Wind as Art

I know this is not aquatic, but this map is too neat not to share. The map displays the current wind conditions throughout the nation. It blends data and art and is quite mesmerizing. My GIS professor showed us this website as an example of how to creatively communicate spatial information.

Go to the website to fully experience this: http://hint.fm/wind/index.html

NPR's Science Friday Report on Cyanobacteria

Cyanobacteria guru Dr. Hans Paerl was on NPR's Science Friday just before Halloween. Listen Here


Dr. Paerl has been a leader in cyanobacteria research since the 1980s. I've been fortunate to see him give presentations twice, and he is an excellent speaker. His message in recent years is that need to be  both nitrogen and phosphorus pollution are contributing to cyanobacteria blooms, and that climate change and warmer temperatures are likely to increase the frequency of cyanobacteria blooms.

I'm not a fan of Science Friday's use of the word "slime" for this piece. It is a reactionary word that oversimplifies the presence of cyanobacteria in the environment. In many systems, if it were not for human alterations to ecosystems e.g. nutrient pollution, cyanobacteria would be a benign to beneficial organism. People already think algae is "gross" and my goal is to educate people on the diverse characteristics of algae some positive and some negative for different ecosystem processes. Calling it toxic "slime" is not a factual representation of what a cyanobacteria bloom is.  In spite of that it's always interesting to hear Dr. Paerl's thoughts and opinions on the topic.

Cyanobacteria in Pinto Lake

Watsonville sits between the Santa Cruz mountains and Monterrey Bay. Its flat fields are known for their abundant strawberry crops. In the algal community, Watsonville is known as one of the toxic algae hotspots in California because of the algae blooms that develop in Pinto Lake. The toxic algae feeds off the tremendous amounts of nutrients that lie in the lake's sediments, deposited there by decades of agricultural runoff. When toxic algal blooms form it closes the lake to human recreation and degrades the ecological health of the lake.

Northern California public radio station KQED just broadcast a nice overview of the situation in Pinto lake and how managers are hoping to control the toxic algae.

Click here for the link to the KQED report.

The professor I collaborate with at UC Santa Cruz has been monitoring toxins in Pinto Lake and was involved in the research that linked the Pinto Lake cyanotoxins to deaths of sea otters in the Monterrey Bay.

Enjoy!

NY Times article on history of oxygen

This is a great article on how earth's atmosphere filled with oxygen. Algae were the major players!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/science/earths-oxygen-a-mystery-easy-to-take-for-granted.html?ref=science

New Toxic Algae Report

After a busy summer in the field and failing to post on the blog, I'm back.

Just this month the National Wildlife Federation released a website and report dedicated to toxic algae.

Check it out here: http://www.toxicalgaenews.com

I'm back at the Angelo Reserve this weekend. Today while looking for algae I watched a dragonfly take flight for the first time. Dragonflies live most of their life in the water as a nymph. In rivers and streams they are predators that eat other insects and small fish. Eventually they emerge from the river as adults to mate and become the aerial predators we are more familiar with. You can see the remains of the nymph exoskeleton below the adult dragonfly. In the first photographs the wings are over the abdomen, then later the dragonfly moved them to their functional position perpendicular to the body. I watched this for 20 minutes until eventually the wings started fluttering and the dragonfly took off.

Bridging the Science-to-Society Gap

This is a thought provoking blog post from the folks at nature.com blogs discussing science in society.

At one point the article states scientists are, "paid to produce and collect the knowledge that is relevant to the world." This definition bounds scientists to produce certain kinds of knowledge. The authors do not see scientists as the individuals in society who engage in the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. I think this blog post offers much to think about, and I hope you have time to read it. Enjoy!

Epiphytic Algae

The photos below are taken through a microscope at 1000x and illuminated with ultraviolet light. They show bacteria stained with acridine orange to make them more visible. The bacteria were shaken off of Cladophora, a freshwater macro-algae, from the Eel River in Northern California. This summer I will conduct experiments to investigate the relationship between epiphytic bacteria and diatoms and their algal host Cladophora.

The photo below shows bacteria upon a diatom. I imagine the diatom is dead or dying and the bacteria are consuming the organic molecules from the decaying cell.

I took at trip up to the Eel River last weekend. These photos are from Standish-Hickey State Recreation Area.  Cladophora is starting grow in the river. I am expecting a big algae year because the big rain events in December flushed a lot of the aquatic insects out to sea. Since insect herbivore populations are low, Cladophora can grow faster than insects can eat it, which means lots of algae biomass in the river.

The photo below shows some really green Cladophora, note the branching pattern.

Below is some Cladophora in a backwater area at Standish-Hickey Recreation Area. The location of these algae surprised me, because over the weekend I usually saw Cladophora growing in fast flowing water, while this algae was growing in fairly stagnant water.