds like the set up of a joke, doesn’t it?

Cool. What do you mean really really wild?

Well my first time down it I thought I was going to die.

Oh. Why?

Because it (and the easy one) is completely covered, and especially at night, is pitch pitch black inside. You can’t see the turns coming.

Ok. I’ll go on the easy one.

So, picture yourself me. Here I am, kind of wandering around impulsively doing things till my Russian colleague (Leonid, more later) comes with his molecular biology stuff. Always wanted to see this volcano and here I am about to ride a water slide full of its heated water. In the dark. In a country far, far away, where I know almost no one, and am traveling completely by myself.

But what the hell, right? It’s just a water slide. People don’t die on it, or it wouldn’t be here. So Oscar goes first, and then I go. Seated. Slick new swim trunks on (less friction). My first sensation is that it is just such a rush to accelerate. I can see the first turn and lean into it. Nice. And then the lights go off. Pitch black. I kind of guess which way to bank, and I guess wrong. Almost slam my head on the side of the slide.

Not a video game.

Suddenly steeper, faster. I instinctively lie back, holding my head off the slide bottom. Survival mode. The next few turns scared the piss out of me, no idea where I was, just banging from side to side. Skipped out the exit into the pool of frogs, and just about puked.

Oscar was laughing. How’d you like it? Uh, it was a little much.

You have to get used to it, he said.

So, I went back up, and got used to it. Tried the medium one. Open, so I could see. Very fun. Then I tried that one again, only this time facing down on my belly like superman. Very cool. Like a big body surfing wave. Tried the covered medium one belly down. It was fun too. But I walked away from that scariest one. Why?

Because Costa Rica isn’t like California.

In California, they try to generate fun and wild from a platform of boring safety. They build an illusion of fun and wild. The jungle ride, magic mountain, the matterhorn. All are carefully engineered, with emphasis on careful. Cause if they screw up; if somebody gets hurt; they get sued, big time.

But in Costa Rica, where it seems nobody gets sued, they take very scary things, like boulders shooting down a mountain, and build an illusion of safety. Somebody built a scary water slide. It isn’t safe. It is fundamentally wild. But they present it as if it is a California water slide.

Two more examples tomorrow.

Wild&Fun

2010-03-03T19:31:00.001-08:00

So what does wild mean? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. I’ve also been thinking about fun. What does fun mean?

Yesterday I was over at a National Park trail at the foot of the Volcano Arenal. This thing is a real volcano.
Volcano Photo
It goes up symmetrically, very steep, and its top has been covered by fog all but maybe 15 min of the last 3 days.

But after walking a well-tended National Park trail , you come to the end, where the sign reads don’t go any farther. You hear this funny noise along the way, sounds like wind on the video, but it’s not.

It is the sound of boulders rolling down the volcano, I should say flying down the volcano. Eventually, you notice, way far away on the side of the volcano, a fog rising up. Then, after some practice you see that this is dust not fog, and that it is being kicked up by big mother boulders shooting down the mountain from the top. The noise is the noise of these boulders, distorted by the very long distance away. Check out the video. You won’t see the boulders, but you can see the dust rising where they hit. Really cool. Really wild. If you happened to wander over in that vicinity you would die a terrifying death as you tried to dodge screaming boulders on the sharp lava rock.

So the question of wild is very interesting. Christian, a Tico (Costa Rican) economics major was interviewing people watching the boulders fall. He had interviewed them two years before and was trying to see if the “value” of the experience had changed in the interim. I asked him if it had. He wasn’t sure, or really very interested. But what he WAS interested in was the monkeys.

Two years before there were tons of monkeys. Now they seem to be gone. Christian is convinced that the exponentially increasing traffic on the trail has scared them away. Totally cool hypothesis. This kid should be a biologist, not an economist.

Now those of you who’ve followed my blog might recognize this effect as a strictly behavioral one. These loud tourists have very little impact on the ecology of the area. Just a thin low-relief trail. No changes to the vegetation, or run-off or anything. Just a lot of loud tourists streaming back and forth every day.

But the behavioral effect that Christian observed, probably correct yet completely unproved (because Christian never measured quantitatively the density of the monkeys), is that the monkeys moved away during the last two years.

This is kind of the reverse of the lobster effect inside the reserves at Catalina. There, the imposed protection makes the lobsters more aggressive (via hunger), and thereby changes the ecosystem (our hypothesis, as yet unproven). Here, the lifting of protection may be causing the monkeys to shy away to somewhere else (don’t know what the ecosystem effect is here, but I imagine it is pretty big).

Ecosystem managers tend to think from the bottom up. Maintain the trees and plants intact and everything will be ok. I’m thinking more and more, these days, that this approach leaves a ton of critically important questions about behavioral changes unanswered.

Here’s Christian standing by a big ole tree in the park.

What about the fun you ask?
Stay tuned.

Wrong-footing Around

2010-03-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

1Mar10

Wrong-footing around.

Came into San Jose, Costa Rica, near midnight night before last. To bed at the Hampton Inn. Slept like a log. Awakened by telephone. The delivery of my little 4X4, rented for the entire 4 weeks.

Everything is out of balance. My Spanish sucks. My sense of what the hell I am doing is very unfocused. Bad combination.

Just a scant week before coming here, out of the blue, I got an email from the Costa Rican fellow who was so instrumental in organizing a travel course I co-taught here 4 or 5 years ago. It was an intensive 3-week course with 13 students; TONS of logistics, a half-dozen different places we bused or floated to. It was really cool, but also very hard work, and I vowed never to do it again unless someone else did ALL the organizing. I even told Jose as much.

So literally days before I was to come to Costa Rica, and literally years since we last corresponded, Jose sends me an email, completely out of the blue, telling me he is ready to call my bluff and organize a travel course from top to bottom. I write back and say I’ll be there in a couple of days, can we meet.

Yesterday, Jose swept into the lobby of the Hampton Inn, and escorted me back into the real Costa Rica. The epitome of Costa Rica is that nobody uses street names. They use landmarks. Addresses are simply a hierarchical series of landmarks. Very confusing. Very wrong-footed. Especially for an entity such as Google Earth! When I looked up Hampton Inn on Google earth, I found no less than half a dozen in the airport area alone! Which one was I in?!

Of course, I neglected to consider that Google Earth could get anything wrong. That the descriptive algorithm of landmarks means ambiguity, a quality that makes computer algorithms burn up. There is only one Hampton Inn near the airport.

Jose got there early. He came with his sister and her husband. We reminisced and gossiped in the lobby, and Jose recommended a good side-trip to one of the volcano rain-forests, and even called a local lodge there. He was about to send me on my way, when I said, whoa. I want to see your new school! Cmon, Jose. Let’s go see it.

Wrong-footed in the right direction.

WakingUp

2010-02-27T15:24:00.000-08:00

Up at 5:45 AM. Brutal cell phone, doesn’t know how loud it is. Also doesn’t know that when I fumble it off, it doesn’t mean “snooze”. The second alarm reminds me how out of control I am.

One last check of email before heading to the internet desert that is LAX.

Check the coastal forecast just out of habit.

Whoops, Tsunami watch. Big quake in Chile, 8.8.

Google around for a while. Looks like Southern California has some protection. In 1960, a similar quake sent a tsunami that devastated Hawaii. Hawaii is on “alert”, so probably something will hit there.

For a marine scientist, or even someone who plays in the ocean, a tsunami is the strangest, beastly thing. It is as if your cherished ocean is transformed. Video footage of the big one that swept the Indian Ocean a few years back was jaw dropping. People perched in multi-story buildings watching the water level rise, a river of strangeness where there once was a predictable ocean. People who can’t climb higher are plucked off the building, and swept away by the irresistible current.

I think often how I would react if a big earthquake hit our home in Venice. What would I do? Would I scream at my Bird, “Get your wetsuit on quick, grab a boogey board we have to race to high ground.” Of course, high ground (greater than 40 feet above sea level) is a mile away. The wave period of a tsunami is 15 min. The odds are against us, if it is the 40-foot waves that rang the Indian Ocean’s bell.

Bird is asleep, fighting a new winter cold. The taxi is waiting for me. “Bird, there’s been a big earthquake in Chile. They’ve issued a tsunami watch for LA. Warning for Hawaii. Don’t think anything will come of it, but if you hear a commotion of police sirens or whatever, that situation’s changed.” Strange way to leave a loved one for 4 weeks. Still, I got a sleepy loving kiss out of the deal.

Heading to Costa Rica for a month. Everyone I talk to thinks I’m going there to surf. I guess I will have to surf to make them feel properly jealous.

But first I have to spend a week dissecting out Dolabrifera brains and carefully, cleanly, preparing them for a “molecular genetic analysis”.

Dolabrifera is the slug that doesn’t sensitize. You can give it as much electric shock as you want to, and its reflexes won’t get stronger. Do that to our California sea hare, Aplysia, and for hours it reacts to the slightest wisp of a touch as if the sky is falling. It pulls in, not just the piece that is touched, but everything into a round ball of cringing slug. Aplysia learns.

Dolabrifera doesn’t.

It is hard to believe that I’m sitting in LAX, swimming in the anxiety of travel; leaving behind my familiar house, my loving Bird, and the security of routine, in order to study a sea hare that doesn’t learn.

But I am. There you have it. Sabbaticals are the most improbable things. My colleague at Chapman, Walter Piper, has a verb for this, “Wrong-footing”. He likes to do it to his students, surprise them with a weird question, keep them off balance.

This sabbatical has been wrong-footing me. It keeps me off balance. It forces me to think a little differently. It wakes me up.

Here's Miami's mobile charging station (sent my blog from here). Fly to CR shortly.

2010-01-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

31Jan10
Ok, back from a behavior conference in Steamboat Springs (that’s me on the right, snowboarding!).

Lots of new ideas swimming around in my head after this conference. The Winter Animal Behavior Conference is a diverse collection of behavior researchers. They study the behavior of everything from computer animicules to bugs to slugs to lobsters to fish to birds to rodents to primates.

Note that most animal behaviorists lay off humans. The study of humans is a bit too dicey for most of us. The ratio of heat to light is too high. Any hypothesis, no matter how reasonable, generates huge controversy in the study of human behavior. The noisy heat of the controversy tends to occlude any light that is shed by the data.

So we study animal behavior. For some, the goal is to better understand human behavior. For the rest of us the goal is to understand general principles, and especially the evolution of behavior.

For me, the key reason for going to this conference, besides snowboarding my tail off, is to hear new ideas, to see what new experimental approaches are emerging, and sometimes to initiate collaborations.

This year was a gold mine. Amazing talks by a host of “newbies”. I’ll be referring to them in the next few postings. I told them about the ravenous lobsters of Big Fisherman Cove, and they liked the story. These guys are more interested in the learning than in the ecology (just the opposite of my buddies at the conference in November), but there is plenty of juice for everyone in this story.

Anyway, my next junket is coming up at the end of February. Off to Costa Rica to study the natural history of a slug species that doesn’t learn!

Stay tuned.

Biologicos Ambulantes

2009-11-19T14:32:00.000-08:00

The Western Society of Naturalists is driven by a kind of unstated credo, personified by the students of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, where I started graduate school one million years ago. Biologicos ambulantes is what we used to call it (I first heard this term from a forever biologist named Mark Silberstein). The idea is that you are hooked. You will always do marine biology, so don't pretend. You will move to wherever you can support yourself doing science. Graduate students at Moss Landing sleep in the backs of trucks. On old professors' floors, wherever they can. They party hard all night, and then get up the next day in time for the first lecture at 8AM.

Saturday night was the "auction". A raucous, hilarious affair, with drag queens and a noted scientist (unnoted here) with a killer stand-up routine. This guy egged the assembled nerds on and on, till the audience had coughed up literally thousands of dollars, all of which goes to next year's student travel fund.

Our research was well received. Although my reputation is as a cross-disciplinary neuroethologist (no relation to the previous paragraph), my buddies are mostly community ecologists of one sort or another. Greg Cailliet, Dan Reed, Jim Barry, Jim Estes, Mark Carr, Jim Harvey, John Oliver, Pete Slattery, and on and on. These guys are all excellent, established scientists, who do community ecology for a living. So I was a bit nervous that our "discovery", that a scavenger can be transformed into a raging predator inside a marine reserve, would either be rejected, or trivialized.

Neither happened. They were almost as stoked as I am about our data.

Here's a movie we showed next to the poster. Note the failure of the ink to deter the attacking lobster.

So Saturday night was pure celebration. The wine flowed, the bids flew. I finally dragged my ass to bed at 12:30, but the party was just getting going. Moss Landing Marine labs just missed winning the Tequila Trophy, but they readily helped the winners (was it San Diego State University?) swig down the tequila, as I was walking out the door. I heard later that the party spiraled up the ten floors of the hotel into the wee hours until "security" finally put the thing to rest.

But they were ALL there at 8AM for Jim Estes' lecture on the importance of top predators for the global carbon budget. I saw my ex-technician and undergraduate apprentice, Brian Hoover. This guy has the invaluable combination of smarts, off-kilter perspective, and rebel that will make him famous. He is almost already there. Well done, Brian. I see John going down that slippery slope into the briny, but we shall see.

Transitions

2009-11-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been crazy. Sunday I came off island with a raggedy-ann poster in my computer. The three of us have been trying desperately to get the data we need to make our points. Some luck came our way. The last caged lobster ate a sea hare, and the other cage with no lobster still had its original 5 sea hares. Now we write. But first, John and Dan had to pull out the cages and store them in a safe place. We will be deploying them again, as soon as we get our feet under us.

Here’s an embedded jpeg of our poster. John has printed out the 3’X4’ version, and will soon bring it to Venice for our drive to Monterey.

You can clearly see how damn BUSY this thing is. Blame it on the alternative hypotheses!

Every poster I’ve ever done had too much writing, and this one is a prime example. Dan will be standing up there ready to explain the poster in words to anyone passing by.

Pretend you are one of them. Oh, jeez, I'll never see all the posters I want if I stop here!

Maybe I will stop for a second, though. The map looks pretty cool (now click on the image and get the close-up; admit it, we've caught you)

Ok. Fine. You move on. I don't care. The behavioral findings in the first 3 figures are still the sexiest damn story I’ve been involved with for a long time. We are completely stoked.

So in an hour or so, John and Dan will show up, and we’ll drive my Prius up to Monterey, posters in hand!

Day before yesterday, I came off the supply boat at Fisherman's Cove, loaded with champagne and fruit for fruit salad, and “Jack S. Fogbound” fixings. I had invited Gerry Smith, our treasured Diving Officer, and a slew of other staff from the marine lab, over for lunch. We took pictures, and I toasted everyone. While the boys put away all the diving stuff and stored the cages, I made fruit salad and Jack S Fogbounds. The latter is an unbelievable sandwich that was invented by Shirley Brokaw in the early 60s when her husband and two boys (my buddies) owned a 26 foot tugboat with a tiny stove. You take a small French bread roll, cut it, smear it with mustard and mayonnaise, a couple of slices of the best salami you can buy, some sharp sharp Canadian cheddar from Trader Joes, some onions, then close it up in a sheet of aluminum foil. Pop 8 of them into a small oven at 350 degrees until it starts smelling nice (ca 15 min), and then serve to your 8 guests. If its cold, these sandwiches warm your hands as you unwrap them. Mmmmmmmm good, they are.

I toasted the staff for all their help, but mainly I toasted Dan and John. These two guys have been working like madmen for 9 weeks on this project, and earned not a dime. I am eternally grateful for that. Twas a rich wonderful campaign.

Then we kicked them out, went for “one last swim” (a Siwash tradition), and headed home to Alamitos Bay.

Worked 16 hours on the poster yesterday, and now we leave. Whew. Getting too old for this.

TestingAlternateHypotheses!

2009-11-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

We’re desperately trying to finish two posters for the Western Society of Naturalists Meeting. It is coming right up.

Here’s the story line for the lobster poster. You are all familiar with it already. Indeed some of you have actually driven it with your perceptive comments. But here it is again.

This research story is about how relief from fishing pressure can transform a species from one with little or no effect on its ecological community, into a keystone predator, whose eating habits have overriding influences on that community.

Our central hypothesis is that lobsters fished by humans live in a world of over-abundant food. When protected from such fishing pressure, lobsters survive and grow and compete much more strongly with each other. This drastically broadens their list of acceptable food, because they are getting very hungry.

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that lobsters outside of Marine Life Protected Areas (“reserves”) have never been observed to attack a sea hare. We found this as well. In addition, we found that a large percentage of lobsters inside preserves readily attack sea hares.

We have now actually tested several alternative hypotheses consistent with these attack observations.

H_A’s:

1. 1.) Lobsters are attacking because there is something in the water (perhaps crowding pheromones, for example) that directly makes them more aggressive. Rob, Howard, Chris

Test: Lobsters that attacked in the reserve were held in identical lab conditions as lobsters from outside the reserve.

This figure shows that lobsters caught off the preserve (we did not test these behaviorally, but their responses were 94% certain to be “no pounce”.) needed to starve in the lab for 7 days before they would attack a sea hare. The attack readiness of lobsters from inside the reserve depended on their behavior. Lobsters that did not attack proffered sea hares in the field waited statistically just as long as the outsiders. Lobsters that DID attack sea hares inside the reserve were ready to eat in the lab much sooner (a little more than 2 days). Because the conditions were identical in these experiments, the lobster’s state, rather than something about its environment seems to be driving its behavior.

2.) Lobsters that fail to attack a sea hare are just not hungry (Klaus). We finally tested this experiment with three dives, and it wasn’t nearly as scary as we thought it was. 86% percent of sea hares that showed no interest in sea hares, nevertheless pounced upon and ate (attacked) the shrimp we offered them. This isn’t a complete negation. These no-pouncers do appear to be a bit more shy about shrimp than the attackers, 100% of whom ate the shrimp. Nevertheless, it appears to be primarily the unacceptable taste of sea hares, rather than a general aversion to eating, that explains the absence of pounce/attack behavior.

3.) Lobsters only eat sea hares because they are dropping out of the sky. Attached, “normal” sea hares would be unappealing (Rob and John).

Our cage results are in. We performed 7 different control enclosure experiments, i.e., provisioned for 1 or 2 days cages with 5 sea hares in them. We lost no sea hares (!) in these controls. By contrast, when we enclosed lobsters which showed attack behavior, we found that 6 of the nine enclosed lobsters ate at least one sea hare, and some ate as many as 4 animals per day!

Things that go bump in the night.

2009-11-08T10:02:00.000-08:00

I have a good friend who was once swallowed to the chest by a great white shark erupting from below him as he treaded water off Point Conception. The shark spit him out in mid air, and he miraculously survived. I heard the story from him a couple of years later, and as he bent his legs into the position they were caught in by the shark, the scars came scarily into register, forming a perfect shark jaw.

But what really sticks with me is when he said that the only inkling he had that the beast was organic, and not some inanimate submarine or torpedo, was that he could feel the torque of the tail strokes as the shark rose out of the sea. I have no idea how Rob ever gets back in the water after that, and have nothing but awestruck admiration for his continued “waterman” existence.

A few nights ago, the three of us were together, diving, again. We decided to do the lobster-seahare-shrimp shuffle that we do so well. I looking forward to inhaling and exhaling to stay a little up, and descend a little as we present first the sea hare, and then the shrimp. We cut up some jumbo shrimp, cause that is all we have, and putt out to see if we could do the dance again.

What happened to the magic? It started with the dive plan. John was to hold and present the sea hares. As soon as the lobster responded (or not) to the sea hare, I would move in with the shrimp. Dan was lighting and filming. I decided to increase our overall efficiency, so I told John to go ahead and look for more lobster nearby during the short time I was presenting shrimp to the subject lobster. Dan didn’t hear me say that.

Second, there was a bit of a surge running. Not enough to dominate, just enough to throw you off balance.

We moor the whaler to Siwash on the buoy closest to the south-side cliffs, get our gear on, and descend.

John presents to the first lobster. No Pounce. This is the critical behavior for this dive, for our contention is that lobsters will reject sea hare as food, but not food in general. I descend down with the shrimp, by exhaling to sink, but the surge throws off my presentation. Meanwhile, John has moved on as instructed. The lobster finally attacks the shrimp, as we had expected. Fine. But the lighting to record this behavior is gone. I look up, and Dan is swimming after John who has located another lobster. I try to motion to Dan to stay with the lobster while I present the shrimp, but I’m not at all sure he gets what I mean.

It’s dark. The visibility sucks, and we’re moving back and forth with the surge. John is getting frustrated. He spooks a couple of lobsters in a row; they tail-flip before he can put the sea hare on them. I’m feeling the creeping frustration. Finally, John does a successful presentation. Another No Pounce. I move in with the shrimp. Can’t get the shrimp to the lobster for all the surge. The lobster is moving, but not yet spooked. Finally he runs into the shrimp. He attacks, and again the lighting suddenly disappears. Exasperated, I look around for Dan. He’s chasing John again. I’m breathing hard. Suddenly, wham! Something hits my tank so hard I feel a little whiplash. I’m startled, and a bit angry cause I think it is either Dan or John. I look over my shoulder and there is a HUGE shape there. I remember uttering a loud shout, very much like I do in a movie theater when the monster suddenly attacks. I turn to face….......... an overhang. We had moved into an unfamiliar area that has a very high rock with an overhang. Apparently, my frustrated breathing had made me more buoyant and less aware, so I was floating up, probably pretty quickly. I THOUGHT I was staying in one place so when I hit the rock, it felt like something was hitting me hard.

I drop down to where John and Dan are. All this time, John just noticed I was having “buoyancy control problems.”

He moves his hands like the umpire calling the runner safe. This means stop and adjust your buoyancy compensator until you are neutral again. I do this. Adrenaline still coursing through my veins. I think of my friend in the jaws of an inanimate behemoth. Sometimes this life gets just a little too rich.

Experiments widen perspective

2009-11-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

Ocean is like glass. The Catalina Flyer is flying. I’ve just done my tet-a-tet with John and Dan; they coming to Catalina on the same boat I’m taking to the mainland. The boys are back from their Halloween activities to do some more research. Last night was very exciting. We’ve finally gotten our cages right, but, up till last night, still no data!

I managed to talk a CSU Long Beach grad student, Stephen Trbovitch, into diving with me, so we could end our latest cage-enclosure experiment.

Early afternoon, two days ago (two days after the gale), Dan and I planted 5 sea hares in the two now sea-hare tight cages. Couldn’t dive on them night before last, but last night Steven and I checked out the damage. Cage 2 still had 5 sea hares. Rats. They had all crawled up on the ceiling. The lobster was right next to a group of three of them, looking like he was ready to pounce. But we ended the experiment anyway. Caught and measured this not-so-hungry lobster and let him go.

Then, we went to Cage 1. This cage had only 2 sea hares! This is very cool, for the cage itself is now fully sea-hare tight. So this is our first unequivocal evidence that lobsters will hunt down sea hares that have had time to settle down. Again, we measured the lobster, and let him go.

So, this result means that Rob’s (see alternative hypothesis blogs) alternative that lobsters are only attacking sea hares cause we are dropping them out of the water column, is weakened. This also means that the student’s “handout” alternative hypothesis is weakened. The captured lobster in Cage 1 had to first shake off the insult of being captured and constrained in a cage. Then he had to forage for his dinner. He found the sea hares in a way he has never before done, not even remotely resembling a gift from a diver happening by with a handout.

So, Stephen and I set up the next replicate experiment. We went searching for attacking lobsters, and found a monster. Put him into cage 1, left cage 2 with no lobster as a control, and went back to the surface. Steven went to the Halloween party. I tested lobsters in our waterfront tanks (more on that later), and then worked on the poster for the meeting in Monterey weekend after next. It’s coming along, but time is running out. I foresee panic setting in this week.

Here’s the map Dan’s been working on (rough draft. I know, the legend colors are wrong). You can see the location (pink circles) of our 7 dives outside reserves and 14 dives inside them. Next comes the attack data as a function of location. Stay tuned!

Humbled by Gale

2009-10-31T23:42:00.001-07:00

Today on my swim, I enter the cove by the more sedate launch ramp. Hot windless morning, 3 days after the gale. I wade into the mighty chilly water. Oh my, it’s up to my thigh, oh fiddle it’s up to my middle. Ventilating now. I launch my crawl stroke. Fast, and breathless. Just a bit of brain freeze. That’s a first. Stroking hard to catch up to the cold. The storm must have turned over some water, and the crisp air since then has not let the water temperature bounce back much. Water is really clear, but also really full of drift kelp. Floating everywhere. Out I crawl, past the first set of moorings. There are my kelp bass greeters. There are the bat rays. Woah there’s a really BIG one. Out past the stern of Siwash. There are our two cages. I can see one sea hare through the mesh on the ceiling, but it is too far away to see all five of them. Maybe the attacking lobsters we put in the two cages ate a sea hare or two. Sure hope so. But they were pretty small little attackers. We’ll see tomorrow when the boys get back. They are off for Halloween weekend, perhaps the most important party weekend for people under 30.

Three days ago, I experienced some new adventures for me. A gale had been forecast for Tuesday night. I was coming out on the USC supply boat early Tuesday morning. The wind in the channel had already started to climb into the teens at 9 AM, so we all knew something was up. Arriving on the dock at 11AM, nothing seemed too off kilter. Siwash was riding on her mooring nicely, maybe 10 knots of breeze. Bring up all the food to the apartment, load it into the fridge. Talk with John and Dan about their recent dives and lab experiments.

I’ve brought a giant laundry bag from home. My wife and I bought it cheap, used, from a sailmaker a few years ago, and it has served well as an outsized tool for dragging lots of laundry to the laundromat. Now I’m going to cut it up to be a draw-string closeable entry into our Cage #1. The boys have pulled the cage out of the water, and we start working on it in earnest. I stitching from below inside the cage, Dan catching my loop and pulling his outside thread into my loop (if you’ve sewed with a sewing machine you will know what I mean; if you haven’t, no explanation will help. I know, cause I just came to the former side of that divide a week ago). In an hour, the half-bag is sewn on and the draw-string works great. John has attached (with zip ties) two pieces of pet screen to the old hatches. It all looks very sea-hare tight. Ok, let’s go deploy this thing.

By now it is around 3 in the afternoon. The wind is starting to blow, and Siwash is starting to buck on her mooring at Big Fisherman Cove. I had planned to help the boys deploy the cage and put in new sea hares in both cages. Now I decided to change the plan. You guys drop me off on Siwash, and I’ll take her over to the more protected Isthmus (Two Harbors) cove, and after your dive, you can come and get me. All ok.

I take a mooring at the Isthmus, but have some trouble getting Siwash secured. I drop my glasses into the water. Damn. Eventually, John and Dan come for me in the whaler. Their dive was a success. I ask them if they’ve enough air to look for my glasses. They do. They execute some perfect expanding squares that we learned in our Research Diving class last June, and eventually find my glasses. I reward them with a couple of quesadillas off of Siwash’s griddle, and we all climb into the whaler and head back to Fisherman’s.

We walk up to the apartment. We are starting to work on the Poster. It’s going slow. I cook a big casserole with some of the food I brought. We hang around.

Then someone notices the sound of the wind outside. Shit. It’s really blowing. Around 8 PM. We’d better go. John asks if I don’t need some help. Nah, I say, proud of my independence, and knowing that taking an inexperienced helper can often get you into more trouble than doing it by yourself. Down to the waterfront. Trevor has already pulled up the ramp from the floating dock. We jump off onto the now rolling dock. Pitch black. Noisy as hell. We have to take the little dock skiff out to the buoy line to pick up my whaler. The boys drop me off, and head back to the dock. Nothing is going easy, cause there is a shitload of seas and slop and wind. Finally I get the whaler free, and they get back to the dock.

All this time, I’ve had my head down, working on the rings and lines and hulls and engines to get the job done. Now, as I leave the semi-protected buoy ring for the open stretch between Big Fisherman’s and the Isthmus, I realize that the sea has been transformed.

The gale has arrived.

I remember reading Stuart Little as a young boy (and then reading it to my kids as a father). In it, the little mouse Stuart Little, gets a chance to sail a human’s model schooner. How cool, thinks he. He knows this little pond very well, and the human wants to win the sail-boat race. So they do it.

Just like Stuart, I think I know my pond pretty well by now, having sailed back and forth across it many times.

But just like Stuart, I find out I don’t know shit. This pond is no longer mine. It belongs to some demon. It is just howling out here. Moon giving me enough light to scare the bejeezes out of me. The seas were reported later to be 8-12 feet. All I know is that I had to use every ounce of my water knowledge to avoid big-ass whitecaps all over the place. Accelerating away from wave faces, searching for smooth backsides. I manage to work my way over to the Isthmus. Soaking wet now, and just a shade spooked. Expecting a protected anchorage there, but nothing of the sort awaited me. The wind was so far out of the North that big seas and wind were marching into the cove, creating a very ugly scene.

As I come alongside Siwash, I find myself looking DOWN on the deck as the whaler is up on a wave, and Siwash is radically rolled. Down the whaler comes with a “crash”. No fingers missing, though. I manage to get on board, shoving out the whaler before she does more harm. I find some dock lines to tie together to lengthen the bow line holding the whaler, so it will trail far enough behind so it won’t bang into Siwash’s stern. Siwash is hobby horsing like a little toy. The bow is dipping under water about every two minutes. The wind is HOWLING. Ok. Better check the hawser holding the bow to the mooring. Shit. When I moored the boat an eternity ago (actually less than 8 hours), when I lost my glasses, I forgot to move the hawser to the steel chock, where it can run back and forth on a steel wheel that rolls. Instead the line is just over the wooden rail. And now it is pulling so hard, you can’t even conceive of it. I am quite certain that it will wear through in this position. I look at it and scratch my head, and a big sea comes over the bow and totally soaks me again.

I realize that I am getting cold. I realize that Siwash is in a bit of a pickle. I realize that if I fall overboard with these clothes on, I will sink before I can get the clothes off.

So for the first time in my life at anchor, I grab a life jacket. I go down below and put on all the layers and foul-weather stuff. I put on the life jacket. Now let’s go work on the line. Up I go, and now I am a bit intimidated. It is pitch dark. The harbor patrol guys are cruising upwind looking at all the moored boats, then turning downwind, and surfing past me. I flash the ok sign. 4-foot breaking seas are everywhere. Now and then a 6 footer flies by. The other boats are pitching crazily, as is Siwash. The tension on that hawser is just as scary as can be. Knowing that it isn’t led right makes me really nervous.

So here is where I start swearing at myself. I can’t do what I’m supposed to do, because I don’t have an extra pair of hands. What I need to do is start the engine and push it forward hard, and give the hawser on the bow some slack so I can lay it over the chock, properly. But the whaler is going crazy back there, so I can’t do it. Every 6-foot wave yanks the whaler back and then it races forward toward Siwash. There is enough line so it doesn’t hit Siwash, but it is that slacking line that prevents me from starting the engine. That line will almost certainly get wrapped around a turning propeller if I try that operation. A fouled propeller is NOT what I want on a night like this. I can’t risk it.

Had I said yes to John and Dan, all this would have been solved. One of them would tend the line, keeping it out of the water as it wildly tenses and slacks, while I put the engine in gear and go fix the goddamn line.

But instead, I start jury-rigging things. I run an extra line from the winch on the mast, out to the chock on the bow, and make a loop around the outboard part of the hawser. I take up the slack and slowly grind on the winch. The line is stretching like crazy. But it this action moves the mooring hawser farther forward, so that a different part of it is pressing on the rail.

All this time, I’m not kidding here, green water is regularly coming aboard as we slam into wind driven, steep nasty waves.

I’ve never seen such waves while moored. Not even close. I’m thinking, “this really isn’t ok. Something is going to break.”

I look up at some shouting just a ways away, barely discernable above the howling wind. “Cut the fucking line, now!” “What?” “Cut the line.”

I can see a sail-boat, with its bow sickingly headed toward shore, two harbor patrols buzzing around it.

But then I bring my attention back to my boat, and shove a fender under the hawser, pushing it just a little more off the rail. The wind catches Siwash sideways, and she tips 40 degrees. The boat is bucking and rolling like a wild thing.

Ok, that’ll have to do. Now I just have to be lucky. I look for the distressed sail boat, but can’t find it. Lots of lights on the shore though. I hear on the radio that the boat ended up on the beach. I hear later that they just towed the mother off. If Siwash ends up on the beach, there’ll be no towing her off, she will stove her ribs and all will be lost.

But I will survive. I’ve got my life-jacket on!

Nothing to do, now, but go down below and monitor the conditions. I call my wife and tell her I’m fine. And then hang up and listen. It is now well after midnight, but it is very hard to sleep. Around 3 AM, the wind has slowed noticeably, making my worry lessen a lot. I sleep.

Still windy when I wake up at 11 AM, but completely normal. I find out later that the anemometer at Fisherman’s registered a gust of 56 miles an hour during my ordeal.

Holy shit. That’s a bucket load of wind. A new world’s record for me at sea. Perhaps because there just happened to be such an instrument, but still, worth marking. I also hear that somebody got “lost at sea” cause he put his 12 foot dinghy out to sea to help a friend (the whaler is 15 feet, in case you were curious). Then this morning, a search helicopter and airplane collided while searching for this guy, and 9 people were killed. Jeezus.

The next day, the wind is flat. The ocean is a very different beast. I bring Siwash back over to Fishermans. Our research goes on.

How to restore an ecosystem

2009-10-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

Heading across the channel from Catalina. Another 5 days gone. A chunk of work accomplished. We are seeing the end of the time looming. We can also see the body of work that is taking shape.

A few days ago, we did a lot of cage work. I’ll tell you about it later. But today, I want to start with this really cool observation, because it takes me somewhere worth considering.

While we were working during the day, placing cages and stocking them, etc., we noticed some REALLY big and REALLY curious sheepshead. These fish don’t get so big outside the preserve. They are caught by humans before they can grow that big. Here, though, there are some massive fish, with really big white grindey teeth. Just the right size to poke through the 1/8 inch mesh of our second cage design. These could very well be our Monster from Iron Bound Bay. We intended to replenish the cage to 5 sea hares, but I figured we had a “learnable moment”, so I offered one of the sea hares up to the biggest sheephead. SLURP, in it went. SPIT, out it flew. Then the teeth came out, BITE, out comes the ink. SHAKE, SLURP, and the sheephead swims away, John chasing and filming. The big fish spit and slurped a few more times, and then slurped for good. Goodbye mr sea hare. Thanks for teaching us something. Sorry you had to die.

Check out this movie:

All this was pretty humbling to my lobster-centric view of things. Here was a very mobile sharp-eyed sight predator, whose presence would seem to be anathema to sea-hare survival. It raises the awkward question of the relative impact of sheephead vs lobsters on not only sea-hare abundance, but the community in general.

Actually, this kind of realization is what most community ecologists confront from time to time. Most ecologists tend to work with “what’s there”, that is the beasts you think are the players in a system. But there is always a chance that you are looking in the wrong place. That the REAL driver of the system is something else, a bacterium you don’t have the tools to study, an extinct species, or an over-fished species.

This doesn’t mean your conclusions are not correct, but it does threaten them with irrelevance.

Here, we were, building that case that the shallow rocky near-shore environment, in the absence of human fishing pressure, develops a large, hungry horde of lobsters, which eats every animal in its path, including sea hares, but also species more destructive to the kelp forest, such as sea urchins.

Then, we watch this big ole sheephead chase after the released lobster (to no avail), and then eat our sea hare like a red-hot candy, and wonder, oops, there’s what we should be studying. This guy will eat everything. I bet he’d eat an urchin without batting an eye.

An old friend of mine (graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Labs and Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Bob Cowen, studied these beasts out a San Nicolas Island back in the 80’s. I didn’t really pay attention to his work, but remember him talking about the destructive powers of these big male sheephead. Now I see his point.

This all brings up a very important point from a management perspective. The California Department of Fish and Game has historically set size and bag limits according to a sort of “farmers” mind set. Let the fishermen take the biggest animals, but keep the breeders in good condition and everything will work out fine. In the case of sheephead, there’s a little biology that makes this algorithm work out well for the DFG. These fish change sex: they start life as a female, and when they are the biggest female “in the block”, they change to male and compete with other males for the females. Since there will always be enough males around to inseminate the females, we can set a pretty small size limit that won’t harm the breeding females, only the large males.

This is the population-level perspective. However, Paul Dayton, Jeremy Jackson, and a host of other smart naturalists decry this perspective. They want an ecosystem-level perspective. What counts to them is not the breeding potential of the fished species, but its ECOLOGICAL potential. In the case of sheephead, the species is not threatened. It has a passable yearly recruitment. It adjusts its age of sex change to conditions on the ground. Everything is OK, from a farming, or fisheries mindset. But these experienced, thoughtful, community ecologists say FOUL. You are robbing the sheephead of its natural ecological function. Even a low density of these big bad males, will keep all the primary consumers (e.g., urchins) at bay, eating the abundant ones long before they damage the kelp beds. So, with the fisheries approach, the population may be doing fine, but its EFFECTS on the community are a joke. They can’t shape the community as they have for millennia because they can’t grow big.

Same goes for lobsters. A big (say greater than 5 pounds) lobster is an entirely different beast than his sub-legal 1-lb son. The natural (pre-fishery) community has droves of these big guys (you can see that in the catches of the early part of the 20^th century). These lobsters very likely ate everything.

Of course this is all a great big hypothesis, but it is pretty well supported.

So what do we do, Mr. Science? Well, I’m just a cranky ole blogger with some new data, but here’s what I think anyway.

The fisheries people can start by considering these animals (lobsters and sheephead), not as sea-going pigs, which have a “maximum sustainable yield,” but rather as shapers of the ecological community. You need these big guys around, regardless of gender, because they shape your community, making it much more like the pre-human one.

Jeez, Capn Bilge. Aren’t you asking a lot of Joe Fisherman, who just wants his right to catch a fish, or bring up a delectable lobster?

Yes. But this HAS been done before. There is a doable pathway to this place. It starts with something called “slot limits.” This means you take only a particular size RANGE: nothing smaller than 3 ¼” carapace for lobster, but at the same time, nothing LARGER than say 5” carapace. There is already a little discussion about slot limits on spiny lobsters. Conspicuously absent from that discussion is the role of large lobsters as community shapers. Instead, most of the discussion regards a different consequence of large females; they produce orders of magnitude more eggs.

Both effects, together, make the argument overwhelming: 10-100 times more eggs released per square kilometer, and better control of urchin outbreaks. Slot limits rock. Let’s do it!

Too complex, you say. Can’t make the recreational fishing industry retool like that.

Yes we can. It has already been done. The trout fishery has TOTALLY done this. They have slot limits, and EVERYONE obeys them. Fishermen still CATCH the large individual, i.e., bigger than the slot. But then they take a picture and LET HIM GO! All over the Rockies the fishing people PRIDE themselves in this. There is almost a religion about preserving the big guys (maybe we should get Robert Redford to make a movie, “A reef runs through it” to give the lobster a human face). The river outfitters understand that it is these big bull trout, caught and released over and over again, that bring their business back to them, year after year.

By contrast, on Catalina, a lot of the poaching is by the people (not the majority, but a good chunk) who live at Catalina. You can see them out poaching every night. There is a titillating game of warden go seek. This is crazy. The locals should be the caretakers of the big bulls, not their assassins!

Ok. Here’s how we do this. “Give” the people of Catalina the Isthmus Reef. Nobody is allowed to fish for sheephead OR lobster on Isthmus Reef without a local Catalina resident on board. Pay for the resident warden to go to fishery school for a year, and pay them through fishing fees. Then let them oversee the protection of the “Big Bulls” on Isthmus Reef. Inform all the cattle boats with recreational fisherman, and get them on board. Put buoys around the reef with signs laying out the rule. No fishing without a guide. If you don’t have a guide you have to go somewhere else. Some macho fisherman from the mainland comes over, and tries to sneaks out with a big guy from the reef has a problem. Someone on the island, not necessarily even a deputized warden, catches this poacher, and he is in big trouble, and not just because of the fine. He gets a heartfelt tongue-lashing from someone who has grown to be proud of their reef full of “big bulls”.

Let the public fish the other spots without a guide, but give the responsibility of guarding Isthmus Reef to the residents. Pretty soon, something happens. People don’t want to catch a bunch of small lobsters and sheephead to take home. They want to catch a BIG beast. They pay extra money to fish or dive on Isthmus Reef, with a local guide. They bring home pictures. The word spreads. The reef has some MONSTERS. The island has employment. More and more Islanders get work as guides. But even more important the island has PRIDE. Pretty soon the present-day sub-culture of poaching changes to a energetic, even fanatical, culture of protection.

Please note that this is NOT a Marine Life Protected Area idea. That idea, as important as it is, does not integrate well with local culture. The idea of an outside authority imposing its will on the locals, many of whom have grown up in these waters, is proving itself to be too abrasive to fully function in cultural settings like Catalina. This idea is much more internal, and organic. Something like this has already been done on tropical pacific islands with the giant clam. I can’t remember the reference, but local communities pitch together to protect their cherished brood stock, close to their community, from would-be poachers. Seems totally parallel to the Catalina Island situation. Let’s do it guys. Come on Catalina! I bet you could make this work and REALLY put Two Harbors on the map.

Wow. The ferry just arrived. What a diatribe I’ve perpetrated. Sorry. Last time, I promise.

Lighten up

2009-10-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

You can tell we’re transitioning from how to do the research to how to present it. Here’s one way. It is a drop-dead gorgeous morning, glassy. I’m in the Catalina Express heading from the Isthmus, where they picked me up, to Howland’s Landing a little farther west, where we pick up 100 screaming kids from the camp.

This is my most favorite stretch of ocean and coast in the world. Bar none. The water is blindingly blue. The scrub and earth are shades of brown and green. The swell is an intriguing mix that invites analysis. There is only one yacht moored here. on this Sunday.

But here I am trying to decide whether I should apply a 3 or 5-cell moving mean to our waterfront behavior data. The WSN meeting in Monterey is looming large, and we’ve still not quite figured out our narrative.

So, in my data/laptop obsession, I miss the quartz-filled beach at Howland’s, where we now lie, waiting for the kids to board. I miss Frog Rock in the middle of the beach. As a kid, I used to wait patiently for the tide to go up so I could jump, better dive, from as high up the 8-foot rock as I dared.

I miss the quiet intertidal zone on the west side, where I, as a 7 year old, discovered crabs and anemones and tidepool fishes and moray eels for the first time. And where I still remember how I once slipped on a slimey rock, sliding down 15 feet on my butt into a rock pool a foot deep. I scraped my butt, I broke my toe, I drenched all my clothes. It hurt so bad that I shit in my pants.

Now that was a bad day.

But today, the tranquility of Howland’s as these little 7-year old boys load onto the ferry, reminds me to chill out just a little.

I don’t know why I feel such a need to establish this research. It is probably a variety of reasons.

First, it is a SCUBA project. I’ve never done one. All my graduate student friends did this all their early careers. Many of them have stopped doing it; it takes so much time and energy. This is my chance to catch up. There is a part of me that believes that you can’t really call yourself a Marine Biologist if you haven’t published data gathered with bottled air. This is nonsense of course. You can get data much more rapidly in the very same ocean if you restrict your observations to the intertidal zone.

Second, although this is only my second sabbatical (clocks have a tendency to reset when you shift institutions), this may be my last. 7 years from now I’ll be 64, and that’s pretty old for an ambitious place like Chapman to be granting a sabbatical request. So, if it is my last sabbatical, let’s make it count.

There are lots of other reasons I want this sabbatical to work out, but I’ll list them some other time.

Trying again.

2009-10-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Last night, John and I dove on the cage that Dan and I had deployed the day before. Fear and loathing in my heart. I noticed the gaps in the cage doors the day before, and figured those busy-body sea hares would just march right through them. When John arrived from the mainland, I bitched and moaned about the gaps as we started making the second cage. Different people around the Marine Lab had different suggestions. A student in the CSU zoology class out here suggested we just make it so the meshes overlap when the door is closed. The doors don’t really close like that. They are on loose zip-tie hinges, not solid ones. I got the idea of sewing a drawstring to the hatch and having a little Santa bag entrance to the cage to put rocks and lobsters in and out. The driver for the supply boat said cut some hose lengthwise and put them on the PVC to make a tighter fit.

We tried the last idea. It worked great in our as yet undeployed cage 2. Now, there are no gaps bigger than a finger. So we decided to take the idea down to the already deployed cage.

So how do you plan a dive, when you have no idea what will greet you when you drop down there?

Will the cage be ripped to shreds like the last time? If so, let’s pull it up and bring it back to dry land and get drunk.

What if it only has one hole? Ok, we mend it underwater.

What if all 5 sea hares escape? We put on the hoses and come back to the dock and get more sea hares.

What if 2 sea hares escape? We put on the hoses and go find an attacking lobster.

What if zero sea hares escape? We put on the hoses and go find an attacking lobster.

What if we can’t get the hoses on underwater? We take off the doors and ascend to the whaler and work on them there. Then go find an attacking lobster.

We take the whaler over to Siwash, jump in the water with our gear on, and descend down to the cage.

Guess what? All 5 sea hares are there. 3 of them were on the walls of the cage, 2 of them on the rocks, feeding on the algae.

Hurray!

John and I flash reciprocal “OK” signs (understatement) and get busy. Wrassle stubborn half-split hose onto the four sides of the PVC. Wrassle little zip ties through the fine Pet Screen mesh to secure the hose to the PVC. John and I each working on one gate, furiously. Knowing if we delay too much, we won’t have enough air to find an attacking lobster. Within 20 min the job is done. Check on the sea hares again, and now, let’s go find an attacker!

Why is it that when you really need a taxi quick, they are never around? Lots of little guys running around, but none of the tanks we’ve regularly seen. We try a few. Some half-hearted pounces, but none of the committed attacks we have grown so familiar with. We start by heading out toward the point, but then I change my mind. I’m thinking we have to get back into the core of the preserve. We don’t know, maybe people are poaching out here, even. So, I turn and head back. We go for a long time seeing very few lobsters. Getting nervous. When you aren’t in the middle of doing something, but just swimming, you start to think about monsters. Goddamnit, where are the lobsters??

Then I see a tank. Finally. Wiggle my light at John. He comes over, red light on the lobster. I take a sea hare out of my game bag and offer it up to the lobster. Full-blown attack. Ink flying everywhere. Lobster marching with his prey to another den. Signal John to “get him”. John has really learned how to catch a lobster with high probability out in the open. The key is to avoid the antennae. If the bug has his antennae laid back, you just have to wait. This one was trucking along with his inking sea hare under his mouth. Finally he slows down. John moves in. Lots of kelp in the way. Not a great shot. He lunges, pins the puppy to the bottom. 5 million bubbles come up from my sigh of relief.

He has the lobster clutched to his chest. It is MY job to now figure out where the cage is. I’ve gotten better at keeping track of my location. And there are a couple of landmarks at this spot. So there it is right there. We swim over. John carefully pulls the lobsters legs off his chest without breaking them. Puts the bug into the cage. Then he fastens the hatch, we signal ok, then thumbs up means we head to the surface.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good after a dive. We congratulate each other, put our gear away, eat a big omelet, and go to bed.

If at first you don't succeed...

2009-10-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

So, my hypothesis is that first, the lobster ate one of the sea hares enclosed with him in the cage.

Then, the monster from Iron Bound Bay wreaked havoc on the cage, and ate the other sea hares with one gulp. Let’s see 19 Oct. That’s one day past the new moon. A fully moonless night. Plenty of time for the monster to make his way up from Iron Bound Bay, to flit along the ridge down to the isthmus, and over to Big Fisherman’s Cove. I think he has a lover in the blow-hole on the point at Fishermans. Then, the two of them ransacked the bay, ripping up lobster dens, pulling out kelp plants. Trashing cages.

So, I spent ALL DAY on the mainland trying to find chain mail to wrap our cage with. My wife and I found some mobile screen-making outfits in LA, but I needed to go to Orange and give letters of recommendation to the PreMed advisor there. Calling and driving, leaving messages, getting half-yesses. Nobody seems to have 25 feet by 60 inches of chain mail. I ask our department assistant, Cheryl, to find me some chain mail while I write these letters. She gets on the internet and calls all the Home Depots and Pet Smarts around Orange, and all they have are small pieces. 48”. That won’t do. So I’m now in the office googling “screen and windows Orange” getting nowhere, when Brad, the other assistant shows me an advertisement from his “Yellow Pages”

Whazzat? Yellow Pages is how people used to find things like monster-proof netting for lobster cages, before the internet. There it was. Mobile Screen and Windows. I called. Talked to Chris. He checked. He had it. 25 feet of 60” reinforced “pet-proof” screen. I screemed yay! And took off in a flurry. Found the place in the bowels of Orange County freeways, and got the fucking chain mail.

Back out to Catailina. Dan and I put in the chain-mail on the frame day before yesterday afternoon, and redeployed the cage with sea hares, one more time, last night.

Now we have a waxing moon. Hopefully Mr. Monster, Sir, stays on the south side of the island.

This film is of us deploying the improved cage. I think you can see the cage eater, if you look very closely. Note the daring absence of wet suits (a short dive on a sunny day).

The monster from Iron Bound Bay

2009-10-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

My dad was a scary man. He could scare the daylights out of you. As kids, one of the highlights of coming over to Howland’s Cove on Catalina for the weekend was after dinner. My two brothers and I would beg and beg, and finally the old man would relent, and tell us a scary story. Actually my big brother Howard really wanted to hear the scary stories, but Ricky and I were not so sure we wanted one, but we went along with Howard anyway. I don’t know if Dad was tapping oral traditions, or just making shit up. He once told us about a star-crossed couple, just married, who were found embraced, dead as door nails on the point at Lion’s Head (this same point marks the boundary between the Invertebrate No Take zone to the west and the recreational lobster fishery on the Isthmus side; see earlier maps). The lovers were both buried there on Lion’s Head, side-by-side by their next of kin, as a warning to other lovers to “watch out”.

Watch out for what, Daddy?

The monster from Iron Bound Bay.

What’s that, Daddy?

It is a large, dark, wet, slimey creature that emerges on moonless nights from the murky waters of Iron Bound Bay.

Where is Iron Bound Bay, Daddy?

Just the other side of that big ole hill right there.

The thing is, Dad’s story checks out. There IS (or at least was) a pair of tombstones on Lion’s Head. Also, I have often perused charts of Catalina. There actually IS an Iron Bound Bay. And it is on the opposite side of Catalina Island from Howland’s. Just like my Daddy said.

A few years back, my wife and I nosed the Siwash in to Iron Bound Bay on a wonderful round-Catalina week. There are blow-holes everywhere in Iron Bound Bay. A blow hole is a concavity that traps air. When a big wave comes in, the air is compressed and finds an outlet somewhere and blows. There are lots of variant blow-holes (you’re probably thinking I’m one of those variants, called a blow-hard), but they ALL make deep, scary noises. There we are on a sunny day with a pretty big south swell running, and there is this symphony of deep rumbles, and gurgles, and hisses. We’re talking surround sound. The cliffs go up so steep, you hurt your back trying see the top of them. Just for the hell of it, we turned off the engine to listen more carefully.

SPOOOKEY. Really spooky. Deep deep sounds, pitched so low you almost feel them, not hear them. No real rhythm to the sounds. It doesn’t sound like periodic stuff, like what waves make. It sounds more like…. Turn the engine back on, Bill, quick.

I do, we leave, and that’s that.

What does the monster do, Daddy?

He smothers his victims in kelp and slime, and then bites off their fingers and breaks their necks.

Oh, jeez. Are we ok over here at Howlands?

Well let’s see, is there a moon tonight?

Yes.

Then we’re ok. It’s only on moonless nights that the monster comes over the hill.

Three nights ago, Dan and John redeployed our lobster enclosure cage. John and I had worked like dogs to get the new mesh on. This cage story is long and arduous. Dan brought out some insect screen used for regular windows. Really? Ok, fine, let’s try it. But Dan miscalculated. There wasn’t enough to even cover one of the cage frames. Now what’ll we do? Long story, we “borrowed” mesh from a Cal State biologist named Mark Steele. I promised to replace it. Looked pretty good, about 1/8” mesh. John and I set about putting it on the PVC enclosure frame. Smoked twine round and round, the sun goes up and over and down, and we’re winding and tying, tying and winding. Finally we get the fucking thing finished.

John and I deploy the cage. First night is control night, no lobsters; we want to prove that enclosed sea hares can’t escape. John and I get our SCUBA gear on and put the cage on the whaler, sink the enclosure at the right spot, pile up a nice rock bottom, put out 5 sea hares, close up the hatches, and go back and make dinner. I go back to the mainland the next day. The first night off island I get a call from John. Something happened.

What?

There’s a hole in the cage.

Really? What made it?

I don’t know.

Ok, 2 of the 5 sea hares escaped. So Dan and John repaired the hole, put the remaining three sea hares back inside the cage. Caught a big attacking lobster. Forced the lobster into the cage, closed the hatch and went back and ate dinner.

Next night I get another call.

Bill, things are really getting out of hand out here. What do you mean? Well, when we dove on the cage tonight, the netting was all ripped up. Did all the sea hares escape? Well sort of. What about the lobster? It was still there. Are you sure it was the same lobster? Positive.

But there’s something else.

What?

We found the intestines and buccal mass of a sea hare on the bottom of the cage.

Holy shit.

Looks like we’re going to need a bigger boat.

The “bliss” of research diving.

2009-10-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

The other night we set out to test one of those alternative hypotheses. Klaus from Sweden wanted us to do this. So we did (this guy is an awesome scientist. Ignore his ideas at your own peril. Actually, layperson, Jeff, had the same idea, and that brings up another point about alternative hypotheses. If more than one person brings them up, you’d best listen.

Anyway, these guys asked whether the same lobsters that refuse to eat sea hares are still interested in eating something tastier. If they are just being subordinate, or spooked, maybe they won’t eat anything. Let’s offer them a juicy shrimp after they say pass on the sea hare.

Although the dive was still in the black of night, it was nevertheless a very pleasant thing. We went off the lab dock. No getting the boat ready, with running lights, radio, float plan for Gerry, anchor problems, etc. Just drag our gear down to the dock and jump in. The three of us are only out here on the same day once per week. We took advantage of this to do an operation that really is best done with three divers.

Dan carried the camera and red light. John carried the bag of sea hares. I carried the juicy shrimps in a water-tight bag (I guess I’ve got the least number of years to live if the shrimp-eating great white should appear). Thus, John presented sea hares, I presented shrimps, Dan filmed the mayhem.

Down we go. John spies a bug, moves down to the bottom, and presents a sea hare. Lobster attacks, John floats up, Dan moves down for a close-up. After 10 sec, Dan moves up, and I move down with the shrimp. This operation is orchestrated without words, in three dimensions, completely improvised. Spontaneous movement in three dimensions. We were deep enough (30 feet), where you can control your buoyancy by breathing. Take a somewhat deep breath, and you slowly rise off the bottom. Take shallow breaths and you sink down. The cool thing is, this is not just showing off. John noticed a few weeks ago, and I’ve now seen it too, that lobsters often spy the bioluminescence when you kick your fins or make any other movements, and shy away. So don’t kick down to get into place, let out a long breath, and empty your lungs instead. This is tricky. You can’t hold your breath (this risks getting an air embolism and a consequent underwater stroke), but instead only inflate your lungs a little bit, then let it way out. Yoginis can do this easy, I guarantee you. But it’s a bit tricky for the rest of us. Anyway, presentation 1: lobster eats sea hare, lobster eats shrimp. Not test there, but still nice to know.

Second presentation, lobster didn’t pounce, but then John scared it trying to “make sure”. He pushed the sea hare onto the unwilling lobster a little too aggressively. It tail-flipped out of the picture.

Third presentation, no pounce. Perfect presentation. John backs out, I breathe out, and descend from above. The only light is the red one Dan is using to film the action. I watch the lobster’s antennae; they aren’t allowed to touch me (or the gig is up). Drop my shrimp in front of it. Lobster pounces, starts to eat. All the lights go on. We need to document the white shrimp in the red lobster’s mouth. He eats it right up, oblivious to the light. This is the same oblivion we see after lobsters start to attack and eat sea hares.

Needless to say, this was all pretty cool. Lobster says no to sea hare, yes to shrimp. After the first couple of presentations, I was so excited I somehow LET GO of my bag of shrimps. Damn, where did it go? Swimming around looking for it. Dan and John start to figure out what I’m doing. Not sure if the bag sank or rose, but it is gone. I give the thumbs up signal, which means go up, not ‘isn’t life fine’? We float on the surface while I swear and apologize, apologize and swear. Why didn’t I bring two bags in case this might happen? Now what do we do? Allright, goddamnit, let’s swim back to the dock. Fifteen minutes back to the dock. The boys laze there, while I walk the half-mile uphill in my wet suit (I imagine what it must be like to be a navy seal or Sean Connery) to the apartment and bring back another zip-lock bag of shrimp. Of course, I’m so flustered, that I just remember to bring one bag back.

This scant hour delay seems to take many hours. I’m really pissed at myself, and wondering if my incipient Alzheimer’s has really started to set in. Ok, get our gear back on, and down we go.

Start our three-dimensional dance.

I’m really back to enjoying it again. Being underwater with your trusty research mates. Spy a beast, wiggle your light at your mates, over they come, all lights off, red light coming on means Dan is filming, starting the dance. We present shrimps to several more sea-hare-spurning lobsters. All of them eat the shrimp. I’m pretty excited. I’ve got the next shrimp in one hand, the bag of remaining shrimp in the other. John presents the sea hare, no response, then he gets out of the way. As I move in I notice that he left his sea hare behind. I pick it up as I go to present the shrimp. Lobster eats the shrimp. Yay! Another one.

But wait. I’ve got the Aplysia in the same hand I used to carry the bag of shrimp, but now no bag of shrimp.

Again! Oh, no!!

Then I turn. John hands me the bag. He had watched me drop it. We both snort a laugh underwater.

Come up in time to make dinner and get to bed by 1AM.

AbstractDeadline

2009-10-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

Below is the view while I write this blog. Not bad, eh? Siwash is farthest to the left over in the calmest corner (you might want to click on the photo to see the big version). Our enclosure cage is (finally, more later) just about in line with the mast on the other side of Siwash in 20 ft of water.

Here is the final “Abstract”, as written for the Western Society for Naturalists. We finished the writing of it at 4:59 PM a couple of days ago, a little less than a minute before the deadline.

But that is the custom among busy scientists. When I was a postdoctoral fellow in Tom Carew’s lab at Yale, the grad students and post-docs ponied up a milk shake for the person who waited the very longest to collect a data point used in the abstract. This used to drive Tom utterly crazy. Sometimes, the results weren’t certain until a day before. I think the record (attained by a crazy French Canadian grad student, who is now a very successful scientist) was a data point that got included in a statistic an hour before the deadline.

So, this year, we had much more time for our Abstract. Our data were collected at least a few days before the deadline. All we had to do was just write the sucker. Of course, I also talked John into presenting an additional poster with his very sexy limpet data from last summer, so he and I had to wrangle two abstracts. But we did it just fine.

The key thing with abstracts is brevity, and conciseness. Perhaps I should rewrite that sentence. Abstracts need to be concise. That’s all. No need to add brevity, for that’s part of the word concise. Make sentences square. Active verbs. Say I and we all you want, especially if it makes your sentence more concise.

I hesitate to put our abstract out there in front of all of you. I know there are many among you who could have written it clearer, sexier, and more concisely. But I am discovering the value of humility, and shared discovery in the scientific process. Every day I discover this. Rediscover it.

Here’s the abstract.

Lobsters exhibit unprecedented attack behavior on sea hares inside marine life protected areas.

A growing body of evidence suggests that marine protected areas can significantly change the density of fished species. Such direct effects can be of paramount importance to community structure. However indirect effects of management decisions can be equally profound. The present field study examined the indirect effect of a preserve on the dietary breadth of the California spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus, on Catalina Island, CA. We monitored this keystone predator’s attack behavior inside two separate preserves, and compared it to behavior in neighboring non-protected areas. In particular, we used SCUBA to present the relatively unpalatable sea hare, Aplysia californica to foraging lobsters in the field. No observations of natural attacks by lobsters on Aplysia have been reported prior to this study, and our presentations outside the reserve confirmed this lack of attacking behavior (no attacks, 7 dives, 89 presentations). However, within the two preserves, lobsters attacked sea hares an average of 24.8% of the time (sem = 3.4, Number of Dives = 14; 287 presentations total). In the most vigilantly protected part of the preserves, this attack frequency increased to 34.5% (sem = 2.0; Number of Dives = 7; 93 presentations). We conclude that marine preserves cause lobsters to broaden their diet, thereby consuming less-preferred species. We hypothesize that this effect is mediated through intraspecific competition: The lack of human fishing on lobsters in the preserve results in greater biomass density (size and numbers) of lobsters, thereby reducing available food. The fact that lobsters in the preserves attack and eat Aplysia may have important implications for other non-preferred food items (e.g., urchins) with stronger functional connections to the ecosystem.

Cookie-lobster LIKE sea hare

2009-10-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

How can a sabbatical be so damn busy?

Right?

I am supposed to have TIME. I’m supposed to contemplate natural truths. I’m supposed to get wise.

I should have known. Abstract deadline. Might be a garage band title. Those two words strike horror into the hearts of many a scientist. Not me. Ha ha. I’m tenured. I’m on sabbatical. I don’t need no stinking poster.

But here we are. Sitting on this cool, brand-new, lobster-attack data set.

The Western Society of Naturalists meeting is in Monterey this year, the COOLest setting possible for a marine biology meeting. They have an “attitude adjustment hour” where the drinks are at a table next to a 40-foot deep glass aquarium! A kelp forest. Full of fish. And lobsters! Lots of people there from my marine biology past (very few or none from my neurobiology past. That conference is happening right now, and I’m missing it).

Hmm… maybe we SHOULD write an abstract. Twould be fun to see all those crazies again. They will love this lobster story. Plus John did a project on limpets last summer that sings. He’s been to WSN before, so he knows the ropes. He can wrangle two posters in one meeting, right?

Ok. Let’s do it. Lets summarize our results in 250 words.

Actually writing the results into the abstract is easy. The hard part is committing to what the data mean. Dan asks me, “Can we just narrate how we got here? A chronological abstract?”

Nope. Can’t do that. Busy scientists don’t want to hear how you got here. They want to hear about your results, and what you think they mean.

So what DO our results mean, Dr. Wright?

I say something defensive, like “Fuck if I know.”

But then we talk. I’ve learned that I can’t very well just go “poof, this is what it means.” I have to talk about it. With students, with fellow scientists, with my dive officer, with my wife, with my mom, with whomever wants to talk about it.

With you all! An amazing conversation we had. Your “alternative hypotheses” keep dribbling in. I’ll get to them in a later blog.

But my point is, most data have multiple ways of viewing them. In my case, our original view was, oh, we need a natural traumatic stimulus that might cause sensitization in sea hares. What might that be? Oh, how bout predators? Ok. What might eat sea hares? Oh, how bout lobsters? Ok. But we have to starve them 6 weeks in the lab before they attack. Oh, well, maybe lobsters on a preserve are hungry enough to attack, cause there are so damn many of them? Ok. Look, lobsters on the preserve DO attack and eat sea hares. Cool! Let’s publish. Ok, but first, what does it all mean, Mr. Natural? It DOES mean shit! But what shit does it mean?

So, do we talk about sensitization? Hmm… our audience is not neurobiologists. They are mainly marine ecologists. Nah, sensitization isn’t going to work. The chronological abstract never works.

But really, for an ecologist, this is a totally cool finding. Lobsters have a pervasive influence on near-shore communities (A “community” is the assemblage of marine species in the area of interest. Actually, they also have a strong influence on the human community here on Catalina. But that is a different story).

So, because lobsters can really change communities, they have been called “keystone predators.” If they are there, the community is one way. If they are not, it’s another. When Carlos Robles built exclusion cages out here twenty years ago, he excluded lobsters. This resulted in a homogenous blanket of mussels. Take away the cage, and the lobsters eat all the mussels in a few weeks, and you get a lush carpet of lots of different algae and small invertebrates. Regardless of which community you think is “better”, there is no doubt lobsters are the key; the keystone.

So what WE’VE found is that lobsters’ eating habits change, depending on whether or not they are being fished.

Lots of fisherman comment that, no matter how much you fish, lobsters are still around. This is true. Take a dive off Palos Verdes peninsula, and you can see lobsters.

“See, there they are, right there. Doing their keystone thing. So take your Marine Life Protected Areas and stuff them in a closet on some other planet. These lobsters are still here, so don’t tell us they aren’t.”

They aren’t.

That’s what our new results are telling us. The lobsters in Palos Verdes are a completely different beast than those at Big Fisherman’s Cove, and very likely they are a completely different beast than what lived at PV before modern humans got so efficient at catching them.

Nowadays the lobster that lives at PV is a connoisseur. He only eats the most delectable items. A fat mussel here, a limpet there. Don’t bother him with eating sea hares. They give him indigestion. Don’t offer up urchins; too many nasty, pointy spines. But he doesn’t get that easy life-style for nothing. His life-expectancy is very short. The modern lobster will be on some human’s plate a year or two after he reaches legal length. That’s why the lobster had so much food. His parents and grandparents and great-great grandparents have all been eaten, so he doesn’t have to compete with them.

But at Big Fisherman’s Cove, we have a different species. These lobsters cruise around in broad daylight turning over every shell and algae clump for something to eat. A sea hare, mmm…. Cookie lobsters like sea hare. A baby sea urchin? Mmmm…. spines no matter, cookie lobster like spines. These are bold, big lobsters. Maybe 3-5 pounds. Underwater tanks turning over the bottom. Probing, smelling, searching, pouncing, attacking anything that they can get their legs on. Totally different from PV lobsters.

Guess what? The lobsters that cruised the bottom, before humans started fishing them, were 20 lbs and more. Huge monsters. Lots of them. Hungry monsters. Eat other lobsters. Eat everything. Now we’re talking keystone. These guys were REAL keystones. You can’t have an “urchin barren” with these mothers wandering the benthos. Drop them on an urchin barren, and they call it breakfast.

So, that is the perspective we are choosing for this year’s Western Society of Naturalists meeting. And this generalizes to any keystone predator system. Keystones are not stones, they are flexible, plastic entities that CAN be keystones, but you have to know about their behavior. In particular, do they broaden their diet when they reach high densities and eat all the delectables to oblivion?

Next post, I’ll give you the 250 word version.

Jeez, I guess I do have a little time after all.

2009-10-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

John on the 1" mesh

We’ve been building some enclosure cages to try to experimentally test some alternative hypotheses in the field. Most importantly, maybe lobsters don’t really eat sea hares in nature, even in preserves. Maybe our experiments simply show that they eat sea hares dropping out of the water column. This is Rob’s alternative hypothesis. It is part of a larger question: Just how devastating ARE lobsters on the ecology of sea hares? We rarely see sea hares bigger than a cm or so out at Catalina, and have never seen them yet in the preserve. Is it possible that this rarity is driven by lobsters? So we (actually, John and Dan) built a couple of cages in which we intend to enclose lobsters with sea hares. We predict that when we put some sea hares in the cage for a day or so and then put in one or two lobsters that attacked the field-proffered sea hares, the lobsters will readily eat one or more sea hares in a very short time (a couple of days).

Cool idea, eh? If they consume the sea hares, it strengthens our case. If they don’t, the idea that we are studying an artifact is strengthened. Remember, anytime you feel scared for your hypothesis you are doing the right research.

If the lobsters do end up eating all the sea hares in the enclosure, we would say, ok, then we’d put in lobsters that don’t attack in the field. The effect of these wimpy lobsters on the sea hares should be weaker or delayed. Let’s do it!

Three days ago we tested the cage. We had tightly wrapped it on all sides with netting of 1-inch mesh. It looked good. I used some lashing tricks I learned from my Dad on Siwash to keep the netting tight on the frame. Dan and I sank the puppy right next to Siwash (close to ample supplies of attacking lobsters), and covered its floor with rocks. A fun underwater job, one of the few that we could do in the daylight. We put three sea hares in to make sure they didn’t go anywhere in the absence of lobsters. A trivial “pre-test”. The next day, John and I dropped down on the cage to find out whether the sea hares were standing on their tails waving for food, or hunkered down inbetween the rocks.

What we found was NO sea hares. Gone. All three of them. Damn. What the hell? Where are they? We took out every single rock and still no trace of a sea hare. Could they have slithered out of 1-inch mesh? The answer if YES. RATS! All that work, to build and wrap the cage. Arggh. Why the hell didn’t we try to enclose them at home before we came? Now we’ve got to pull out the cage and wrap it with a MUCH finer mesh.

This is all way depressing. Experiments deepen your science. We want some results. Failing to do an experiment deepens your depression. Shit, we are missing a chance, and just cause we weren’t thinking. We’ve only got 5 more weeks. What if the experiment takes 6?

Dan is bringing out finer mesh today, and John and he will retie the cage, and deploy it again. Those slithery sea hares.

Yesterday, we were offering sea hares to our captured lobsters in 3 foot deep tanks up near the dive lockers. We are finding that the lobsters that attacked in the field are much more prone to attacking sea hares in these tanks as well. They do so within a half an hour to a couple of days (non-attackers need to be held a couple of weeks before they attack in these tanks). That is a good finding. It means the difference in field behavior depends on the sea hare, not its immediate context (cave nearby, big kelp bass). In the process of doing these lab presentations we figured out we could fish out the sea hares with a hand net. Actually the fish net had pretty fine mesh. About 1 inch.

Once, after leaving the recovered sea-hare in the hand net for maybe ten minutes while we set up the next presentation, we noticed the sea hare with its head and half its body hanging outside the net. Hmm… I guess 1 inch mesh isn’t even close!

Readers'AlternativeHypotheses

2009-10-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Dreaded alternative hypotheses.

You all answered my challenge much more heartily than I guessed you would. Science and non-science friends rose to the fun. They are GREAT hypotheses too.

I’ve simply pasted them into another blog I started called “Alternative Hypotheses”.

http://billyssabbaticalalternative.blogspot.com/

Not that I don’t want them to “clutter” this blog, but mainly to keep them where I know they are. Alternative hypotheses have a way of “getting lost”. Lost hypotheses can haunt you if they turn out to be correct.

Here’s my processing of these very cool gems. Thank you all for playing this game of science with me.

1.) Among the non-scientists, Jeff suggested higher densities in the reserve makes animals more aggressive, this spills over on their feeding habits. This is a cool hypothesis that mirrors modern research on the ecological role of “personality” in nature. Way to go Jeff.

2.) Semi wants more information. She suspects the students want to please me or get a job or something. That’s all true, and others (see below) bring up observer bias as a possibility. Nice, Semi.

3.) Rob has two alternatives. First, he thinks the fact that we are dropping the sea hares “out of the sky” may be artifactual. First, the sea hares may be changed by that unusual circumstance making them more attractive than their wild, firmly attached brethren. Good idea. The sea hares are DEFINITELY not the same as in nature. They go limp, and spread out their sea hare wings.

4.) Rob’s second idea: Crowding makes them more aggressive. Sounds like Jeff’s idea. Are you two friends? (answer yes. Coincidence?)

5.) Rob has a REALLY cool idea about how to test our idea. He suggests there might be a way to chemically test for sea-hare-specific chemicals in lobsters’ tissue, similarly to how C4 carbon signature in modern humans tells us we eat LOTS of corn. This is a fucking rocking idea there, mr. Rob. Not an alternative but a very cool test. I’m guessing there IS a way to do this. Sea hares are noted for their unique distasteful, hard-to-break-down compounds. I’m betting there is a way to test for them.

6.) Dave’s alternative hypothesis was hidden in a cryptic poem. I can’t figure it out. Can you?

7.) Only one student bit. This tells us a lot about students. His idea is very cool. Lobsters in preserves are used to getting handouts! Their shyness of big divers is overcome by this experience of getting handouts. Way to go, John. Will you come work for me?

8.) Two scientists contributed. Klaus from Sweden wants to know why lobsters tend NOT to attack sea hares. It is because the sea hares sequester lots of nasty chemicals from the red algae they eat into their flesh. They also actively secrete ink and a gooey yuchy substance called opaline when they are attacked.

9.) Klaus wonders what happens when we give lobsters juicy, tasty food, like squid or mackerel or something. Maybe they don’t want anything at all! His hypothesis is that non-attacking lobsters are just not hungry for anything at all. This is a GREAT idea. We’ve been talking about it. There was a white shark sighted a few months ago swimming around a couple of divers maybe a mile from here. Gerry says they are definitely out there, at least young 10-12 ft guys. We are still a bit spooked at night down there. The morays are scary enough. We ARE going to do this, but we have to get a courage transplant first.

10.) Klaus doubts that sensitization can really protect a sea hare from a lobster. I wonder that too. We are trying to set up a cage experiment to test this question (more later).

11.) Chris from Chapman wonders about observer bias. He knows how sweet-natured my students are, and suggests they don’t want to disappoint me, and might be giving sea hares much more gently while in the preserve. He suggests blindfolding them till they get underwater at particular spots. I LOVE this idea. Not sure I will do it, but what fun if would be.

12.) Chris’ related alternative is that density per se makes lobsters hungry. Like we all get in a crowded restaurant. Cool idea. We will definitely test this one.

Readers'AlternativeHypotheses

2009-10-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

Dreaded alternative hypotheses. You all answered my challenge much more heartily than I guessed you would. Science and non-science friends alike rose to the challenge. They are GREAT hypotheses too. I’ve simply pasted them into another blog I started called “Alternative Hypotheses”. http://billyssabbaticalalternative.blogspot.com/ Not that I don’t want them to “clutter” this blog, but mainly to keep them where I know they are. Alternative hypotheses have a way of “getting lost”. Lost hypotheses can haunt you if they turn out to be correct. Here’s my processing of these very cool gems. Thank you all for playing this game of science with me. 1.) Among the non-scientists, Jeff suggested higher densities in the reserve makes animals more aggressive, this spills over on their feeding habits. This is a cool hypothesis that mirrors modern research on the ecological role of “personality” in nature. Way to go Jeff. 2.) Semi wants more information. She suspects the students want to please me or get a job or something. That’s all true, and others (see below) bring up observer bias as a possibility. Nice, Semi. 3.) Rob has two alternatives. First, he thinks the fact that we are dropping the sea hares “out of the sky” may be artifactual. First, the sea hares may be changed by that unusual circumstance making them more attractive than their wild, firmly attached brethren. Good idea. The sea hares are DEFINITELY not the same as in nature. They go limp, and spread out their sea hare wings. 4.) Rob’s second idea: Crowding makes them more aggressive. Sounds like Jeff’s idea. Are you two friends? (answer yes. Coincidence?) 5.) Rob has a REALLY cool idea about how to test our idea. He suggests there might be a way to chemically test for sea-hare-specific chemicals in lobsters’ tissue, similarly to how C4 carbon signature in modern humans tells us we eat LOTS of corn. This is a fucking rocking idea there, mr. Rob. Not an alternative but a very cool test. I’m guessing there IS a way to do this. Sea hares are noted for their unique distasteful, hard-to-break-down compounds. I’m betting there is a way to test for them. 6.) Dave’s alternative hypothesis was hidden in a cryptic poem. I can’t figure it out. Can you? 7.) Only one student bit. This tells us a lot about students. His idea is very cool. Lobsters in preserves are used to getting handouts! Their shyness of big divers is overcome by this experience of getting handouts. Way to go, John. Will you come work for me? 8.) Two scientists contributed. Klaus from Sweden wants to know why lobsters tend NOT to attack sea hares. It is because the sea hares sequester lots of nasty chemicals from the red algae they eat into their flesh. They also actively secrete ink and a gooey yuchy substance called opaline when they are attacked. 9.) Klaus wonders what happens when we give lobsters juicy, tasty food, like squid or mackerel or something. Maybe they don’t want anything at all! His hypothesis is that non-attacking lobsters are just not hungry for anything at all. This is a GREAT idea. We’ve been talking about it. There was a white shark sighted a few months ago swimming around a couple of divers maybe a mile from here. Gerry says they are definitely out there, at least young 10-12 ft guys. We are still a bit spooked at night down there. The morays are scary enough. We ARE going to do this, but we have to get a courage transplant first. 10.) Klaus doubts that sensitization can really protect a sea hare from a lobster. I wonder that too. We are trying to set up a cage experiment to test this question (more later). 11.) Chris from Chapman wonders about observer bias. He knows how sweet-natured my students are, and suggests they don’t want to disappoint me, and might be giving sea hares much more gently while in the preserve. He suggests blindfolding them till they get underwater at particular spots. I LOVE this idea. Not sure I will do it, but what fun if would be.

12.) Chris’ related alternative is that density per se makes lobsters hungry. Like we all get in a crowded restaurant. Cool idea. We will definitely test this one.

Science means scraping off everything that isn't true.

2009-10-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

So, the Buccaneer Days, and lobster opening, and nasty-ass gale all marked the end of the first part of this sabbatical research. These interruptions allowed us to stop and take stock and think about all the possibilities that are no more. We’ve started to chisel away alternatives. Let's talk about what I mean.

Prior to coming here, we knew:

a. Almost no one we’ve heard of had ever seen a lobster attack a sea hare.

b. A trio of undergraduates witnessed two such attacks in the Wrigley Big Fisherman’s reserve two summers ago.

c. Starved lobsters will eat sea hares in the lab.

Our hypothesis, our best, most hopeful guess, was that lobsters in reserves, where they have been protected for at least several years, attack sea hares. They do this because their protected status means their greater biomass (more of them, and bigger individuals) in the shallow subtidal puts pressure on their food supply. Less food means hungrier lobsters. Hungrier lobsters eat species they would not otherwise touch (e.g., sea hares, but also sea urchins, and other defended invertebrates).

Note that this hypothesis is one of convenience. It is what we call “parsimonious. “ It most simply unites our two main observations, that starved lobsters in the lab and wild lobsters at fisherman’s cove perform an otherwise rare behavior of attacking sea hares. Parsimony feels good, but it only gets us so far. Until we start removing alternatives, we’ve only traveled down the science road a short way.

Let’s list some alternative possibilities, given the above observations:

a. The two observed attacks were an anomaly. Perhaps these inexperienced students “overinterpeted” their observations to please their professor.

b. Perhaps there is something about living in groups in caves that predispose lobsters to attack sea hares. Other divers would never present a sea hare to lobsters in a group. Instead they would try and catch the lobsters!

c. Lobsters attack only at Fisherman’s cove for some unnatural reason, e.g., the steady bright light on the pier alters lobster behavior.

d. Lobsters attack sea hares all over Catalina Island because its water is exceedingly clean.

e. The act of presenting sea hares to lobsters, usually you just drop them out of the water column onto the lobsters’ antennae, is irrelevant to how they encounter each other in nature.

I love to make lists of alternative hypotheses. A beautiful hypothesis is simply that, regardless if it is your pet or your alternative. I like b. above. If groups were key, that would be very interesting. Going that direction would be fun.

But I also DREAD lists of alternatives. You know why? Because my list is never complete. It’s like that game when someone writes a word you try to make as many words out of the letters as you can. There’s ALWAYS at least a word or two you didn’t get (you know this cause others playing the same letters get additional words every time). In science, you never know if you’ve missed a good idea. Your nightmare is that some colleague will raise an alternative that you missed, that is consistent with your data, and that turns out to be right!

Now, in my old age, I’ve actually come to see this nightmare as something of a comfort: Having colleagues out there, who actually listen hard to your crazy ideas and observations, and then bring their own experience to bear on the question, and politely give you a brilliant alternative hypothesis. This is one of the amazing moments of the scientific process. But it hurts, too. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Ok, here’s an exercise. You all give me alternative hypotheses! Look at the three observations and invent an explanation.

Cmon, I bet you can do it. If you can write a limerick, or a Haiku, you can invent an innovative alternative. Humor is good. Actually ANY hypothesis is good. Everyone should invent one or two hypotheses a day. Most people invent many, many more.

So email me back (and I’ll post your hypotheses), or just post your hypotheses on the blog (please identify yourself so I can have some fun with it). I’ll check back in a day or so and compile the list!

Weather trumps research

2009-10-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the commodore’s lounge on the Catalina Express (had to upgrade just to get a ticket). Just drank my complimentary mixed drink. Boat hasn’t left yet. People still piling on. Unbelievably obnoxious pirates in the commodore’s lounge, still drunk. But they are all laughing and laughing and laughing. I can’t help feeling a bit jealous. If only I could be like that.

Last night was a rough one. After our dive we entered the data and notes and the boys went back to the apartment, and I back to Siwash. She was bucking all over, as the waves from the gale got nastier and nastier. But the mooring is a good one. I didn’t sleep so well, but everything held. This morning, the wind hadn’t yet arrived so I took the whaler in to the lab and checked the weather. Down-graded from gale to small-craft warnings (20-30 kts, instead of 25-35). Still, it was starting to get nasty. I called John and Dan and we took the whaler out there. Started the engine, wind piping to 20 kts. Let go of the mooring, Siwash’s bow falling off the wind right toward the frothy shore. Big Fisherman’s cove has an ugly lee shore. It is well protected from all kinds of wind, but it is a perfect trap for a boat in a Northwesterly wind, the deep bay trapping any hapless sail boat trying to tack her way out. But we are under power. The propeller finally doing its work, Siwash moves forward and turns back upwind, and out. 10 minutes of slop and we come into the bay at Two Harbors. Get a nice mooring up against the west cliff.

John and Dan and I drive the whaler back to Fisherman’s and helped Gerry separate the two docks so they don’t bang themselves to death in the swell. Then we walk up the gangway. Gerry hauls the gangway off the inshore dock, leaving the dock safe, but unusable. We take a car to the ferry (without my dirty clothes).

The Catalina Express is finally pulling out. Wind howling offshore. Siwash is nicely tucked over in the west corner of the bay at Two Harbors. Siwash’s weepy side is exposed to the bay. Two rows back, by God is Jada. Jada was Grandad’s upgrade when he gave Siwash to Dad in 1960 or so. A beautiful, powerful, yawl. I think she is a charter boat in San Diego. But there she is, very close to Siwash at two harbors. That’s how it was for a couple of decades at Howland’s cove when I was growing up. Siwash one row closer to shore with my brothers and parents and me, and Jada next row out with Grandad and Gramma and guests. I used to love swimming out to Jada, begging a coke, and warming my belly on her teak decks.

Man the waves are BIG. The crowd is getting less jovial. Laughter turning to “oh my god.” and “better take a Xanex”. Big Fisherman’s looks like a washing machine as we go by. The docks are separated, the gangway lifted. Gerry’s world is under control. Looks to be blowing 25-30 knots out here. Isolated sailboats, most of them mainly out of control. They’re handing out sea-sick bags on this boat. People are taking them. Just took a big wave, spraying all over. The skipper is slowing the boat down a bit every time he comes to a wave. Cabin is deathly quiet. Boat gets on a quartering swell and does a semi-broach, leaning just a little too far down wind as she turns upwind. Woah, just did it again. Everyone else laughing.

Not me. It reminds me of a black night in 30 knots of wind, sailing on my older brother’s “pocket rocket” Presto (a “Moore 24”, 2000 lbs and 24 ft) back in the 80s. We were racing, against a bunch of other crazies, from San Francisco to San Diego. Wind had piped up 10 knots from what it was during my last watch in the daylight. I got the helm in the pitch dark before my eyes had accommodated. Flying along at 15-20 knots, a speed-boat with a sail. Tripped on a wave I couldn’t see, and sent Presto into a full broach. Sails flopping like flags. The boat completely laid out sideways with deck vertical. Hanging on to the “life rail”, cause if I let go, I’d fall straight down into the sea. Gives me butterflies just thinking about it. Here’s the idea. Now make the boat much tinier and the ocean much larger.

Wondering what I’d do if this skipper broached this big ole ferry boat. I don’t have any idea. The thought fills me with black. The pirates have no such baggage. They are still laughing. But here we are, after all, turning around Angel’s gate and into the harbor; cheated death again.

So, “to conclude”, the research of yesterday turned inexorably to a water day today. Strapping things down, adjusting to the storm. No diving for Dan and John today. Probably not tomorrow either. Have to let this angry sea settle down a little. I get my 2 days shore leave, and then back at it.

Birth, Death, and Lobsters

2009-10-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

33 years ago (yesterday), my daughter Sara was born. I was 8 years younger than she is now. In the scramble of yesterday I forgot her birthday. Until a bunch of workers were standing around the waterfront talking about the guy who died yesterday.

“How old was he?”

“I dunno, he was born in 1976. You figure it out.”

1976 was when Sara was born. Yesterday.

The deadman's birth year reminded me to call my girl. I didn’t yesterday, but will today.

So the intrepid divers took out last night into the teeth of the brewing gale. We lost one of the extras so we all 5 went in one of the Wrigley boats, extra wide, plenty of room. Heading up to the Invertebrate Preserve (see Map). By the time we got there, the swell was probably 3-4 feet and the visibility was close to zero. Ok, back we go. On the way home we rode some of those waves and hooted and hollered. Got chased by a guy paranoid about his dozen hoop nets intended to catch lobsters. Hoop nets are different than traps. Hoop nets are collapsed on the bottom with a can of cat food in the middle. The lobsters come for the cat food and munch on it for an hour till the operator pulls up quick and brings the lobster with the net. A trap is only used by the commercial guys on the south side of the island. They are illegal on this side. Anyway, some guy chased us real close. He was dressed like a pirate, and said Arrr, as he turned away.

Next stop, Big Fisherman’s cove. Mike and I “tended” the skiff, while the other 3 dove. It was getting pretty lumpy. They got 9 presentations. 4 attacks! This story is starting to get pretty consistent. Even in bad weather the preserve lobsters attack.

Here’s the cool thing though. We took a couple of the attackers into the lab. Our intention is to see how long before they start attacking sea hares in the lab. Usually it takes the lobsters a week or so to get used to the lab, and another 5-7 weeks to get hungry enough to eat sea hares.

But just for kicks we laid a sea hare on top of the biggest guy. He attacked it big time!

Not 8 weeks, not 2 weeks, not one week, not one day. 20 min after being released into the tank he was ready to eat sea hare.

Meanwhile, chop’s getting bigger. I go out to Siwash to spend the night as the gale builds.

More tomorrow.

Death, Gales, and Pirates

2009-10-03T23:22:00.001-07:00

Swimming hard this morning. The LA County sheriff’s helicopter taking off over my breathing shoulder. Watching it whupping by every time I turn my head to breathe. The helo is carrying a stiff. A diving stiff. Some 33-year-old was diving for lobsters all night. Third dive. Rapid ascent from 85 feet said his dive computer, but he had lost contact with his buddy, so no one knows why. DOA at 4AM. They put him in the chamber and took him down to 160 feet anyway. They’ve saved some pretty dead divers that way in the past. But not this one.

It’s kind of sobering. I figured out what happened when the helicopter turned off its engines after it landed. If there is someone alive, they keep the rotors going, and take off as soon as they can. But not this morning.

But I keep swimming. Turning the corner into Chalk Cove and the hordes of boats anchored there.

This weekend is Buccaneer Days at Two Harbors. A long tradition. Everyone comes into shore dressed as a pirate and they drink grog and eat meat and be obnoxious. This morning they mostly had hangovers.

100 strokes past the buoy means 0.8 miles. My favorite harbor seal comes under me on the way home and peers with his big eyes at me. Always startles me, cause he is so big compared to the fish I see. But he reminds me of our cat, Blue. Startle is what he wants to do.

Last night we had a big dive. “We” became not just John and Dan and me. We recruited three more certified divers. One from our class last June (Jacob), one is an assistant for the CSU invertebrate zoology class (Andy). One from my childhood (Mike), who also happens to dive out here a lot and is ok’d to dive with me.

We scrounged up (borrowed, and bought) extra running lights and dive lights and charged up both cameras. Last night was the start of the lobster season. That’s why people were diving after midnight. The season actually starts at 12:01. We wanted to get behavior data from the Out-Of-Preserve lobsters before they got spooked by all the divers. So that’s what we did. Happy to say the ‘hypothesis’ is still alive. Close to 30 presentations of sea hares to lobsters at these three sites. No attacks, 2 or 3 weak pounces. These guys have plenty of food. Don’t need to eat sea hares. The map shows the same stuff as last time, only I’ve added blue dots from last night’s dive. Cool, huh?

So that means we’ve got 5 dives outside the reserve, and they all point to the same conclusion. Lobsters don’t want sea hares out there. Tonight we go to the preserves.

But there is a catch. The NOAA weather is forecasting monster winds tonight. Cmon. I’m looking at the ocean. It’s just a normal westerly. Fine, says the forecast, but late tonight is a GALE. A gale? What the hell? This is Catalina. Southern California. We don’t have friggin gales. Must be some mistake. But they’ve been saying it now for 24 hours at least. They aren’t backing down.

So, I put the little dinghy up on its chalks on Siwash. Lashed the awning down. Ran the engine. Strung an extra line to the mooring chain. Gerry says the chain will hold, but the line might chafe. Best to have an extra strung. I’m leaving tomorrow. But the gale is supposed to peak midday tomorrow.

Stay tuned!

Matilda underwater

2009-10-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

This video of my grandaughter is exactly how I feel underwater. I grab for my depth gauge and can't find it. My light bangs into my face. Everything is so damn overwhelming, but all you can do is just concentrate harder. Watch her do it. It's amazing. She even looks up and considers swimming back to the surface and going back to the boat and drinking some wine and eating some chocolate.

Tsunamis make you think.

2009-09-30T21:29:00.001-07:00

Came back from the mainland yesterday afternoon. Our outboard is broken, so we have to use one of USCs boats. No problem. It’s 5 in the afternoon, time to psyche myself up for our evening dive. It takes me 45 min to get my gear on. It takes John and Dan only 15.

But tonight we don’t even start that. I get a phone call from the dive officer, Gerry Smith. There is a TSUNAMI warning for Catalina Island! We all remember the Indonesian tsunami in 2004. But this warning was for Catalina Island. And that’s where we are! Of course the predictions were for tiny 1-2 foot waves, but even a 2 foot rise in sea level over 15 min can create a nasty current.

So we ditched our dive and started playing with our data. We weren’t sure what to do with it. We threw out our early dives, in which we used bright lights and glow sticks that clearly inhibited initial pounce behavior. Then we just placed the dives on our Google map of the different zones. Each red dot represents a clean night dive presenting sea hares to lobsters. The white zone is preserve, the red zone non-preserve (this is just a rough draft).

Then we measured the distance of the dive from the nearest boundary (negative distance for outside, positive distance for inside the preserves), and plotted the proportion attacking as a function of that distance. This created the scattergram you see here.

What’s cool about this graph is that it shows that location matters. If you are clearly outside the preserve you see NO attacks. If you are way inside the preserve you see 30-35% of presentations eliciting attacks. If you are a little way inside the preserve you see just a few attacks.

So we three sat around the lab and talked about what might be going on. We wondered why don’t all reserve lobsters attack? Perhaps it is because only 30-35% are residents. The rest are transients from outside the preserve. They are not yet hungry enough to eat sea hares. Give them two months and they might. But more likely they will wander on out of the preserve.

Next we wondered why don’t we see attacking lobsters outside the preserve. We surmised that hungry lobsters might be wandering out of the preserve, but they will soon find food and immediately give up their sea-hare-eating ways.

All speculation, but it did lead us to wonder what will happen

a.) when the lobster season starts on Friday night? (We think we will get a huge influx of non-attackers)

b.) two months from now when there is very little immigration from outside the preserve (divers have either taken the lobsters or driven them out), and all the arrivals from October start getting hungry (We predict that in December a much higher proportion of remaining lobsters will attack).

All this BSing is EXACTLY what scientists are supposed to do. Without it, our measurements get us nowhere.

We also realized that we only have 2 reliable points from outside the preserve. Aargh, we’ve got to get a few more before the lobster hunters ruin things. I’m going with a CSU Fullerton student tomorrow night. Then Friday before the midnight opening, Dan and John and I and three new volunteers will dive two or three more times on non-preserve lobsters. That should do it.

Whew.

Students rock

2009-09-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I took my two days “off island.” I left John and Dan with a pretty big chore: Test lobsters in the Invertebrate “no take” Preserve. This is a region on the other side of the Isthmus that was designated protected a couple of decades ago. It hasn’t been patrolled as zealously as BFC (Big Fisherman’s Cove), but we thought it worth going over there anyway. So John and Dan did it!

Now, this brings up something that scares me to death.
I train these kids to be scientists. We three take a diving research course together last June. Now I am utterly relying on them to not only do the research right, but to not get into any trouble. So, two weeks ago I taught them how to tie a triple clove hitch so the dinghy doesn’t get away. Now they are taking the Boston whaler out into the dark night, putting down an anchor, getting their diving gear on, going down, and coming up with amazing data!

To tell the truth, I’m just glad that they come up alive. Sometimes there just seems like so many things that can go wrong, and so many ways to screw up. But what I always keep coming back to is keep breathing. Actually, the more I watch John and Dan work, the more I realize that it is I who is the weak link. These guys are careful, thoughtful, watchful, strong dudes. They know what they are doing, and are rapidly getting better and better.

But what about the science?! Dan and John tested the no-take preserve lobsters for responses to sea hares, and the lobsters attacked! The only other place we’ve seen that besides our protected cove over here at Wrigley. Exactly what you’d expect! If the pattern holds (and we have a shitload more dives to do before we can be confident of that) the measures taken by the California Fish and Game to prevent invertebrate takes are actually having an effect. Lobsters inside preserves broaden their palette of edible food items to include sea hares.

Letters

2009-09-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

Some of you have written you want to get the emails. I love some of the comments. Here are two of my favorites.

**Yes. Please keep me on your mail list. This is about the least cluttering
thing--I think it freshens the airspace. Anyway, it reminds me to read it.
And it's a little package that comes to me, like an afternoon snack. And
now I'm hooked on the story, like a Lone Ranger radio show. I'm really
rooting for the sea hares; god they just SOUND mythological, Brer Rabbit
against ole Brer Lobster. Hooray for science. And so, thanks.

**Yes, I want to be on the email blog.There is defiantly a movie, a story, a

fable a novel, a soap opera.. a sea opera that's it; in 4 dives. Dive 1- in
which the sea hare draws the attention of the lobster.Dive 2 - in which the
sea hare mistakens the attention of the lobster for the brotherly attention
of a crab.Dive 3 - the hare misguidedly agrees to dinner with the
lobster.Dive 4 - the lobster dines on the sea hare.

I'm thinking about the moral of the story.I need more material.

(I wrote her back: The moray of the story is watch out for the eel.)

Breathe

2009-09-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Research diving is crazy. You have to enter a completely foreign medium, one breath of it (seawater) makes you black out. But you are breathing air through a “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” Don’t forget to breathe that SCUBA air. Just like Yoga. Keep breathing. Keep breathing. Make the rhythm of the breathing flow through everything you do.

Now, finally, you are in the water, hooked up to your tank and all the various items you’ve tied to it. Ready to go down. Down you go, letting air out of your buoyancy control bladder (BC). Your embedded weights pull you down. Breathe.

Once you start to descend, you descend faster (the bladder volume is reduced more and more as the water pressure builds; smaller BC means less lift). You know this because you’ve experienced it over and over in the daylight. But now it is black. Where’s your light? Attached to a ring on your BC. Grope till you find it. There it is. Breathe.

John’s ahead of me with a sea hare in his hand, bubbles streaming out . Where’s the camera? I’m supposed to be filming. Attached to the BC. Grope till I find it. Turn it on. Aim it at John’s light. What’s that crazy light flashing all over the place. Oh. It’s my light. I’ve absent-mindedly let go of it and it’s dangling on its rope. Breathe.

Found the light, found the camera. Then bonk, I hit the bottom. Forgot to push more air into my BC, and here I am rolling on the bottom. I let go of the camera, the light, push off the bottom, grope for my power-inflator button, and force air from my tank into my BC. Off the bottom I come. Breathe.

How the hell did I get so tangled in this kelp? Can’t even see how tangled I am. I notice, as I slowly writhe and tug on the kelp, the little voice inside me saying “you don’t belong here Billy. Time to get out.” I ignore the voice. Now it isn’t pitch black anymore. Bioluminescence lights me, and everything I touch. But I still can’t see cause there is nothing around me but kelp. Breathe.

Slowly unravel. Take your time. Ok. Finally free. Now where the hell did John go? There he is, just a couple of body lengths away. His sea hare is in his hand, he’s bearing down on a lobster, ever so slowly. Moving like kelp, he gently lets go of the sea hare, and it drops perfectly onto the antennae of the lobster. The lobster bats it away with its antennae. John retrieves the sea hare and tries again. After three tries he moves on. This lobster doesn’t want to eat sea hare. John comes to another lobster. Same story. These lobsters are really tame. John can basically touch the sea hare to their short first antennae on the front of their head, and push a little, and they just sit there. They don’t eat, but they don’t back off. 20 presentations John makes before running out of air. These lobsters hate sea hares, just like everyone always said. It is becoming clear that the WMSC preserve makes lobsters into sea-hare eaters!

Does human fishing make lobsters picky?

2009-09-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

So, lobsters from the preserve attack (not all of them but around 4 out of 10). Cool they don’t do that on the mainland. That much we know. But now we are wondering, maybe there is something magic about Catalina Island, or this general region. Maybe something else makes lobsters attack. We really need to try lots of lobsters OUTSIDE the preserve and see if they attack.

So, a couple of nights ago we presented sea hares to lobsters less than a mile outside the Preserve. The night started inauspiciously. Dark as pitch, heading to the reef marker, anchored a bit beyond it. Anchor holds, turn off engine. Quiet. Dark. Lonely. Lots of current. No reachable shoreline. No way do I want to go into that cold black sea. Let’s go back to Siwash and get a good night’s sleep. Drink a glass of wine, and eat a chunk of 70% chocolate.

NO, goddamnit, we have a question, a burning question. We think lobsters out here aren’t hungry. We think that all that fishing pressure means that there are so much fewer lobsters than in the preserve that they never deplete the available tasty food (snails, urchins, mussels). Why eat an unpalatable sea hare, when you’ve got plenty of other snacks?

But here’s why this question burns. A day before, we dove this very same reef and were surprised to find shitloads of lobsters; just as many as we find in the Preserve a scant kilometer away. Seems like shitloads of lobsters should knock down the food out here too. Maybe these lobsters are hungry and will eat sea hares. Is that possible? This question makes me nervous. Maybe we got this story wrong. I hate science. Doing science makes me soooo nervous. What if the lobsters chomp on the sea hares wherever we see greater numbers? What if this whole damn trip is misguided? Plagued by doubt. I’ve been here before. I can tell myself that your science sucks if you can’t put your hypothese at risk. Tell myself over and over. But somehow I’m still really nervous.

Just before going over the side, John notices that his mask broke, probably when we loaded our gear. Rats. Ok. Take off the tanks, pull up the anchor, zoom back to the dock, get an extra mask, then zoom back into the darkness to the reef. The tide is ebbing now. The current will be stronger. Oh well, lets do it. In we go.

Otherworldly predators

2009-09-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

So here I am. John and Dan too. We’ve been presenting sea hares to lobsters in the preserve. We are politely asking each lobster we encounter if he or she would like a bite of sea hare.

A few days ago, inside the WMSC preserve, we presented sea hares to 15 lobsters. 6 of the lobsters attacked! They just pounced on the sea hares, probed them, turned them brought them to their mouths, even ran away with the sea hare tucked under their bodies. The sea hares inked (if they hadn’t already). We don’t have many sea hares to go around, so we intervened (in this movie we bonk the lobster on the top of its carapace), and stole our sea hare back. Sometimes that was pretty hard. As scared as lobsters are of humans, they didn’t let go. Damnest thing you ever saw. No one has seen this before. I’ve talked with a crusty sea-hare collector about this. He’s presented sea hares to lobsters on the mainland countless times. He has NEVER seen lobsters attack. But here in the preserve, lobsters pounce on sea hares, probe them, ball them up, bite them, run with them tucked under their chest, eat them. It’s the coolest behavior you ever saw. Here’s a movie.

SocialPressure

2009-09-23T22:48:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been taking this natural sensitization story on the road for a couple of years now. Most of my science friends (professors and postdocs mostly) like to study natural behavior. They are very happy with my effort to drag the study of learning and memory into a natural context. But they can be a pain in the ass, too.

“But you are starving these poor lobsters, Billy. How natural is that??”

“Well, see, it’s like this… Before humans fished them down to the nubbins, there were lots and lots of lobsters. Everywhere. Big ones. They ate up everything around, and there just wasn’t a whole lot of food. Lobsters got really hungry. Sea hares started to look pretty good. So, lobsters started to eat sea hares.”

“So, what is your evidence of this “just so” story, Dr. Bill?”

“Uh, well, shoot. Do I have to have evidence?”

Yes you do. That’s what science is about.

One day a professor friend of mine named Matt Grober said, “Hey why don’t you see if lobsters at the Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island eat sea hares. They’ve been ferociously protected from any and all fisherman for 25 years. Maybe you’ve got a prehuman microcosm there.” He showed me a cool photo of a cave with lots of big lobsters.

Ok. Let’s do that! So I took 6 or 8 of my Chapman students to Catalina on Siwash. Grandad’s boat. We brought a half dozen sea hares out with us, and moored nearby the Wrigley center. I sent in some students (one of whom, John, is with me now) armed with sea hares to present to the lobsters. I didn’t really think it would work.

When they came back, their eyes were popping! The lobsters ate the sea hares right up!!

So, wow. That’s amazing. Are you sure? Wow. Maybe the preserve did that.

That was last summer. More than a year has past, and finally I get to come back to this cool phenomenon. Science brought me here.

Starved lobsters attack sea hares (who learn from the experience!)

2009-09-23T15:45:00.001-07:00

Lobsters eat everything. Maybe sensitization helps protect a once-attacked sea-hare from a second attack.

But here’s the thing. If you bring in a lobster from the field into the lab, and present it with a sea hare, it just bats it away. Sea hares don’t taste good; lobster isn’t interested.

BUT if you withhold food from a lobster for 4-8 weeks, then it WILL attack a sea hare. Charles Derby in Atlanta was the first to do this to study inking behavior on the part of the sea hare. My students and I started doing the same thing, in order to cause sensitization. Two years ago, we found that attack by a hungry lobster DOES cause sensitization, just like the sensitization caused by electric shock. Furthermore, last summer some other students and I found that the neural changes that underlie sensitization caused by electric shock are identical to those caused by lobster attack. We are starting down the path of understanding how sea hares use their learning in nature.

Science gets you places you would never plan to go.

2009-09-23T15:35:00.001-07:00

Take my sabbatical out here on Catalina Island as Exhibit A. For the last 20 years or so, I’ve been studying the neural basis of learning and memory in sea hares. These are sea-going slugs that only live a year. They mainly eat and mate and lay eggs and die. But of course, that is what all species do. In the case of sea hares, though, there is precious little more to the story. Or is there?

Neurobiologists have been using sea hares since the 60’s, and I since the 90s, to learn the secrets of how neural systems make behavior happen. More particularly, what happens in sea-hare brains when they learn? How does an intervening experience change what happens in an animal’s brain so that a given stimulus, say a water squirt, now causes a DIFFERENT behavioral response? Kind of a hare-brained question, eh?

The most commonly studied form of learning is sensitization. Traumatize an animal with some heinous experience, and it gets jumpy. It reacts much more strongly to any and all stimuli than it did before. Squirt a water-jet on its siphon and a sensitized sea hare starts pulling that appendage in much faster and longer.

Now neurobiologists are in some ways not very imaginative. They found early on that if they gave a strong electric shock to a sea hare, its reflexes to mild stimuli were dramatically strengthened after the shock. 40 years and numerous breakthroughs and awards later (including Nobel prize in medicine in 2000), neurobiologists still give electric shock to cause sensitization. We now know a whole huge amount about what happens in the sea-hare brain when it gets an electric shock. And yes, the knowledge from this science is already helping humans with neurological afflictions.

But no one knows the slightest thing about sensitization in nature. The natural history of the poor, hapless sea hare is barely known at all! That’s where my students and I come in. We are hell-bent on figuring out how sea hares use sensitization “out there”. There are no electric shocks in the ocean, so that stimulus won’t do. Well then, what other trauma might there be? LOBSTERS! Those creepy crawly delicious California spiny lobsters.

OldAndInTheWay

2009-09-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

Big Fisherman’s Cove: Late night, last (2AM). Sleeping on Siwash. Grandad’s boat. The first photo was taken by my Diving Safety Officer, Gerry Smith. A solid piece of reality in a crazy research project. Next is what Siwash looked like when Grandad owned her (second decade of 20^th century).

Up this morning at 9. Totally glassy. So secluded. The only boat in Fisherman’s. Researchers and donors only. Not a breath of wind. Sun beating down. Have to swim today. Period. Jump into the whaler, 2 min to shore. Check email, then change into swim suit. New swim goggles. Ear plugs for the first time ever. Get in feet first to protect the ear plugs. Whew. Then it feels GOOD. 70 degrees. So clear, so perfect. Start across the bay, 60 ft visibility, clearly seeing the skates and rays on the bottom 40 ft down, the kelp bass in the water column, bait balls coming and going. The bass tracking the bait like dingos (I’m guessing, never having seen dingo’s track their prey). Kicking hard. Breathing hard. This is what I am supposed to do. Take control of my body again. I respectfully told my doctor I was going to stop taking the miracle statins for cholesterol . I want to control my lipids and cholesterol without resorting to drugs. He said he’s against it, but will order new blood tests for November if I insist. I do. So now I’m swimming to get control of this aging and HDL’s and LDLs and cholesterol. Shit.

But all this only heightens my pleasure in swimming this awesome cove. The water is just gorgeous. Swimming hard, out to the point. Kelp everywhere, fish everywhere. Body aching. Breathing hard. Keep kicking. Be Michael Phelps. Goggles fogging. Don’t clear them. Keep swimming. Now I’m at the Chalk Cove buoy, ½ km from the dock. Wipe the goggles with kelp, spit on them (makes the fog go away). Then back I go. This time more seaward. Out over 60 ft. Barely see the bottom. Fish everywhere. Think about sharks. I always do. Finally make the dock. Drag myself out of the water. A bit shakey. Being old sucks.

2009-09-19T15:01:00.001-07:00

Sitting in the Catalina Express, just accelerating for Angel’s gate lighthouse, bound for Two Harbors on Catalina Island. I’m in the second week of a 10-week junket. I’m 58 years old. Experiencing the first REAL sabbatical leave of my life. Scared shitless, and excited as hell.

This ferry is REALLY fast. It is traversing my old stomping grounds, the upper end of LA harbor, turn the corner at Angel’s gate, and out to Catalina. I cut my sailing teeth here a million years ago. This express goes so fast it has to turn the 120-degree corner in a wide sweep. There’s Point Fermin to windward peeking out behind the bulge in the west breakwater. Sweeping past these landmarks that are oh-so-slow to change when sailing a boat going 4 knots. But now these points and bluffs and buoys and lighthouses move past like we are airborne. Tweeks my poor brain big time, this speed.

John and Dan will be waiting for me when I get there. These are two crazy students who have decided to forego their scholarly education for a much more wet one. I’m paying them with room and board and free air (Air is what you put into a SCUBA tank so you can breathe underwater. It costs money to do it. But for John and Dan it is free). When I arrive at Two Harbors, we will walk 80 feet to the dock where our Boston whaler (a small vessel with a powerful outboard motor that can get us where we want to go fast) is tied up. We will climb into the outboard, jet over to Fisherman’s cove, and get into our dive gear, back into the whaler and scout out a new spot to study lobsters. Hopefully we will return to the same spot tonight and do our behavioral observations. We’ve been doing this for a week now. Talking to people, scratching our heads. Where should we go? Where can we best entice a lobster into attacking a California sea hare?

We are here because of a crazy hypothesis. Lobsters are incredibly efficient scavengers. They wait till night-fall and leave their dens and forage out in the open for whatever delectable creature they can get their legs on. They pounce on their food, grab it with their front legs and stuff it into their mouth. They eat all kinds of food, mussels, worms, urchins, snails of all sorts, as well as anything dead they run across (e.g., fish or seal carcasses). Lobsters probe food items with their legs, crush them with their mouth. They are ravenous other-worldly creatures. If you should drown at Catalina Island and sink to the bottom in less than 200 feet, you would be rapidly consumed by these guys (I don’t know this for a fact, but I’d bet a lot of money on it). Bottom line, everything in the sea is their food.

Unless the food is a California sea hare. Offering up sea hares to lobsters has entertained many SCUBA divers over many years. Grab a sea hare off the bottom, and take it to the nearest hole with lobster antennae protruding, and watch the fun.

Only there isn’t any. The lobster either bats the sea hare away with its antennae, or retreats deeper into its den, or simply ignores the sea hare. Sometimes the sea hare will crawl up onto the lobster! I’ve offered lobsters sea hares many times. I know lots of people that have done this many times. Lobsters don’t eat sea hares.

Yet our hypothesis, the crazy reason we are diving at Wrigley Marine Science Center at Big Fisherman’s Cove, Catalina Island, is that maybe lobsters DO eat sea hares.