Back to College: April 30, 2010

April 24, Saturday

Last night two friends, Curt and Sharon Johnson, arrived in Friday Harbor on their sailboat, Windwalker. I spent an enjoyable evening with them including munchies and salad for supper. I was pleased to learn that one of their reasons for coming up here from Everett was to pay me a visit. Curt is also retired Navy and spent many years teaching natural history in high school. Curt is an avid SCUBA diver that I occasionally go with.

Curt and I spent a couple of hours touring FHL. In the evening I again had an enjoyable evening as well as dinner on their boat. They provided the salmon and greens while I brought the potatoes and wine. Hobbit doesn’t have a well stocked refrigerator.

April 25, Sunday
Curt and I almost went SCUBA diving yesterday but decided it was too windy. Postponing was a good decision as the weather was excellent today. We took both of our dinghies around the entrance to Friday Harbor (we have lots of dive gear) and beached them on an ecological preserve on FHL property. Two years ago Linda, Chris, Win, and I walked through the woods to the same beach.

We started our dive about 10:00 and spent the better part of an hour under water at depths down to about 65 feet. This was really a great dive. We saw lots of small white nudibranchs that I would need in a lab to identify, solitary orange cup corals (Balanophyllia elegans), boring sponges (Cliona californiana), staghorn bryozoans (Heteropora sp.), many species of tunicates and starfish, as well as a myriad of other invertebrates and fish. One of the things I really enjoyed about the dive was being able to recognize a large percentage of the seaweeds (algae) we saw.

Wally Getting Ready to Dive

Curt Getting Ready to Dive

April 26, Monday
This was really a fun day. We went out on the Centennial, FHL’s 58 foot trawler. The rain gear you see in the pictures is not because of the weather, it’s to protect us from all the water and junk that comes up with our catch. As I went on board, the captain, Dr. Dave Duggins, an instructor at FHL who also has a Coast Guard Master’s license, noted that I was a mariner and asked me to help him out as he didn’t have a crew. My duties were to drive the boat as he set out and managed the net. I also helped him with the lines when we docked. We made two trawls, one in about 400 feet of water and one in about 250 feet. We caught lots of interesting stuff that you don’t see intertidally and will be studying the catch for the next couple of weeks.

Wally in Front of and on the Bridge of Centennial

Dr. Dave Duggins and One of His Graduate Students Unloading First Haul

Dr. Megan Deither (Closest to Camera) and Zoobots Processing the First Haul

A "Rose Star" (Crossaster papposus) Dredged from about 400 Feet.

April 29, Thursday
This has been a rather pleasant week. The rest of the Zoobots were busy studying for and then taking their mid-term in zoology. Since I switched to audit, I got to relax and do other things. Given all of the e-mails from family members concerning my drawing of diatoms and the questions about what they were, I decided to use some free time to make a new slide and take some photographs under the microscope. The following picture shows six or seven species.

Diatoms at 200X Magnification

My major educational activity has now shifted to trying to develop a way to photographically determine how much chlorophyll is present on a surface. One of the projects being worked on by the Zoobots needs this to assess the effects of limpets (a type of snail) on intertidal algal communities. Those of you not scientifically inclined should just skip the rest of this paragraph. For those of you who are scientifically inclined, the technique is to remove the IR filter present in a digital camera (all digital cameras have a built in IR filter). We then obtained an external filter that removes all visible light and a second filter that removes light in the near infra red (NIR) and IR wave lengths. With the camera on a tripod we first take one picture with all visible light filtered out then take a second picture with all of the IR filtered out. The percentage of red light absorbed increases as the amount of chlorophyll increases while there is a much smaller change in the absorbance of IR light. Using image processing software we separate the image taken with visible light into red, blue, and green. We then pixel by pixel take a ratio of the red to IR from the second picture. The average ratio is an index. I will also have to work out a correction factor for brightness using a grey card as a standard. We will use a spectrophotometer to calibrate the process after chemically removing chlorophyll from some sample coupons with methanol. I figure it’s either going to work or it’s going to fail – how about that for a philosophical statement.

Back on page 2 in the prologue of this journal I discussed that I couldn’t dive at FHL as part of a UW sponsored activity because I didn’t have proof that I was certified as a scientific diver by UC Berkeley. While chatting with the instructor for our research program I saw that he was a diver and suggested we take a dive together. I then mentioned that I couldn’t dive as a lab activity because I couldn’t find my certification card from Berkeley. He asked if I knew Lloyd Austin. When I replied that Lloyd had been my diving instructor, he pulled out a document he had received about 10 years ago at Lloyd’s retirement party. It was a list of all scientific divers Lloyd had certified at Berkeley. There I was, certification number 45. I’ll have to check with the dive master here to see if she will accept this as documentation for my qualification. Talk about serendipity.

April 30, Friday
Today was really a lot of fun. The Zoobots went on a field trip to the "4th of July Beach" with a sixth grade class from the local middle school. We broke into groups so each of us had 4 or 5 kids. There were two activities. One was a scavenger hunt where we went around the beach and up to knee deep in the water looking for things like clam holes, crab shells, nudibranchs, shells from different species of clams, snail eggs, etc. etc. The second was to dig up sand near the water then near the high tide mark looking for different critters. We had a sieve through which we washed out the sand. My group found the coolest thing of the day; a ribbon worm that was about 2 feet long. Unfortunately, it broke as we extracted it from the sand. Ribbon worms are in the phylum nemertea and aren’t even distantly related to earth worms which are in the phylum annelida.

Wally with 6th Graders from the Friday Harbor Middle School

Part of our 2-Foot Long Ribbon Worm, Cerebratulus

After getting back to FHL, we did a little work on our research project then, for the first time since arriving 5 weeks ago, I went home to Snohomish.  Getting home required bumming a ride with a classmate and taking a ferry to Anacortes.