Quito by night...

...is absolutely amazing. That is all.

Hello Quito

Jon, Leslie and I got into Quito late last night and pretty much passed out immediately. Our flight to Baltra in the Galapagos isn't till tomorrow morning, so we have today to check out the city. This was my first look at Quito in the light, from a 4th storey hotel room with a broken window.


Leslie and I spent the morning wandering around Quito. I attempted to try out Jon's GoPro cameras out of the water, before we switch out the wide angle lens for the flat one. I didn't realise I'd left the camera on time lapse instead of just single shot mode, so I ended up with 160 pictures that were mostly of the inside of my pocket. But here is one of the few decent shots I did get.


I never manged to get the haircut I wanted in the US because I was busy with packing, moving, taking the GRE and (of course) collecting and sorting algae. So we went looking for a place to get it cut in Quito. Here I am with my six dollar haircut and the milo tin I found at the giant hypermarket, Megamaxi. I am always excited when I see milo being sold (e.g. in Moorea, New Zealand) because it's so much harder to get in the US.

The W's of a species invasion

When people go beyond the typical "oh you are studying marine biology that really cool" talk (something that I should write about at some point) and want to know exactly what I am doing with my summers, I usually say that I am studying a species of seaweed that is not where it's supposed to be. Most people have never heard of the concept of introduced or invasive species before, so the conversation usually turns in that direction and only occasionally goes back to my research.

But these conversations makes me wonder how I can talk about what I do in a bit more depth, while keeping it interesting enough for people who think algae is sushi and muck on fish tanks. I am going back to a primary school English composition framework because I realised that studying a new species invasion is a bit like the compositions we were taught to write as seven year olds - you have to address the same spread of questions. Also, if you can explain your science to a seven year old then you either have a brilliant seven year old or you have achieved relatively good communication of your science. (Which is why you probably have to test it out on more than one seven year old.)

So here is a brief summary of the questions we are asking, in terms of the good old 5 W's:

1. Who

Who is the invasive? - This question is a little bit out of order, since we had to figure out what the algal species was in order to determine that it was a new invasive species. This question was answered last summer, thanks to Craig Schneider at Trinity College who first documented the presence of Heterosiphonia japonica in southern New England.

Mr. Hetsiph makes friends with a kelp stipe.

2. Where

Where is it now? - We have some idea of this from last summer and a tentative northern range limit, and there are people further south who are looking out for its spread.

Where did it come from? - Most likely from European waters, where it is also invasive, but possibly from its native region in the North Pacific. This could probably be figured out using genetic comparisons of the New England populations with potential source populations from different places, but that is out of this lab's area of expertise so it is probably a question for someone else to answer.

3. When

When did it get here? - Still unknown, but certainly sometime before summer 2009, when it was first found and identified in New England. We don't know if it was introduced only once and just spread rapidly, or if it was introduced multiple times in multiple locations.

4. What

What is it doing here? - This is where we're at now. What kind of interactions does our invasive species have with the native community of algae (competition for space and nutrients, maybe?) and the herbivores like snails and amphipods? To try and answer some of these questions, we are conducting field surveys of algal species and abundances, which will lead into field and lab experiments later on.

"What does this mean for me?"

5. Why

Why does this matter? - Probably the most important question of all. Why should anyone care? Well, invasive algae have been an issue in the western Atlantic for some time and some have significant negative impacts (e.g. Codium fragile). Coastal management agencies are interested in knowing the potential impacts of the invasion on coastal health, water quality, etc. And because of the relatively early stage of this species invasion, what we learn about Heterosiphonia could contribute to a more general understanding of what makes an invasive species successful, and how invasions spread.

That's it for now, tomorrow I shift gears completely and head for somewhere a little more exotic. I fly from Boston to Quito, Ecuador, and then take a domestic flight into Baltra in the central Galapagos archipelago on Thursday. Hopefully there will be more blogging from the land of the tortoises.

So what exactly am I doing with all this algae?

This is what I have been doing for the past week.

We've gone diving at sites in Nahant and in Rye, NH and put down 0.5m x 0.5m PVC quadrats like the one below. First, we visually identify each species of algae and record the approximate percentage of the quadrat that it takes up. Then we collect all the algae in the in the quadrat, put it in a bag and take it back to the lab. We collect about 10 bags per site.

This is a quadrat (pre-collection) from Nahant last year. I haven't yet taken my camera underwater this summer.

In the lab, we sort the algae by species and clean it - i.e. remove little critters like amphipods, isopods, little crabs, little starfish*. The result is something like in the picture - neat piles of algae on a lab tray. Then we weigh the algae by species in two ways: 'fresh weight' which is just spinning it down in a salad spinner to remove excess water and then putting it on a scale; and 'dry weight' which is putting it in an oven at about 65ºC so that it is completely dried out, and then weighing it (this destroys the algae so you can't do anything with it after).

This is all the algae from one (0.5 m x 0.5 m) quadrat from our Rye, NH collection site. I am pretty sure that if I cleaned up the algae up a bit better and arranged everything a bit more prettily, I could convince someone that it is some kind of Japanese delicacy that they should try.

This whole long process gives us estimates of two things:
1. How many species of algae are out there, and what they are
2. How much of each species is out there, in absolute terms and relative to the others. This can be measured by percentage cover of the quadrat or by weight. We are doing both to see how well the two agree (i.e. if one is an accurate proxy for the other).

These two things can then be used to tell us plenty of other things such as how diverse the algal community is, and which species we should use in lab experiments.


*This is described in one sentence, but is the longest, most tedious part of the whole process. It took us <1 hour of underwater time to collect 10 bags of algae, and a full day to clean, sort and weigh only 7 of those bags. During the process I wrote this song.

The Algae Song
(to the tune of "Daisy Bell")
Algae, Algae, give me your answers true
I've gone crazy, just from sorting you
The amphipods are too many
And Desmarestia is nasty
But soon I'll find
If Hetsiph might
Influence diversity

Return to Cunner Ledge!

I've been working hard on collecting and sorting algae from morning to night for the past few days, but this morning I found some free time to walk around Nahant's East Point, which is always nice. It was just after low tide, so I went out to my old field site next to Cunner Ledge. Here it is, marked with the yellow arrow in the picture and on the Google map for East Point. You can also see the Marine Science Center on the map.


I am a little less sure-footed than I was last summer (especially since I was climbing the rocks in flip-flops this morning) but I went back down and looked for my 0.5 m x 0.5 m plots. We set up 30 plots along that seaweed-covered ledge last July. My plot markers are still around :)

This was the very first field experiment that was truly my own - Matt helped me set up the plots at the start, but I collected the data and maintained the plots for the 8 weeks that it ran. It was a small-scale manipulation of the diversity of basal species, i.e. species that bring energy into the system. Seaweeds do this through photosynthesis and filter feeders like barnacles and mussels do this by consuming plankton from the ocean.

And while we're on the topic of my field site, I finally got round to digging up the screencap of Cunner Ledge in the movie Shutter Island. The movie was partly filmed in Nahant, and my field site makes a half-submerged appearance. So here we have Leonardo DiCaprio pointing a gun at a guard, which is all very interesting, but LOOK THERE IS MY SITE IN THE BACKGROUND. Which is really the best part of the entire movie.

Off site algae collection

Today we drove slightly over an hour north to Rye, NH to revisit a site from last summer and do some algae collections there. This is a picture of our entry point into the water, and the actual site of collection is just next to/behind the big rock on the left.

The picture is deceptively warm and sunny and hides the fact that the water temperature was still 7ºC/45ºF, which is about where it is in the early winter. So we were freezing in our wetsuits for both dives and I am still cold 7 hours after exiting the water.


But on the way back we got crabcakes at a roadside place and sat in the sun and it seemed like New England summer again.

The great escape

Living and working in a marine lab is always interesting because things like this happen.

I am sitting in the lobby of the building at night, working on my laptop. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the dark, empty main lab. An escaped green crab scuttles out into the lobby in a small burst of speed, then pauses to see if anyone has noticed.