Tsunamis make you think.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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!)

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.

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

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.

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.