Alaska; Day 4

[draggonlaady]

On day 4, I went out with V and Cap'n Dave in the La Tourista to set nets. We picked a spot near a couple of rocks protruding from the surface, set the net out, and then went ashore to wait. Which turned out to be several hours of waiting. Good thing I brought my trusty camera! We were on a rocky island, which had 3 distinct types of tide pools. On one side, there were shallow, long, warm pools swarming with hermit crabs, limpits, chitons, sculpin, gunnel, and anemones (in red, green, orange, and brown. some even had cute stripes!). The barnacles here were...hmm. I'm getting tired of saying huge. Right, they were of impressive stature! Just offshore here, there were forests of various colors and sizes of kelp.

A few more red sea urchins, and the ubiquitous sea stars were also hanging about.

I was surprised to discover just how mobile and flexible chiton are; I had imagined them moving slowly and holding a fixed shape, rather like limpets. Turns out, not so much. This fella was waving around out from under a rock shelf, looked for all the world like a tentacle. Then it curled up over the edge of the shelf. When I touched it gently, it snapped back under the shelf with startling speed.

These isopods were pretty neat; the red one is about 2" long.

To give an idea of how long we were waiting, (and how determined gulls are) I took a series of pictures of the rocks where we set our net. These are glaucous wing gulls, for those who care :)
Big rocks, lots of perching space
Well, getting a little close here.
Glad those other guys left, now we have lots of space again!
Hmm. Well, this is getting interesting...
Fine, ocean. You win. We're out of here.


On the point of the island, the ground was uplifted layers with deep crevices between slabs of rock. The tide pools here were deep and shaded, with no crabs but many multi-colored snails. Many muscles and small barnacles. Also sea roach; once again, creatures here are surprisingly not small!

Around the other side of the island there were pools of the same shaded/cleft construction, but warmer and a little shallower. These were swarming with tiny red bugs. Occasional small shrimp scuttled about. There were snails here too, bazillions of them, all small and purple. Dave says they're carnivorous, and that if you drop meat in the pools, it'll be entirely devoured surprisingly rapidly. I didn't test it, but whatever they eat, they seem to be thriving. This area here, for example. Those are not pebbles coating the ground. That's a solid layer of purple snails.

This critter has the delightfully apt name of "purple intertidal sponge."

Unlike on the fossil beach, there were very few sea cucumbers, and they were quite small.

There were pine siskin flitting about and singing cheerily, but I couldn't ever get a good picture. I did get some not-bad shots of the loon (yellow bill? Pacific? thoughts, winnett) drifting offshore though, and the raft of seals sunning themselves in the shallows.

All we caught in our otter net was kelp, so we eventually pulled it back in and headed to a different area. While we were relaxing on the island, the crew of the Sea Weasel was busy; they pulled in a single net with 4 otters and a half-grown sea lion. One of the otters escaped while they were trying to deal with the sea lion; he was rather displeased about being netted, and maneuvering several hundred pounds of displeased sea mammal is a bit of a daunting task. They managed to cut him out of the net, but that left a huge cut area, and while they were working on it, they sacrificed a stuff sack, a seat cushion, and a life vest to keep him from gnawing on humans. As it was, he dented and scratched a sizable area of the skiff. Of the 3 otters they hauled back to the Jerry O, one was late pregnancy, so they did not want to open her abdomen. Measurements and blood samples were taken, but no transmitter in that one.

Z spotted a wrecked plane while waiting for nets; he told Cap'n Dennis about it that night. Based on Z's description of a white plane with blue trim, and 2 9's in the tail number, Dennis thought it might be the plane of someone named Smokey, who'd gone missing about 8 years ago. We planned to go looking for it the next day.

Dinner was cedar-plank salmon, much yums were had.

After dinner, Leanna, Ocean, and I ran out in one of the skiffs to see the pictograph on the cliff. The story is that this cranky looking sun has been here for at least 200 years, though there is debate over who did it and why.

Sunsets out here were gorgeous!
I forgot to post the sunset pics from the days before, so here you go:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

Comments

Sunsets

[(Anonymous)]

Fun, fun stuff!! Crazy beautiful sunsets!!

[la-roja.livejournal.com]

That cranky sun is awesome and your timelapse of the gull covered rock was hilarious. It looks like so much fun!