Cookie-lobster LIKE sea hare

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.