Biologicos Ambulantes

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.