A Mighty Wind

Our annual spring switchover has come and gone on the Farallones. The winter crew has departed along with the breeding elephant seals and the seabird season has begun. It’s been an interesting start to the season for us – Cassin’s Auklets are breeding and look to be off the their best start in several years, while Brandt’s Cormorants remain strangely absent from breeding colonies for a second straight spring. There has been one constant over the most of the last month – Wind, and lots of it.

For several days last week and many more over the last month, northwest winds were blasting the island at a steady 40 knots, and gusting upwards of 50 knots. The sea heaped up in great waves of white foam and salt spray coated everything.

Wind is one of the great driving forces in the ocean. Its patterns can dictate currents, drive nutrient rich upwelling, and shape the distribution of marine life at all levels of the ecosystem. But while wind is crucial to biologically rich areas of the ocean, like here in the Gulf of the Farallones, it can also make things difficult when you are living and conducting research on an isolated island. When it really starts to blow – there is no place to hide…

Biologists struggle against the wind while performing a Cassin's Auklet nest box check.

It’s difficult to know what 40 or 50 knots of wind really means unless you are lucky enough (some might say unlucky enough) to experience it. In those kinds of winds – everyone is just trying to hang on. Western Gulls are tucked low to the ground, facing into the wind, drawing their necks in to reduce the wind’s effects. Those gulls foolish enough to stand with their back to the wind were forcibly flipped into cartwheels by the gusts.

We biologists are hanging on too. It is actually a struggle just to walk around and stay on your feet. One must learn to lean into the wind at an angle to avoid being blown over. During really high wind gusts, the air will actually hold you up if you lean at an extreme angle (or even lift some smaller folks off of their feet!).

We say that at 45 knots, you can lean over at 45 degrees and the wind will hold you up. In winds like that, a hat or an unsecured data sheet will be gone in a flash, blowing 100 ft away by the time you realize it’s missing. At night you can feel the house shake as it is slammed by one powerful gust after another. It feels a lot like a small earthquake, with the whole building vibrating and pictures dancing on the walls. We are thankful for the solid construction of the original lighthouse keepers, whose 140 year old houses we still live in.

But, while the winds may get so strong that there are waves in the toilet bowl and it eventually flushes itself, we of the Farallones marvel at the strength and power of the wind that drives this dynamic marine ecosystem.

Team Mirounga Goes Intertidal

This past week the winter crew took advantage of daytime low tides by visiting some of the many caves and tide pools around SEFI. We were able to explore Jewel Cave and Little Murre Cave, both difficult to access unless a very low tide coincides with calm seas and no timid Harbor Seals napping on nearby rocks. Waiting for all of these events to converge is enough to frustrate even the most patient tide pool lover, but it was certainly worth it: we saw some spectacular animals.

Ari, Monica, and April explore Little Murre Cave

Although it is easy to see how beautiful these invertebrates are, the behaviors and physical adaptations they have acquired to live in such a harsh environment are even more remarkable. Imagine what life on the rocks that ring the ocean's edge of SEFI means for these creatures: crushing surf and hours of dessication, scorching sun and frigid water, Black Oystercatchers and other shorebirds pecking at you from above, and a host of other invertebrates and fish looking for a meal from below. This severe environment produces animals that not only look like something out of science fiction film, but often act like it too.

Six-Rayed Star (orange and tan morph)

Tiny, bright pink Six-Rayed Star

The Twenty-Rayed or Sunflower Star

These stars of the sea are echinoderms, a family name meaning “Spiny skin”, shared by urchins and sand dollars. In addition to their diverse and brilliant colors, we found stars of vastly different sizes and numbers of arms, from the tiny Six-Rayed Star (L. hexactis) which measures just a few centimeters across, to the Twenty-Rayed or Sunflower Star (Pycnopodia helianthoides), which can grow up to 25 centimeters across. No matter the number, all sea stars can drop one of their arms if a predator has them in a death grip, only to regenerate it later. Both also rely on their tube feet, which like suction cups grasp onto the rocks. The Sunflower Star, a top predator, has as many as 15,000 tube feet which help them to move quickly across any surface to overtake and disassemble their prey, including anemones, crabs, mussels, and even other sea stars.

Proliferating Anemone underwater. Note the juvenile anemones attached to this parent's basal collumn.

Two Proliferating Anemones close up when they are left high and dry by the low tide.

One Aggregating Anemone becoming two!

Anemones are gelatinous creatures related to jellies. These Cnidarians have tentacles armed with stinging cells (nematocysts) arranged around their central mouth/gut. Although they may seem to a casual observer to be passive and immobile, anemones display some fascinating behavior. The Proliferating Anemone (Epiactis prolifera) hatches free-floating (planktonic) young out of its mouth, which then attach to the parent’s column at the base, where they live protected until they are about 3 months old. At this point the tiny anemones detach and wriggle through the water to a nearby rock or solid place to settle and grow.

We were lucky to get the above picture of one Aggregating Anemone (Anthopleura elegantissima) in the process of becoming two! These individuals can divide by fission, sometimes creating huge colonies of identical clones from a single individual. When colonies of two different individuals meet, these anemones wage war by stinging each other with specialized, clustered stinging cells, often killing whole individuals and resulting in a line of bare rock between colonies.

Three-Lined Nudibranch: an island record?

The Sea Lemon or Monterey Dorid

Nudibranchs are some of the most beautiful and rare animals one can find at low tide. Sometimes called sea slugs, their name means “naked gill” and refers to the tufts that extend from their back (cerata), which are actually gills. These Three-lined Aeolids (Flabellina trilineata) in the photo above have probably been seen here on the island for years, but we couldn’t find any record of them in our journals, so we have a first official record for the island! These soft, beautiful, translucent animals are just a few centimeters long, but don’t let their looks deceive you. They are voracious predators of the intertidal zone, and use their meals wisely. When a Three-lined Aeolid preys on a hydroid (tiny attached cnidarians that look like plants), they incorporate the un-fired stinging cells from the hydroids into their own tissues, and can then use them for defending themselves.

Like many other nudibranchs, the Sea Lemon or Monterey Dorid (Achidoris montereyensis), gets its hue at least in part from what it eats. Sea Lemons feed on yellow Crumb-of-bread Sponge (Halichondria panacea) and other sponges. Depending upon their diet, their backs can be bright yellow to deeper orange.

Surf crashes into Jewel Cave

When winter storms hit SEFI and conditions seem difficult for the biologists working here, we only need to look to the intertidal zone to gain some perspective. The more we learn about these amazing species, the more respect we have for their tenacity and adaptability in an extremely harsh, dynamic environment. The intertidal zone is just one of a long list of critical and special habitats that the Farallon Islands provide for life in one of the richest marine environments on the planet.

Winter rain, spring flowers

In addition to providing PRBO biologists with drinking water for the year, winter rains cause SEFI's plant life to burst into bloom. Wildflowers dot the typically brown landscape with a range of colors, from subtle purple to bright yellow, all against a backdrop of green, making late winter and early spring undoubtedly the most botanically beautiful time of year here.

Maritime goldfields blanket the island with bright green and yellow.

The most common plant on SEFI is maritime goldfields (Lasthenia maritime), also known as "Farallon weed." This native spreading annual blankets the entire island, from the edge of the marine terrace to the lighthouse, with vivid green leaves and bright yellow flowers. It even grows on West End Island. Cassin's auklets dig their burrows underneath its canopy.

A close-up view of maritime goldfields.

Human visitors aren't the only animals on SEFI to appreciate the maritime goldfields. Sometimes on hot days the elephant seals will fling bits of the plant on their backs in an attempt to stay cool. In these photos, elephant seals lounge in the goldfields on the marine terrace.















































Other common native plants include fiddleneck (Amsinckia spectabilis), with small, yellow, trumpet-shaped flowers that grow along a stalk like its namesake; miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), with tiny pale pink flowers in the center of a circular, glossy leaf; red maids (Calandrinia ciliata), whose flowers are a gorgeous deep purply red; and common chickweed (Stellaria media), a spreading, low-growing plant with a cluster of little white flowers. Another favorite is sticky sand spurry (Spergularia macrotheca), a succulent with fleshy thin linear leaves and purple or white flowers.

Miner's lettuce.

Sticky sand spurry.

Common chickweed.

Non-native wildflowers grow on SEFI as well, including scarlet pimpernel (Anagalils arvensis), dwarf nettle (Urtica urens), goosefoot (Chenopodium murale), storksbill (Erodium moschatum and E. cicutarium), New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia expansa), and plantain (Plantago coronopus). One of the most common non-native plants is umbrella mallow (Malva neglecta), which sports a beautiful purple flower and big leaves. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been working to control both Malva and New Zealand spinach for 20 years, but the tenacious plants seem to have a strong foothold here.

Scarlet pimpernel.

Storksbill.

Action on the Beach

With only a handful of female elephant seals remaining on Sand Flat and Mirounga Beach, the bulls are vying for any last-minute mating opportunities. Bedlam Boy deserted the marine terrace harem with its one lingering cow, headed to Mirounga Beach which still had 8 cows, and kicked out former harem-master Mauricio. Not to be deterred, Mauricio moved onto Sand Flat and attempted to mate with a departing cow there. Rusty, the alpha male on Sand Flat and reigning elephant seal king of SEFI, bellowed his protest, forcing Mauricio to retreat.

Bull elephant seals are nearly 3 times as massive as cows,
as shown in the above photo of an attempted copulation by Mauricio on Sand Flat.

Bellowing with the large nose, a secondary sexual characteristic, is used as a display of dominance
towards other males. Dominant alpha bull Rusty, above, only needs to bellow and all other males retreat.

Finally, for those of you who can just never get enough of cute weaners (ourselves included), the photos below are offered for your viewing pleasure.

Powered by the Sun

The Southeast Farallon Island research station is powered primarily by the sun's energy. Eleven years ago, a solar array was installed on the roof of the powerhouse and a battery bank inside supplies the houses and workshops with electricity. Those solar panels and batteries served us very well for the past decade. This solar power system replaced diesel generators that ran nonstop during several decades of Navy and Coast Guard presence on SEFI, and won the refuge an environmental leadership award from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But the life of the solar batteries had come to an end.

A Pave Hawk flown by the California Air National Guard's 129th Air Rescue Wing lands on Southeast Farallon Island

This past week, Mike McGoey of the company NexGen returned to SEFI to replace the batteries. The 48 extremely heavy batteries (300 lbs. each) were carried to the island by two Pave Hawk helicopters from the California Air National Guard's 129th Air Rescue Wing. They also removed the 12 old batteries (1500 lbs. each). It took 7 trips, but all the new batteries were delivered safely, and we are so grateful for their assistance.

Mike McGoey of NexGen installs the new batteries: he also installed the original batteries in 1997.

Charles Whitefield and Mike McGoey hard at work making sure we have solar power to support the research station.

Mendel Stewart, the manager of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's entire San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge complex - of which the Farallon Island Wildlife Refuge is just one part - visited SEFI to oversee the delivery of the batteries. Derek Lee, PRBO's winter Farallones biologist, showed Mendel the main northern elephant seal breeding beaches and Steller sea lion haulouts. After all, the wildlife is what we are out here to monitor and protect. Thanks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NexGen, and the California Air National Guard, PRBO scientists are able to continue conducting research into one of the world's most productive and important marine environments, powered by the sun!

Mendel Stewart of the USFWS and Derek Lee of PRBO Conservation Science survey the elephant seals on Sand Flat.

Weaner City 2009

This is every elephant seal lover's favorite time of year. Plump, big-eyed weaned pups are now the most numerous age class of elephant seals on SEFI. The beaches and marine terrace are strewn with weaners who were left behind when their hungry mothers headed back out to sea after nursing their pups for 25 to 30 days non-stop - without eating anything the entire time.

A newly weaned pup still has its black fur.

This older weaner is still very fat but has molted its black pup fur. It is now a silver-gray color.

Weaners will now remain on the island for the next month, sleeping and playing with each other, and molting their black pup fur until their new pelt is a smooth silver-gray. They will live off their (considerable) blubber for the month, before leaving land and inshore waters for the first time and swimming out into the deep sea to forage for fish and squid. It likely will be the most difficult year of their lives, dodging sharks and searching for food using nothing but their instincts. Ocean climate conditions such as El Niño Southern Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation play a large part in whether they survive. We wish them luck and hope to see them back on SEFI next year.

This is an older weaner that has metabolized much of its blubber. It will soon be ready to head out to sea.

West End Excursion

Today, SEFI biologists made a special, all-day excursion over Jordan Channel to West End Island to check two elephant seal breeding beaches. This trip is a rarity and a privilege because West End receives an extra level of protection from human disturbance. Literally thousands of seabirds and California sea lions reside here, as well as Steller sea lions and a small but growing population of northern fur seals. No human structures exist on West End. In fact, the United States Congress designated 141 acres of the Farallon Islands – including West End but excluding SEFI – as part of Farallon Wilderness in 1974. This is the smallest designated wilderness in California.

View of West End Island in the distance, from the lighthouse on SEFI.

West End Island is completely off-limits during the spring and summer seabird breeding season. During the fall season, biologists visit West End a handful of times to monitor the breeding fur seals. Over the winter, we typically check the elephant seals with just a couple of trips, each time crawling slowly and carefully along the foothill of Maintop and over Raven’s Cliff so as not to scare California and Steller sea lions into the water. On our way to the far western end of the island where the elephant seals breed, we look for sea lions with shark bites or plastic straps around their necks, and record numbers that were branded on sea lions by researchers on breeding grounds elsewhere. The brand number information is shared with the researchers who marked the animals so they can estimate survival and how far the sea lions dispersed from where they were born.

Interns April Ridlon and Ari Waldstein make their way across the guano-covered rocks on West End.

April and Ari with Pastel Cave and the edge of Great Arch in the background.

PRBO Biologist Derek Lee and intern Monica Bond in front of beautiful granite rock formations.

On this trip we found 10 elephant seal cows and 10 pups at Pastel Cave Highlands, and 11 cows and 11 pups and 3 weaned pups on Shell Beach. Shell Beach once supported a harem of more than 200 cows, but the population fell dramatically after large winter storms hit the islands in the 1983 El Niño, and it hasn’t rebounded.

A bull elephant seal weighs about 5,000 pounds - much more than this "little" 150-pound pup! The blood on the bull's neck is from a fight with another bull for dominance of the harem.

To our delight, we also spotted a group of 24 northern fur seals on Indian Head Beach. Some had been tagged at the Channel Islands in southern California. We read the tags and enjoyed watching and photographing their antics. These sweet-looking but rather aggressive seals were extirpated from the Farallon Islands by Russian and Yankee fur traders a century ago, and are only recently making a comeback here. Fur seals first returned to West End Island in 1995, when 4 individuals were counted. Last year the population had grown to nearly 200 including pups.

Monica and April check out the northern fur seals on the flat below.

This northern fur seal looks sweet but can be rather aggressive.

Elephant Seal Update

The northern elephant seal breeding season is in full swing, with 12 cows and 5 pups on Sand Flat (including Drip, Kyra, Aphrodite, and Gypsy with pups, and Siu and Arwen still pregnant), 3 cows and 1 pup in Mirounga Beach, and 1 newly arrived cow on the Marine Terrace of Sand Flat. The photo on the left shows Drip's pup, already 17 days old, nursing from one of two nipples located on either side of her mother's belly button. Through our tagging efforts, we know the entire history of Drip and her mother. By tagging these seals as pups we know when and where they were born, and can track them throughout their lives. PRBO scientists are reaping the rewards of 30 years of tagging effort because we are able to determine lifetime reproductive success of multiple generations of females, and correlate these long-term demographic data to individual and environmental variables such as age, oceanic conditions, and climate change.

After kicking off smaller Mauricio, Rusty (above) has settled in as alpha bull on the Sand Flat, historically the largest harem on SEFI. A large chunk is missing from his nose, and Don Quixote (left) has been spotted in the gulches with some gaping wounds on his own nose and back. We suspect there may have been a fight between these two massive, 5,000-pound males. Today we counted 8 subadult males lurking on the outskirts of the Sand Flat harem, so Rusty will have his work cut out to keep them away from "his" cows.

Gimli has been guarding an empty Marine Terrace Sand Flat for the past 10 days. Today he was rewarded for his patience. A pregnant cow just arrived, the first 2009 breeding female for this relatively new harem. Gimli is sporting some impressive scars on his nose and cheek from last year’s big fight with Bedlam Boy. Note in the picture on the right that part of his nose is missing!

Due to the California and Steller sea lions that have moved into Mirounga Beach we have only been able to look into this area from afar. We know there is a big bull – we can hear and see him – but we haven’t been able to read his tags through our scope yet. In mid-December Salvatore, last breeding season's Sand Flat alpha bull, was hanging out on Last Resort but oddly he departed just after Christmas and we haven’t seen him since. Maybe he went to West End, or maybe he is in Mirounga Beach.

Finally, Bubba is moving between Garbage Gulch and North Landing, where cows have been arriving but then leaving after just a couple of days. Garbage Gulch typically supports a handful of breeding cows, but thus far no cows have remained there. Bubba, too, has some fresh wounds. Time will tell where this big bull will end up.

The gulches and breeding beaches are still full of immature elephant seals, but they are leaving by the day. Based on the color of their flipper tags, we have seen young seals born on San Nicolas Island, San Miguel Island, Point Reyes, and – best of all – we spotted an immature from Año Nuevo with a satellite tracking device glued to its head. This device allows researchers to track where this young seal is foraging at sea.

The Battles Have Begun

With the arrival of the first (and so far, the only) pregnant elephant seal cow on Sand Flat – Drip, a 16-year-old cow born on SEFI in 1992 (see photo below of Drip with some amorous young subadults pining after her) – the battles between the males have started. Mauricio was the first bull to arrive. He lost a brief fight to Salvatore (see photo above; Mauricio is on the left) and is hanging out on the marine terrace. Rusty started off in Mirounga Beach, then pushed Salvatore onto Last Resort, and now is defending Drip on Sand Flat. However, we are waiting for the big battle between these two alpha bulls. Last year, Salvatore was alpha on Sand Flat and Rusty dominated Mirounga Beach. Who will take Sand Flat – the ultimate prize – this year? In other news, Don Quixote currently is holding Mirounga Beach, and Bogs is nursing his wounds on Mussel Flat.

We also have resighted 2 of last year’s weaners that survived their first difficult year at sea. This immature below was born on the marine terrace of Sand Flat last year, and has returned for the fall haulout.