The Oyster’s Garter

The platypus genome has been sequenced, and it really IS an unholy mixture of mammal, bird, and reptile. Check out Jim Lemire’s handy breakdown. And did you know that platypus secrete milk through their skin because they don’t have nipples?

Further adventures with fish traps! As I’ve mentioned before, my sugar momma for this trip to Curacao is fellow Scripps graduate student Ayana Johnson, who is trying to build a better fish trap, one that excludes juveniles and tiny non-target reef fish. Our adventures with tying the traps to the truck were only the beginning - we still had to get her modified fish traps in the water.

Trouble is, Ayana is deploying eight per site and the traps are really quite big - about 4 feet wide and 1.5 feet deep - so we needed a boat to get them out. So here’s what stacking fish traps looks like if you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. That’s Ayana on the left and me on the right.

After only one day of checking the traps, we’ve already noticed a sharp difference between the regular traps and the ones with escape slots. (All the fish we catch will be released at the end of the five-day experiment.) The regular traps catch all kinds of tiny useless-but-beautiful fish, like juvenile French angelfish and four-eye butterflyfish. And eels. Holy crapoly, huge moray eels that come into the traps and eat everything else. In contrast, the modified traps did not have nontarget fish. But they also didn’t have any fish, though it’s hard to judge after only one day in the water. After seeing my very favorite fish on the reef, the fluttery silly-looking smooth trunkfish, caught in an unmodified trap, I sure do hope that Ayana can find a way to stop wasting all these fishy lives.

Carnival of the Blue #12 is up at the Island of Doubt. More ocean awesomeness than you can measure with an 100 meter transect tape!

Though my giant swollen hand remains a medical mystery, I now have a suspect. The dread Bearded Fireworm lives on the reef, peaceably crawling about munching on coral polyps. Until…a giant five-fingered hand reaches down from the sky and tried to sample the tunicate that it happens to be crawling on. Then the worm extends its GIANT POISONOUS SPIKES and bam! The offending hand is useless for a week.

They’re not exactly spikes, of course. Most marine worms are polychaetes, also known as bristleworms. Each of their segments has a fleshy protrusion called parapodia, from which protrudes hair-like bristles called setae. (Here’s a nice diagram.) Setae come in all kinds of forms - they can be jointed for traction, hooked for gripping, and so on - but the bearded fireworm’s case, they are hollow and filled with poison. Because of this kickass defense, fireworms fear no predators and are out and about during the day. The one that nailed me must have been small or I would have seen it, but individuals can get up to 12″ long.

Bearded fireworms apparently also have an unfortunate tendency to sneak into people’s aquariums. Googling around brought out some rather desperate threads on how to remove them. I can personally assure these people that gloves are no defense. I wasn’t wearing any pansy neoprene diving gloves, either - when I work with spiky things like nasty spicule-filled tunicates, I wear hardened rubber work gloves. But they were no match for the probable fireworm, no no.

The moral of this story? Looky, no touchy is BY FAR the best way to hang out on a reef. Collecting tunicate samples is way more harrowing than I thought it would be. On top of the fireworm, I almost got nailed by an extraordinarily attractive and extraordinarily toothy Golden Moray yesterday. (Rick would be…so proud. Scroll down for his That’s a Moray Monday series with all the moray goodness you can handle. Except for the golden moray. Rick, do you take requests?)

And sorry, ghouls. I forgot to take a photo of the swollen hand at its peak, what with the science and the doctor and all. Though my thumb still hurts, it is no longer even the slightest bit impressive. You will simply have to use your fervid imagination.

UPDATE: Replaced stock photo with my own photo for maximum grossness.

Living on a coral reef is like living in New York. Space is at a premium, you get crammed into all kinds of peculiar nooks, and you’ve got to be tough to maintain your personal space. (As a short person on the rush hour subway, I learned that my elbows are very conveniently placed for making tall people move.) So diving on the reef in Curacao feels oddly familiar. I’m here to investigate the mysterious explosion of a colonial tunicate on the reefs of Curacao.

Trididemnum solidum has increased by 900% over the past 30 years (Bak 1996). On Curacao’s central leeward coast, these tunicates are everywhere, taking over the reef and smothering coral heads. Trididemnum is native to the Caribbean, so why is its populations exploding? And is the tunicate domination related to human disturbance?

Trididemnum is like the armored tank of benthic organisms - it photosynthesizes, eats bacteria, is very toxic to anything that eats it, and even has pointy spines in its tissue for extra protection (Bak 1981, 1996, 1998 ). However, Trididemnum’s kryptonite has been its dependence on its symbiotic algae - if the tunicate is shaded, it dies. Trididemnum cannot live on filter-feeding alone. (Citation? Randy Olson, 1986! He was a tunicate god in his past life!)

Since corals (this is the belated Coral Week connection) are supposed to be the dominant competitors in lovely nutrient-poor water, what has changed? Potential changes (with credit to Dr. Bak and various people around Curacao) are:

1) Something used to eat Trididemnum, but doesn’t anymore. This is not very likely since Trididemnum is incredibly inedible, what with the toxins and the pointy spicules. But perhaps the tiny little baby colonies used to get bulldozed by the urchins, and the urchins are now gone.

2) Trididemnum is getting a brand new food source, such as bacterial runoff from the land. Tunicates have a mucous-y feeding basket that can capture very small particles, while corals have to grab them with their tentacles. If there are lots of very small tasty bits floating about, maybe Trididemnum is gorging itself.

3) Corals are weaker than they used to be, and can no longer fend Trididemnum off. Trididemnum will not settle on live coral as a larva (Van Duyl 1981), but it can overgrow it. So, for example, when the corals are stressed by too-warm water, the tunicate has a coral-killing party.

So here I am in Curacao, working on methods to test these hypotheses. Since this is not really my trip (it’s all funded by my partner for her fish trap work) I don’t have enough time to do a full-fledged study. However, I’m hoping that my nuggets of data will be enough to provide direction for a full-fledged study, perhaps this winter.

While I am extremely fond of tunicates, even I must admit that they are not as attractive as corals. In fact, it’s rather depressing to see all these fetching corals smothered by something that seems to be more a part of Jeremy Jackson’s Rise of Slime than of Pretty Tropical Coral Reef Land. I really hope that this work will eventually lead to a bit more insight as to why these tunicates are winning the battle for space, and why the corals are losing.

Sources:

Bak, R. P. M., M. Joenje, I. de Jong, D. Y. M. Lambrechts, and G. Nieuwland. 1998. Bacterial suspension feeding by coral reef benthic organisms. Marine Ecology-Progress Series 175:285-288.
Bak, R. P. M., D. Y. M. Lambrechts, M. Joenje, G. Nieuwland, and M. L. J. Van Veghel. 1996. Long-term changes on coral reefs in booming populations of a competitive colonial ascidian. Marine Ecology Progress Series 133:303-306.
Bak, R. P. M., J. Sybesma, and F. C. Vanduyl. 1981. The ecology of the tropical compound ascidian Trididemnum solidum. Part 2/3. Abundance, growth, and survival. Marine Ecology-Progress Series 6:43-52.
Olson, R. R. 1986. Photoadaptations of the Caribbean colonial ascidian-cyanophyte symbiosis Trididemnum solidum. Biological Bulletin 170:62-74.
Van Duyl, F. C., R. P. M. Bak, and J. Sybesma. 1981. The ecology of the tropical compound ascidian Trididemnum solidum. Part 1/3. Reproductive strategy and larval behavior. . Marine Ecology-Progress Series 6:35-42.

Diving in the morning, and processing samples into the night. I have learned it takes 2 1/2 hours to pump 20 liters of water by hand, and another 2 hours to scrub 10 tunicates. I am a tunicate scrubber, and a bad and naughty blogger. Though now I have two hands to do it with!

It’s Coral Week over at Deep Sea News, and I have many coral-related thoughts. Unfortunately, I have been bitten by something poisonous and tropical and my right hand is the size of a grapefruit, which really cuts down on the typing speed. So please enjoy DSN’s many coralline delights and stay tuned. There’s lots of pretty pictures on the way once the swelling goes down.

Imagine it: Paintable solar panels! Not yet, of course, but scientists at several universities have discovered ways to put chemicals into paint that would generate electricity. The theory is simple: paint fades with sunlight, right? Therefore, the paint is already reacting to the sunlight in some way. The trick then is to use the energy getting dumped into the paint and convert it into electricity.

Here are a couple of companies and scientists with more specific applications:

* Nanosolar, in sunny California, has devised a kind of film that can be applied directly to steel. They’re not profitable yet, but they began commercial production in November.

• Scientists at the University of Swansea, in jolly old England, have invented a kind of paste that can be rolled onto steel panels of the sort that’s often used for bridges, and similar to aluminum siding. They think they’re 2.5 years away from mass production.

• Our friends to the north, or in my case to the north east, at the University of Toronto, has devised a way to capture specific wavelengths of light using “quantum dots”. I’m not certain of the technology here, but Ted Sargent, the primary investigator, thinks he can tune his dots so they capture specific wavelengths of light, including the infrared spectrum, a part of the suns energy that no solar cells currently capture. He thinks he can put the dots into paint that we could spray on to any surface. He’s a good decade away from production, but I can already envision great, electricity generating murals painted onto the sides of buildings.

My question that remains unanswered for all of these, though, is I’m not clear how the engineers actually extract the charged up electrons from the paint. Do you just attach some copper wire to it or something? Any engineers out there have a guess?

[Via Treehugger, and thanks to inhabitat for the picture.]

When penguins get old and bald, the feather comb over just doesn’t provide enough insulation. What’s an elderly penguin gentleman to do? Wear a fetching custom wetsuit, of course. The article does not discuss whether a penguin’s natural tux promotes the wetsuit to formalwear.

Thanks, Aunt Sharon!

Some days, you find your experimental organisms and make the science. Here’s my ear (and the rest of me) with my tunicate. They’re the bluish blobs halfway down the far left side. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to sample there, as it’s right outside of a dive resort with a very carefully tended house reef. I hope I find it elsewhere. Of course, if I don’t find it elsewhere, I can assume it’s not invasive and I can just go home.

And some days, you find that your study site is occupied - BY A GIANT OIL DRILL! Seriously, it’s right on top of the study site, drilling away. I had no idea they drilled this close to shore. Unsurprisingly, this was outside a fishing village far away from the eyes of tourists.