Bay Nature January-March 2015

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A N E X P L O R AT I O N O F N AT U R E I N T H E S A N F R A N C I S CO B AY A R E A

The Fine Art of Seaweed

$5.95

Coyote and the Modern World Rescue for a Drowning Bayshore Rancho Corral de Tierra, Finally

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contents

www.SonomaOpenSpace.org

january–march 2015

Features

Matt Knoth

SHAPESHIFTER, TRICKSTER, SURVIVOR

The Heart

in the heart of Silicon Valley

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hidden ecologies

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Josie Iselin, lovingblind.com

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C oyot e i n t h e M o d e r n Wo rl d Coyote is most definitely a survivor.

Targeted for elimination throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, this social, curious, and intelligent wild canine is back in a big way, having adapted to the modern world by expanding both its geographic range and its habitat preferences. How has Coyote done this? The parklands of the East Bay Regional Parks at the urban-wildlife interface offer a great place to ponder this question as well as to observe these protean predators in action.

by Joe Eaton

AN OCEAN GARDEN Th e F i n e A rt o f S e awe e d Starting with the name, seaweed doesn’t get the respect it deserves. But marine algae are among the greatest ecosystem engineers on the planet, fixing carbon, creating habitat, and serving as the base of the marine and intertidal food chains. And what else? They’re downright gorgeous. A few years ago, San Francisco artist Josie Iselin fell in love with the forms and colors of seaweed, and the result is an eye-opening series of images that highlight the beauty and diversity of our local marine algae.

by Josie Iselin

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NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP In c reased Rate of Sea Level Rise Spurs F lood of New Ideas San Francisco Bay is a great asset.

That’s why we built so much of our infrastructure right next to it. But with sea level rise, it’s also becoming something of a liability. What should we do to protect all that infrastructure—and all those baylands we’ve been restoring— when the waters rise some five feet by the end of the century? That question has generated new thinking about the interface between Bay and shoreline, with several creative projects coming online, just in the nick of time.

by Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

Departments 4

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District is right in your own backyard. We offer 26 preserves, over 225 miles of trails, and hiking and nature programs nearly every day of the week, free of charge. Discover your own adventure today.

www.openspace.org

Bay View

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Letters

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Ear to the Ground

News from the conservation community and the natural world

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Conservation in Action

Bringing Presidio's Mountain Lake back to life, from the bottom up

by Dhyana Levey

10 Signs of

On the Trail

A Sea-to-Summit Trek on the San Mateo Coast The newest addition to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area is a dramatic and storied landscape of grassland and maritime chaparral, rising from the rugged coast up to the granitic summit of Montara Mountain.

by Victoria Schlesinger

12 Rancho Corral de Tierra

Letter from the publisher

the Season

The annual spectacle of Pacific herring spawning in the Bay

by Eric Simons

16 Elsewhere . . .

George Miller Regional Trail, Foothill Regional Park, Alviso Slough

30 First Person

Nature photographer Stephen Sharnoff has gone high and low to get up close and personal with one of his favorite subjects: lichens.

Interview by Claire Peaslee

45 Ask the Naturalist

How do seaweeds stay put, despite the pounding of the surf ?

by Michael Ellis

46 Naturalist’s Notebook

The feeding frenzy that ensues when herring return to the Bay

by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.baynature.org b ay n at u r e

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bay view letter from the publisher species in this world, you need to get three things right: shelter, food, reproduction. Simple. But it’s the variety of ways in which living organisms go about meeting these three basic needs that gives rise to the mind-blowing diversity of life on the planet—all the shapes and colors and textures that living things come in.

So take marine algae—otherwise known as seaweed … please. That common name itself is sadly indicative of the level of respect we show these hardy— and beautiful—organisms.

I’ll speak for myself. At local beaches, I usually scan the horizon for whales, peer at the water closer in for sea ducks and harbor seals, and look for sandpipers along the shore. But until recently, I’ve given short shrift to the seaweed washed up at the surf line.

But then I came across the images of San Francisco artist Josie Iselin in her book An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (see page 24 in this issue) and my eyes were opened. (Don’t you love it when that happens?)

Shortly thereafter I was on a beach in Mendocino and dug into several piles of washed-up seaweed. With my new knowledge and a little patience I was able to identify five distinct species all tumbled together. And I was able to see the structural differences between the various seaweeds as distinct adaptive strategies for the necessities of survival in the harsh ocean environment: the need for one end to have the tensile strength to stay attached to a substrate in the constantly

Diane Poslosky

If

you’re going to succeed as a

contr ibuto rs Dhyana Levey (p. 8) is a freelance reporter based in San Francisco. She’s written for the San Francisco Daily Journal, Cambodia Daily, Bay Area Parent, and McClatchy Newspapers.

Michael Ellis (p. 45) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-based tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com) and waxes eloquent for KQED’s Perspectives series.

Writer and podcaster Joan Hamilton (p. 37) is filing monthly reports for Bay Nature on the recovery of

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moving ocean water while another part is buoyant enough to remain near the surface for photosynthesis.

Similar diversity was also on display at low tide on the rocky marine terrace below the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the San Mateo coast. Here in the intertidal zone, there’s a profusion of rockhugging seaweeds that have to survive periods of the day totally submerged in water, periods when they’re battered by the waves, and periods when they’re high and almost dry. There were the bristly low-growing brown mats of “Brillo pad” seaweed (Endocladia muricata), the rough reddish blades of “Turkish towels” (Chondracanthus exasperatus), the slimy green iridescent sheets of Mazzaella, the fine articulated “branches” of red coralline algae, and many others. All competing for space on the rocks where they are bathed twice a day in the nutrient-rich waters of the Pacific. Same place, same conditions, but completely different shapes and textures evolved to take advantage of that place and those conditions. So functional. And yet, at the same time, so beautiful.

Having our eyes opened to the “functional beauty” of local nature— from lichens to seaweeds to poppies to redwoods—is what we’ve enjoyed doing at Bay Nature for 14 years now. If you’ve enjoyed this as well, we’d like to invite you to celebrate those 14 years of sharing nature’s beauty at our upcoming annual awards dinner on Sunday, March 22 in Oakland. We’ll be honoring three of our local conservation heroes and enjoying Josie Iselin’s eye-opening presentation on the beauty and diversity of California seaweed. Find out about our award recipients and the event at baynature.org/dinner.

Mount Diablo following the Morgan Fire. Her stories and photos can be found at baynature.org/diablo.

Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 46) is the author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. Info at johnmuirlaws.com.

David Ogden (p. 16) spends as much time as possible prowling open space in Contra Costa County and volunteers with Save Mount Diablo and the Walnut Creek Open Space Foundation.

Claire Peaslee (p. 30) is a naturalist, writer, editor, and

BayNature

letters

Exploring, celebrating, and understanding the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area

Dear Editor: “The peace and beauty of dawn from a duck blind is punctured by the crash of gunshot.” Isn’t there a disconnect here?

The article (“View from the Blind,” Oct.–Dec. 2014) fails to reconcile conservation with hunting and killing wildlife. Granted, much wetland has been preserved through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and stamps.

But the Nature Conservancy has done the same thing for vast areas of the world without destroying birds and animals in the process. Spending time with family can be accomplished by taking shots from a blind with a camera, not shedding blood.

In addition, the article doesn’t address the issue of lead ammunition. The state of California has finally banned lead shot, but the ban does not take effect until 2019. The toxic effects of lead on

Volume 15, Issue 1 january–march 2015 Publisher David Loeb Editorial Director Eric Simons Development Director Judith Katz Online Editor Alison Hawkes Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Tech & Data Manager Laura Schatzkin Advertising Director Ellen Weis Design Susan Scandrett Contributing Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editors Cynthia Rubin, Marianne Dresser Board of Directors Carol Baird, Christopher Dann, Catherine Fox (President), Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough, David Loeb, Larry Orman, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott, Malcolm Margolin (Emeritus), Volunteers/Interns Paul Epstein, Meghan Ewing, Larissa Gatt, Carmen Taylor, Kimberly Teruya Bay Nature is published quarterly by the Bay Nature Institute, 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 Subscriptions: $53.95/three years; $39.95/two years; $21.95/one year; (888)422-9628, baynature.org P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)665-5900/advertising@baynature.org Editorial & Business Office: 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8550; (510)528-8117 (fax) baynature@baynature.org baynature.org issn 1531-5193 No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from Bay Nature and its contributors. © 2015 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

the environment, including animals and people, have been known for a long time. Do these so-called conservationist hunters continue to use lead shot? No matter how we feel about hunting, the use of lead shot remains a serious public health and environmental issue.

Sandy Slichter, Mill Valley Dear Editor: Knowing what other conservation organizations have gone through when they adopt a reasonable attitude toward hunting, my guess is that Bay Nature will receive irate letters for publishing “View from the Blind.” If the letter writers are vegetarian perhaps we should cut them some slack.

However, inconsistency—hypocrisy, even—is common to us humans, and I wonder how many are morally straight on this. Knowledgeable people are keenly aware of the enormous contributions of hunters and fishermen to conservation. Thank you for the article.

Jake Sigg, San Francisco

Bay Nature responds: We did indeed receive a few heated messages excoriating us for giving space to the issue of hunting and its relationship to conservation.

However, we chose not to print those letters that did not engage with the article itself or with the topic in any meaningful way. We understand that there are strong feelings on this issue, but we believe that our author Aleta George approached it in a nuanced and sensitive fashion.

As to Sandy Slichter’s point that land can be saved and nature appreciated without a gun in hand, that is certainly true, and that is how we approach nature in Bay Nature 99.9 percent of the time. But we also believe that there is no one right way to engage with the natural world, and to deny or ignore hunting’s historical and significant role in connecting people to nature seems untenable.

Dear Editor: I worked for the ebrpd for 14 years, but recently rode out on a wave of mid-career departures. The district’s managers have grown increasingly anti-worker, culminating in contract (continued on page 41) negotiations with

— T H E BAY N AT URE A N NUAL AWAR DS D I N N E R —

Revelations: CE LE BR ATING LOC AL HE ROE S AND THE ART OF NATURE

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Front Cover: The specialized sporophyll blades of a giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) generate spores that will disperse in the ocean and turn into the next generation of this large, ecosystem-building marine algae.

S PECI A L PR E S E NTATI O N : JOS IE I S E LIN: An Ocean Garden: The Fine Art of Seaweed

LOC AL HE RO AWARD RECIPIE NT S:

[Josie Iselin, lovingblind.com]

Conservation Action RALPH BENSON, Sonoma Land Trust

improv theater artist whose home is in Point Reyes.

Birds and intertidal invertebrates appear frequently in her in-the-moment physical theater offerings and her appearances on "West Coast Live" with Sedge Thomson.

Ann Sieck (p. 16) is dedicated to helping people with disabilities, including those using wheelchairs, find parks and trails they can enjoy. See her reviews at baynature. org/asiecker.

Jimmy Tobias (p. 38) is a graduate student reporter at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and former trail worker with the U.S. Forest Service.

Environmental Education JULIA CLOTHIER, Point Reyes National Seashore Association Josie Iselin, lovingblind.com

by david loeb

Youth Engagement JAVIER OCHOA REYES, Groundwork Richmond

RSVP by March 12 at baynature15.eventbrite.com — A B E NE FIT FO R BAY NATU RE IN S TITUTE —

Info: judith@baynature.org | 510-528-8550 x 105

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by aleta george

the Sonoma Valley Wildlife Corridor

n e w s f r o m t h e c o m m u n i t y a n d t h e n at u r a l w o r l d Stephen Joseph, courtesy of Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority

protecting

eear gro a r to t o the the g r o uund nd

Santa Clara Funds a New Approach to Ecosystems

Thanks to the voters of Santa Clara County, who approved Measure q by 68 percent (just above the two-thirds requirement), the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority will now have an additional $7.9 million per year for acquisition of open space, habitat restoration, increased visitor services at its preserves, and environmental education programs. In addition, some of the new funding will go toward a pioneering program to pay for protection of “ecosystem services” on private land in the county.

One of the steps that helped to build this impressive supermajority for Measure q was the publication of a landmark report that assessed the economic value of open space to the county. In a world where money talks, as they say, nature has often been at a disadvantage when it comes to showing “return on investment.” But public agencies are starting to learn how to account for nature’s economic value—for services such as erosion and flood control during severe storms, groundwater storage during droughts, or carbon sequestration to offset the impacts of climate change.

The report, prepared for the Open Space Authority by Tacoma, wa-based Earth Economics, assessed the economic

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value of the county’s natural lands at up to $386 billion—on par with the total asset value of all the real estate in the county. And we’re talking Silicon Valley real estate. “Valuation of natural capital and ecosystem services dispels the assumption that nature has no value” says Andrea Mackenzie, the authority’s general manager.

She adds that these numbers are probably on the low end, since they don’t account for all the benefits that nature provides. Earth Economics based its calculations on an extensive database of valuation studies of similar habitats in areas in the U.S. and around the world with similar demographics and ecological characteristics.

For example, Santa Clara’s 160,835 acres of grassland, both publicly and privately owned, were estimated to be worth between $529 million and $1 billion for providing services such as soil retention, pollination, and climate stability. The ability to make such an economic argument for the value of open space helped boost the campaign to pass the parcel tax increase. Now, with the funding increase on the horizon, the authority is designing a pilot project with the Natural Resources Conservation Service and local resource conservation districts to provide incentives to private landowners to protect the ecosystem services on their

lands through a kind of conservation stewardship grant.

“This is almost like a Williamson Act program,” Mackenzie says, referring to the state program that has allowed private landowners to receive lower property tax assessments for land put under agriculture or open space use restrictions for set periods of time.

Williamson Act funding has been cut significantly since 2009 due to the state budget crisis. Mackenzie says the approach would be the first of its kind at a regional level, differing from the more common tactics of buying land outright or putting it under a permanent conservation easement.

“At meetings you often hear private landowners say, ‘If you want me to protect the red-legged frog, then pay me,’” she says. “So we’re trying to use these cutting-edge tools and approaches.

We know their property is valuable, and we want to invest in that service, and so we will find the (continued on page 37)

SAVE THE DATE

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Cowell Theater Fort Mason Center February 27- March 2, 2015

OceanFilmFest.org j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 5

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From the Bottom Up at Mountain Lake

J

ason Lisenby likens his planting process to working with cookie dough. Standing along the south shore of Mountain Lake in San Francisco’s Presidio, he reaches into a large green bucket for a handful of clay and small stones, then adds a bit of water and sand from the lake to soften up the mix.

Next he drops the “chocolate chips”—about 50 sago pondweed seeds —into his recipe and kneads the muddy concoction into a ball in his hand. He sloshes into the lake in his tall black wading boots, drops his mud ball into the shallow water, and watches it sink.

A few American coots swim by, their eyes on the underwater gardening project. “They can’t wait for the buffet to open,” says Lisenby, a biological science technician for the Presidio Trust.

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keep the hungry birds and fish away for long enough, these sprouts will grow into a robust garden of underwater plants that will form the base of the healthy aquatic ecosystem he and others are working to restore in long-disturbed Mountain Lake.

Submerged aquatic vegetation, or sav, as scientists refer to these critical underwater plants, is not the most charismatic category of flora. But once fully grown, the pondweed and a number of other target plants will serve as food and habitat for the next stage of the restoration process, the return of the native fish, mussels, insects, turtles, and birds that once resided in and around this natural lake in the southwestern corner of the Presidio.

One of the few natural bodies of water on the San Francisco peninsula, four-acre Mountain Lake was, for

Finn Black prepare to drop a chicken-wire cage to protect newly planted sago pondweed from voracious nonnative carp.

several thousand years, a 30-foot-deep lake that provided fresh drinking water for Ohlone Indian inhabitants and European settlers. But in the 19th and 20th centuries it filled with sediment and debris from nearby construction, in particular the creation of Highway 1 and the southern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. The busy road also contributed a heavy load of toxic pollution to the lake, and by the 1970s Mountain Lake was no more than 10 feet deep and incapable of supporting a healthy suite of native species.

In 2001, the Presidio Trust, the federal agency created to preserve and protect the former military base, started the process of rehabilitating the lake by removing nonnative vegetation from around the shoreline and replanting it with natives. More recently, the trust began the process of restoring the lake itself by dredging about 15,600 cubic meters of sediment from the bottom, removing toxins and increasing the average depth to about 15 feet.

Now, with the lake once again clean enough to support native species, the managers are reintroducing the basic building blocks of a healthy ecosystem.

Enter submerged aquatic vegetation.

Sounds simple. But no one knew which plants to use here, nor how to go about propagating and planting them.

So it has been a learning experience for the Presidio Trust staff every step of the way, from consulting with specialists to building a new facility to propagate the seeds to figuring out how best to plant them.

Since March 2014, Lisenby and his colleagues have planted sago pondweed seeds and turions (the plant’s overwintering bud stage) in 13 locations around the lake. In August, ecologists also began introducing water milfoil, water nymph, floating pondweed, and leafy pondweed to the two main planting sites near the lake’s shallow north arm and south shore.

Finding the right native aquatic

assistant curator at the zoo. They will be two to three years old when they are released, although they are about the size of four-year-old turtles now because of their protected upbringing.

“They are like the mascot for this restoration,” she adds.

The plan is for the turtles and the vegetation to take hold after the demise of what’s been the biggest hurdle to the project: wildly invasive carp and largemouth bass that until this winter had overrun the lake. Likely the descendants of released private aquarium fish, the nonnative carp uprooted aquatic plants and stirred up sediment in the water. In November, workers with the Presidio Trust dropped 47 gallons of rotenone, a widely used fish-killing toxicant, into the lake to try and rid it of the fish that, if left to proliferate unimpeded, would snack on future baby turtles. The plantbased toxin does not affect the newly planted sav.

By late November, the Presidio Trust was reporting A “mud ball” preparation of sago pondweed, Stuckenia pectinata, for success, with nearly 1,000 dead planting in Mountain Lake. fish removed, mostly carp.

The carp had been in the Young, a San Francisco State biology lake for about 50 years, says Jonathan graduate student who has been working with the Presidio Trust since 2012 Sonoma State graduate student Wendy St. John holds a western pond turtle hatchling, soon to be released into to try to remove the fish. In the two Mountain Lake. years before the rotenone was used, Young manually pulled about 20,000 juvenile carp and bass out of the water.

Ecologists will check the lake’s health again in the spring before reintroducing the turtles, as well as native fish and chorus frogs. “Obviously, with the carp and bass removed, the lake will be healthier and more productive, which means more of an invertebrate food source for the turtles,” Young says. The restoration has many moving parts: removing toxins, capturing carp, and nurturing threatened turtles. But for now, the future of Mountain Lake is being built one muddy, sago-pondweed-seedfilled “chocolate chip” ball at a time.

Courtesy Presidio Trust

Courtesy Presidio Trust

conser vation in action

plants to cultivate for this project has been a challenge, says Michele Laskowski, a seed collection ecologist for the Presidio Nursery and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which also supports the work of the Presidio Trust at Mountain Lake. “We’ll find a record, sometimes more than 100 years old, [indicating] that a particular species was in the lake at a particular time,” Laskowski says. “So we’re just following clues and hoping we find what we’re looking for.”

Her team has planted seeds from species collected from several water bodies in San Francisco and Marin, including Rodeo Lagoon, Lake Lagunitas, Abbotts Lagoon, El Polin, and the Sutro Baths.

Establishing a healthy crop of aquatic plants is critical to bringing back such Mountain Lake native species as the Western pond turtle, says Nicholas Geist, a Sonoma State University biology professor who is working with the San Francisco and Oakland zoos on a project to bolster the turtle’s dwindling population in the wild.

Geist and his colleagues are looking to a healthy Mountain Lake as a first potential home for the turtles they have been breeding at the zoos.

The San Francisco Zoo now has 67 hardy turtles and plans to release all of them in Mountain Lake in late spring or early summer, says Jessie Bushell, an

Aquatic vegetation experts Esa Crumb (left) and

Courtesy Nick Geist, Sonoma State University

by dhyana levey

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signs of the season

bay buffet: The Spawn of the Pacific Herring Between November and March last winter, 60,600 tons of Pacific herring swam into the San Francisco Bay to spawn. That’s a lot of small fish: 300 blue whales’ worth; 8,600 elephants’ worth; 50,000 great white sharks’ worth. The pulses in that silver fish wave, reaching up to a mile long by a mile wide, represent perhaps the largest aggregations of animals you’ll ever find in Northern California. and dive; and through binoculars the raft becomes a kaleidoscopic frenzy of frothing heads and tails and ripples and splashes. It’s a spectacle you can easily witness in person, and like a salmon run or a wildebeest migration, it’s a direct connection with nature’s enormousness. And that’s just on the surface. You can only imagine what it looks like underwater.

“We assume it looks like this swirling ball of fish moving through the Bay,” says Ryan Bartling, a fisheries scientist with the California Department of Fish

Richardson Bay as gulls try to get in on the action.

and Wildlife. “I’d love to say we have video, but herring are pretty skittish.”

The cause of all the excitement is a smallish schooling fish, ranging roughly from 4 to 8 inches long and from onetenth to one-third of a pound, made in color and shape for blending in with the ocean and with the school. The primary impression of herring, even in video, is going to be the flash of silver scales as they swim by, although what video exists is mainly from spawns in British Columbia. (Stay tuned: Bartling says Bay herring fishermen chipped in to buy Fish and Wildlife a GoPro camera to use this year.)

The Pacific herring, Clupea pallasiione, is one of three herring species worldwide, and one of the top five most important prey fish off the West Coast.

Yet there’s surprisingly little information about what adult herring do for the 11 months a year when they’re not spawning. We know they’re out in the ocean, riding the California Current, eating macroplankton, schooling up

Mary Sheft, marysheftphotography.com

When hundreds of millions of tasty, oil-rich fish arrive in one spot and commence spraying high-protein eggs everywhere it becomes a scene: a mayhem of shrieking birds, snorting pinnipeds, and thrumming fishing boats.

The eggs, billions and billions of them in long strings, wash up at the feet of birders assembled on the shoreline.

From the shore you can see the birds rafting by the thousands, a mile-long debris field across the surface of the water. Gulls rise and fall, screaming; seals, sea lions, and porpoises surface

in Monterey Bay in the summer, but why and where and for what—aside, of course, from feeding bigger animals, which is probably not the herring’s choice—are still mostly open questions.

Even research cruises only occasionally pick them up, Bartling says.

“We still lack good data on the ocean phase for Pacific herring off the California coast,” Bartling says. “When they leave San Francisco Bay we have a general sense of where they go, but we don’t fully understand the total extent of their summer range or the potential for mixing with other herring schools from other spawn locations.”

So Bartling and other scientists stick to what they can see in front of them: the spawn. The Bay is one of the herring’s major spawning sites on the west coast of North America and the largest south of British Columbia. It’s also not clear exactly why herring pick the exact spawning areas within the Bay that they do, but Richardson Bay is the critical spot, the “epicenter within the epicenter,” says Audubon California Seabird and Marine Program Manager Anna Weinstein. About three-quarters of the 2013–2014 spawn happened in Richardson Bay. Probably not coincidentally, the Richardson Bay Audubon Center and Sanctuary recorded its highest-ever bird count in December 2013.

The high herring and bird numbers in Richardson Bay the last few years are an anomaly on the West Coast, where herring and the birds that love them are in general decline together. One study in the October 2014 issue of the journal Conservation Biology tied 20-year declines in wintering birds in British Columbia’s Salish Sea to their forage fish diet, and particularly to herring declines in the sea and Puget Sound. Surf scoters, Simon Fraser University ecologist Erika Lok argued in a 2012 paper, follow a “silver wave” of herring spawns in their spring migrations; the charismatic sea ducks have declined in San Francisco Bay, possibly because of the depressed herring populations elsewhere along the coast.

Herring numbers in San Francisco Bay were down about 10 percent last

A fishing boat trawls for herring in the waters of

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ring can live up to 10 years and reach winter from the year before, perhaps due sexual maturity by age three, although to the drought, but still above average recent surveys of spawns in the Bay have (the average, since the California Deshown a skewed age distribution that partment of Fish and Wildlife started features more one- and two-year-old fish tracking in 1979–1980, is 52,000 tons). than expected.

Bartling said he expects another good That’s one of several concerns for year in 2015, but given the lack of ocean the small commercial herring fishery, data he won’t be able to start putting a which both conservationists and agency number to it until February; herring, he scientists say has lately been a model for says, will always surprise you. “In the responsible fishing. Fishermen, conserva40-plus years that we’ve been conducting tionists, and scientists are currently workresearch and managing the fishery,” Baring on a long-term fisheries management tling says, “the only predictable thing plan to ensure that future catches will be about herring is that they’re unpredictsustainable. Which able.” is one reason Geoff Roughly speaking, Shester, the Califorthe big herring schools nia Program direcswim into the Bay betor at Oceana and ginning in the late fall. a marine biologist They will “stage” for as who studies forage much as a few weeks, fish in the California milling about accordCurrent, says herring ing to some still-unexshouldn’t just be for plained-by-science fish the birds. “Herring whim, until suddenly are more sustainthe alarm clock rings able than any other and the spawn begins. protein source on the The trigger is probably planet that you can a combination of tembuy,” he told me. perature, salinity, subIn fact, he told strate, and predation A western gull makes off with a herring. me this repeatedly. (fishing boats chasing Shester was once vegan, and then did the school sometimes trigger spawns). a calculation that he says showed that But when the signal goes, the school local herring are better for the envirushes to shallower waters. Males release ronment than even lentils, the lowesttheir milt first, along with a pheromone carbon-footprint vegetable protein. If that alerts the females. Females then ikea is the only herring retailer you release adhesive eggs a few thousand at a know (sill vitlök, marinated herring time directly onto underwater vegetation with garlic sauce), take heart: you don’t and structures, making repeated passes have to eat your herring pickled from until eelgrass, moss, rocks, and riprap Scandinavia in the cafe of a postmodern are blanketed with the small gelatinous furniture warehouse. Buy it local and spheres. Larger females can have as many eat it fresh, Shester says, and herring as 50,000 eggs, and one cdfw report says the eggs can cover a 20-mile stretch of will surprise you with its mild, tender shore with a 30-foot band of eggs. flavor. “This is one of the few urban The odds for any individual egg are fisheries in the country, where you have not good, of course. Survival is at best people fishing for herring a few feet a 50 percent proposition, depending on away from the Embarcadero or the Sauboth predation and environmental consalito waterfront,” Shester says. “You ditions. The embryos that survive turn can almost touch the nets from shore. into larvae, which then metamorphose Why isn’t it being sold on every street into juvenile fish, which hang around corner? Anyone who cares about carbon in the Bay until sometime the following footprint should eat local Bay herring fall before swimming out to sea. Herover tofu.”

Mary Sheft, marysheftphotography.com

by eric simons

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sites, Rancho sits atop granite that marks the northern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The granite comes from a 100-millionyear-old formation that was While the park is open to the public, originally part of the southern access remains difficult. So the Golden end of the Sierra Nevada but was Gate National Recreation Area’s Susie broken off by the San Andreas Bennett, a natural resources specialist Fault and transported north whose job it is to know about the park on the eastern boundary of the properties in San Mateo County, agreed Pacific Plate. For the moment, at The beautiful but endangered Hickman’s cinquefoil. to give me a tour of Rancho. We begin least, this freewheeling hunk of our fog-engulfed morning by skirting granite is settled along the San Mateo in determining the fate of the landscape the northwestern edge of the park on coast, accounting for the quartzy yellow to the west and north of Montara a path that rises from the flat farmland gravel in Rancho and the fine golden Mountain. Hickman’s cinquefoil was abutting Highway 1 into the grassy sand along the shores below us. first identified in the area in 1905 and foothills of Montara Mountain, the again in 1933, but was never again noted, I think Bennett is steering me toward landscape feature that dominates the despite many surveys. According to an a rest spot, but instead she stops in front new park. The quartet of peaks forming article by local botanist Michael Vasey of an unremarkable patch of grass and Montara Mountain shoot up almost in a 1996 issue of the journal Fremontia, kneels down. Using her index finger to 2,000 feet from the ocean, and Bennett botanists believed the species no longer lift a small, feathery leaf, she says, “This convinces me we should climb to the top. grew in San Mateo County and that the is Hickman’s cinquefoil, also known as “Biologically it’s the most interesting—it’s few remaining individuals in Monterey like a moonscape,” Bennett says.

Potentilla hickmanii.” This little plant, rather were marching toward extinction. But in We begin marching up a steep hill ordinary looking when not in flower, is an 1995 Caltrans biologists, surveying the and the fine, crunchy gravel beneath endangered species and endemic to San land as part of the permitting process my feet reminds me of Yosemite and Mateo and Monterey counties, with the for the controversial Devil’s Slide bypass Tahoe. I mention this to Bennett and vast majority of the known occurrences project, stumbled upon an unidentified she explains that it is, literally, of a piece of the plants growing at Rancho. The plant, which turned out to be Hickman’s with those places. Unlike most ggnra tiny plant has wielded outsize influence cinquefoil, 50 years lost. And not just one plant but thousands. That discovery Montara Mountain and the slopes of Rancho Corral de Tierra are a dramatic backdrop to the harbor of Princeton-by-the-Sea helped put an end to the bypass idea and the famous Mavericks surf break. The fields of Cabrillo Farms are just across Highway 1 from the Half Moon Bay airport. and to Montara Mountain’s fate as a freeway corridor.

To support the fragile cinquefoil population—a priority for the National Park Service—Rancho has received funding to maintain and restore native ecosystems. That means restoring grasslands in the foothills and removing invasive species. “A cheater’s trick for identifying native grasses is to look for bunches,” says Bennett, as she points to a clump of blue wild rye. Growing nearby is purple needlegrass, designated California’s official state grass in 2004.

Once upon a time it was the dominant grass in the state and is known to live as long as 150 years. There is also California oat grass, noted for secreting away a second set of seeds beneath its flower stalk, out of the reach of hungry grazers. Bennett and her colleagues hope to spread these perennial grasses, along with native wildflowers, across Rancho’s Bob Huettmann

and on what kinds of programs to offer on the property. It’s time to open up a storied, long-private piece of the coast for all.

The view northwest from Montara Mountain across

A Sea-to- Summit Trek on the San Mateo Coast

by Victoria Schlesinger

Francisco Guerrero y Palomares showed some singular foresight when he drew up a crude map in 1838 and said to the then-governor of Alta California something like, “That piece of land.

That’s the one I want.” The young Mexican settler, who also served for a time as alcalde (mayor) of the small settlement at Yerba Buena (San Francisco), sketched out a roughly 7,700-acre rancho for himself encompassing the coastline of modern-day Montara State Beach south to the Miramar community and east to the first string of mountains. He undoubtedly liked the open grasslands for grazing his herds of cattle, the fertile soil, and the freshwater creeks. There b ay n at u r e

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were the dramatic mountains rising to the east, creating a natural barrier for livestock and earning the area its name—Rancho Corral de Tierra (corral of the earth). Perhaps Guerrero also hoped that the parcel’s steep boundaries and rugged shoreline would offer protection from advancing Americans as they claimed California for themselves in 1846, pushing out Mexican nationals like himself.

Those appealing qualities have continued to lure generations of ranchers, farmers, and people seeking tranquility and beauty to this coastal landscape. Rancho, as it is now most often called, was the stomping ground

the maritime chaparral-covered ridges and folds of Rancho Corral de Tierra down to the coastal town of Moss Beach.

of Mexican cowboys, a refuge for booze-smuggling artichoke vendors, and the site of some grandiose development dreams. Despite this history, the land itself hasn’t changed much, which has set the stage for Rancho’s newest incarnation as the site of the most recent addition to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The remaining 4,000 acres of Guerrero’s parcel will now help to complete one of the largest swaths of open space in San Mateo County.

In 2015, the National Park Service is inviting the public to weigh in on Rancho’s next stage. After three years of preparation and investigation—from vegetation surveys and archaeological reviews to a search for salmon and meetings with locals—the service will hold public meetings on the location of trails, parking lots, and bathrooms

William K. Matthias, wkmphoto.com, courtesy Peninsula Open Space Trust

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Robert John White, courtesy Peninsula Open Space Trust

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for the peak, and we decide to hike up the Alta Vista Trail, which follows a natural ridge to the top of Montara Mountain. As we walk along the ridge, we’re flanked by coastal scrub. There’s a sharp smell of sage. We pass coast silk tassel and fruit-bearing coffeeberry. As the path turns steep and narrow with brush growing above our heads, I try be

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From this wildlife crossroads, the climb turns serious as we scramble up patches of exposed granite. The vegetation has begun to shift to maritime chaparral, a relatively rare habitat dominated by manzanita and other hardwoods, found only in pockets in coastal areas from the Bay Area south. We come across a San Mateo tree lupine (Lupinus arboreus var. eximius), a California native found primarily in San Mateo County and listed by the California Native Plant Society as rare and endangered. Some argue that the individuals found on Montara Mountain are distinct enough to be classified as their own species.

We sit for lunch on a granite outcrop, Peninsula Watershed enjoying an expansive view of the foothills below and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Our ridge drops off to the east into a small canyon carved by Montara Creek as it trickles toward the sea. We can also pick out roughly the site of the Guerrero family’s 60-foot-long adobe, to the southeast of the Half Moon Bay Airport strip, and the bright green fields of Cabrillo Farms. After the Americans took California from Mexico, Guerrero continued to work in San Francisco, helping authorities sort out land ownership disputes until he was murdered in 1851. Reports suggest that someone who didn’t care for his expertise had him killed, but no one was ever prosecuted for the crime. Over the subsequent decades the land was sold off in parcels, with parts remaining in the hands of Guerrero’s sons until as recently as the 1920s.

Denniston Creek, named after the American who married Guerrero’s widow, flows past Cabrillo Farms, which abuts the park’s western boundary south of Moss Beach. Ed Lea’s family has farmed there since the 1930s, when his parents arrived from northern Italy among the waves of immigrants whose familiarity with Mediterranean climates helped them thrive on the coast. Lea, who was born on Rancho property, recalls how his parents and other new arrivals grew artichokes under orders from the organized crime bosses who all but controlled the U.S. artichoke market

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Karl Kroeber, courtesy Peninsula Open Space Trust

to imagine traversing this vegetation without a trail, and wonder how the Ohlone and the Spanish—or Guerrero, for that matter—made it through.

We reach a level, open area that the wildlife has taken full advantage of, leaving a lattice of deer trails. The coyote brush and golden chinquapin are draped with wispy green lichen. A sculpted mound of grass is pierced by a mouse-size hole. Human researchers have taken advantage of the clearing, too: a few feet away Bennett unlocks a wildlife camera, slipping out the photo card. Later, she passes along new photos from the camera of a bobcat, a fox, a pair of coyotes, and a mountain lion.

Researchers want to see if and how such wild animals benefit from the various forms of protection and stewardship the

Looking up from the fields of Cabrillo Farms to the rugged uplands of Rancho Corral de Tierra.

and sold the artichokes for huge profits back east. The farms were also part of a system for smuggling liquor up the coast to San Francisco during Prohibition.

In the mid-1990s, a handful of wealthy absentee landowners saw profits from a different source when they put Rancho on the market for $50 million. Jack Nicklaus designed a golf course, and big homes and a resort were in the works.

But thanks in part to the dot-com bust, the required investment didn’t materialize and the nonprofit Peninsula Open Space Trust rushed into the breach, sensing the unique opportunity to protect a valuable piece of the California coast. post had to not only raise a significant amount of capital; it also had to convince Congress to expand the boundary of the ggnra at a time when many in Washington were resisting the expenditure of public funds on land acquisition.

In 2001, post purchased Rancho for $29 million. It was a major success in the trust’s “Saving the Endangered Coast” campaign, which aims to preserve 20,000 acres along San Mateo County’s coastline and is the largest initiative of its kind ever undertaken by a local land trust. In keeping with the organization’s commitment to protect agriculture on the San Mateo coast, post sold the 229 lowland acres of Cabrillo Farms to the Lea family, who had farmed the area for nearly a century, but always on short-term leases.

Even after the post deal was done, some lamented Rancho’s designation as federal parkland. Paul Ringgold, vice president of land stewardship for post, recalls the point person for the sellers repeatedly telling his team, “It’s such a waste, all that property. It would be so great to develop it and put it to good

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until finally we’re on top of 1,830-foot Peak Mountain, marked by a pile of rocks left by previous hikers. I toss in a small contribution. Turning full circle, we take in the views of multi-peaked Montara Mountain: to the south is Montara Knob, a rounded dome rising above Montara Creek. To the east is South Peak, which mainly remains engulfed by fog that sweeps up in gusts from the creek. Then there’s North Peak, the highest of the four, reaching almost 1,900 feet and topped with a pg&e antenna tower. Between our peak and North Peak is an odd little valley, site of the confluence of property boundaries between the ggnra, McNee Ranch State Park, San Pedro Valley County Park, and San Francisco Public Utility Commission watershed lands. That these lands all converge is significant. It means that the Rancho property is a core piece of what is now roughly 27,000 acres of contiguous protected open space. Having such a large swath of protected open space so close to San Francisco is surprising.

And it’s extremely fortuitous for wide-

✤ For more information about Rancho’s public planning meetings, sign up for updates through the Rancho newsletter: parksconservancy.org/rancho. ✤

getting there: As of January 2015, Rancho had no official parking or visitor center, so nps recommends parking at nearby Gray Whale Cove State Beach, on the east side of Highway 1 just north of Montara. From the Gray Whale Cove parking lot, trails lead east and south through McNee Ranch State Park to the summit of Montara Mountain and a wider connection with the trails of Rancho Corral de Tierra. Other public access to Rancho involves parking legally in nearby residential areas, such as near Renegade Ranch in Montara or at the end of Coral Reef Drive in El Granada.

Victoria Schlesinger is a Bay Area-based environment and science journalist whose work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Audubon, and The New York Times.

She’s also the author of Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya (University of Texas Press, 2002). rancho corral de tierra hike Saturday, March 14, 1 p.m.-5 p.m.

Join Bay Nature and Susie Bennett, Mike Coffey, and George Durgerian of the National Park Service for ocean views and an afternoon exploration of the spectacular diversity and history of Rancho Corral de Tierra. Space is limited.

Sign up at baynature.org/field

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Ben Pease, PeasePress.com

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use. I just don’t understand.”

Ringgold chuckles and says, “It was interesting to get that kind of perspective.”

Local reactions have also been mixed.

Residents of the communities around Rancho have grown accustomed to using the land without restrictions—creating informal trails, walking dogs off-leash, and driving off-road vehicles. Following transfer of the land to the ggnra in 2011, acceptance of national park rules has been slow and at times strained.

ranging animals such as mountain lions, whose home ranges can easily extend 100 square miles or more.

To the west and south is the vast Pacific. The golden sands of Montara State Beach glow bright in contrast to the dark slate of the ocean. We can see the sweeping arm of Pillar Point Harbor, and beyond that the famous Mavericks surf break. Farther inland are the ridges above San Vincent and Denniston creeks. Everything is laid out before us as if on a map that spans generations, cultures, and geological eras. History is never out of view at Rancho; it’s folded into every crease and turn of the land.

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foothills, while taking out invasives such as Harding grass, once planted widely as a feedstock, and the ornamental pampas grass Cortaderia jubata. Bennett says, “We’re trying to come up with a vegetation palette that is biologically reasonable, with species that are aggressive enough to survive the nonnatives.” Then she adds, “and that looks pretty.”

Map for Bay Nature “On The Trail”Narticle Jan 2015 issue

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Map by Ben Pease, Pease Press Cartography w/ GIS data courtesy of Michael Norelli, GGNPC 11/30/14 v53

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George Miller Regional Trail Sweeping panoramic views of the Carquinez Strait, Benicia’s shoreline, and Mount Diablo to the east greet the hiker, cyclist, and equestrian embarking on this newly reopened 1.7-mile stretch of the San Francisco Bay Trail between Martinez and Port Costa.

Groves of coast live oak along the trail, mixed in with valley oaks, toyon, bay laurel, buckeye, sycamore, and coyote bush, provide great habitat for a range of birds and mammals.

The East Bay Regional Park District renamed it the George Miller Regional Trail as a tribute to “Congressman George Miller’s years of steadfast leadership in Contra Costa County,” according to a district statement. Miller retired from a 20-term career in the House at the end of 2014.

The trail is part of the district’s Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline, 1,415 acres of bluffs and shoreline between Martinez and Crockett. There are spectacular cliffs and crags along the trail, with sharp drops of up to 750 feet down to the strait.

The trail was originally part of the historic Carquinez Scenic Drive, which closed due to landslides in the early 1980s. The district led the collaborative effort among federal and regional agencies to restore the trail for recreational access beginning in 2013. g e t t i n g t h e r e : From downtown Martinez take Talbart St. which becomes Carquinez Scenic Dr. after a slight left turn at the end. From Port Costa, take McEwen Rd. off Hwy 4. At the fork in the road, take Carquinez Scenic Dr. to the right. [David Ogden]

south bay

Dan Hill

Dan Hill

David Ogden

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California Native Grasses, Wild�lowers, Forbs & Wetland Species

Foothill Regional Park With three ponds formed by half-centuryold earthen dams, this 211-acre park north of Santa Rosa provides terrific, unexpected waterbird habitat in an appealing open woodland landscape crisscrossed by hilly trails. A few days before our November visit a vagrant least bittern had been sighted among the cattails, so a fleet of birders had gathered, scopes deployed, near the third pond. They had already spotted a more common American bittern and heard calls of Virginia and sora rails. Less focused hikers that day saw swallows, black phoebes, acorn woodpeckers, and wild turkeys.

The property was donated as mitigation for the nearby Foothill Oaks housing development in 1990 and has become a popular place for hikers and joggers, with a maze of trails that can be confusing but fun to explore. Wildflowers such as buttercups, fiddlenecks, wild iris, and lupine flourish in late winter and spring on the sunny slopes. Toyon grows along the dams, and manzanita mixes with oak and madrone on the backbones 2 of the ridges.

You can walk two or three moderately hilly miles around the ponds, unimaginatively named a, b, and c, or picnic by the water; only the climb on Alta Vista Trail for a nice view of Mount St. Helena is a bit steep. g e t t i n g t h e r e : From Hwy 101 in Windsor, take the Arata exit; go 1.3 miles east. Entrance and parking are on the left. Leashed dogs and bikes permitted; $7 parking fee. Toilets at the trailhead. [Ann Sieck] 1

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Alviso Slough To experience the size of the 30,000-acre Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge, the best place to start is at the southern end, using the Alviso entrance just past the Environmental Education Center. Though the partial restoration of salt ponds to tidal marsh and seasonal wetlands has not erased the marks of human management, out on the levees, among the birds that gather on dry shores, in muddy shallows, and floating on the water, the busy civilized world of the Bay Area seems very far away (until an Amtrak train hurtles by, horn blasting).

On the five-mile Mallard Slough Loop Trail we passed maybe two or three other walkers. On the longer Alviso Slough Trail a few bicyclists pedaled beside broad expanses of choppy water. But the birds were not experiencing such solitude: At high tide every island was crowded and noisy with them. We saw avocets, black-necked stilts, white and brown pelicans, coots, 3 scaups, ruddy ducks, and grebes. Herons paced the shores while swallows flickered in the air.

East of the loop, Artesian Slough’s freshwater marsh borders the trail; elsewhere isolated ponds hold very salty water outlandishly colored by red and yellow 3 microorganisms. A half-mile spur extends north to the site on Coyote Creek where the little 19th-century town of Drawbridge once stood and has now mostly vanished. g e t t i n g t h e r e : Take North First St. from Hwy 237; turn right on Grand Ave. and follow it to the end. No pets; bikes permitted; toilet provided. [Ann Sieck]

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Relax in Alaska

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e x p l o r i n g t h e e a s t b a y r e g i o n a l pa r k s

This story is part of a series exploring the natural and cultural history and resource of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD).

The series is sponsored by the district, which manages 114,000 acres of public open space in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

shapeshifteR,

TRICKSTER,

SURVIVOR

coyote in the modern world

Bob Gunderson

by joe eaton

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coyote is the archetypal trickster of the american west.

The Chocheño Ohlone, original inhabitants of much of the land now within the East Bay Regional Park District, had coyote stories, of which only a few tantalizing fragments were ever recorded. Surprisingly, there have been very few field studies of the local population, but people who work with wildlife in the regional parks have plenty of coyote stories of their own to tell. And research done elsewhere depicts the biological coyote, to borrow linguist William Bright’s (A Coyote Reader) useful distinction from the mythic one, as a shapeshifter in its own right. University of Colorado emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Marc Bekoff, who has studied coyotes for years, calls Canis latrans a “protean predator.” So it makes sense that from wilderness to suburbia, Seattle to San Francisco to Chicago, coyote behavior defies generalization.

What we do know is that coyotes have been remarkably resilient and tenacious, surviving—thriving, even—in our midst as a relict and a messenger from a much wilder California. As a result of determined attempts at extermination in the 19th and 20th centuries, coyote populations in the American West in general, and in California in particular, suffered substantial losses. But now, in the absence of their historic competitors and predators such as grizzly bears and wolves, and with a change in attitude on the part of their only serious remaining predator—humans—coyotes are back and doing quite well, thank you.

“The coyote was wetéš, the one who commanded,” said one of anthropologist John P. Harrington’s informants about Chocheño legends.

The stories of the Rumsen Ohlone, Miwok, Yokuts, and other nearby native Californians feature Coyote in paradoxical detail: creator, liar, j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 5

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hero, thief, seducer, and buffoon. He made the world—that would explain a lot—either single-handedly or assisting Eagle or Falcon. Like Prometheus, Coyote stole fire for his people; unlike Prometheus, he wasn’t punished for it. He gave them the bow and arrow, the net carry-bag, his recipe for acorn mush, and, inadvertently, death.

Some basic information on the biological coyote: Coyotes are small wolves, about four feet long from nose to tail, 20 to 50 pounds; males are larger than females. Coat color includes many variations on brindled reddish-gray, but a black tail-tip is standard. Captives have lived up to 18 years; life expectancy is shorter in the wild. They’re social, curious, adaptable, at home in deserts, mountains, farmland, and cities. Their range, from Alaska to Panama, includes every American state except Hawaii.

The species evolved in North America and has inhabited California for millennia, as attested by fossils dating back almost two million years in the Irvington gravels near Fremont, along with 11,000- to 32,000-year-old bones in the La Brea Tar Pits, where their remains are outnumbered eight to one by those of the larger, more powerful, smaller-brained dire wolf. Coyotes may have spread all over the continent in prehistoric times.

By European settlement they had vacated the eastern regions, but they’ve made a recent comeback, filling the empty niches of gray wolves in the North and red wolves in the South. Some eastern animals, bigger, more social, and more aggressive than western coyotes, appear to be coyote/wolf hybrids.

extent of their former overlap is unclear).

The Yellowstone experience suggests what might happen if wolves returned: Coyote numbers there fell by 50 percent after wolf reintroduction, and survivors abandoned traditional territories and changed their social behavior, forming larger groups. Relations elsewhere have apparently been more cordial, resulting in those eastern hybrids.

As wolves are to coyotes, coyotes are to foxes. Coyotes seldom cross paths with the introduced red foxes along the Bay shore, but gray fox and coyote habitat overlaps in the East Bay hills. “Gray foxes will bug out of the site when coyotes come in,” Bobzien says. “The evidence from a remote camera study also shows that in riparian areas coyotes appear to temporarily displace mesopredators, both nocturnal and diurnal.

Raccoons may be an exception.” Caufield has seen coyotes and grays in the same areas of Black Diamond, but never at the same time. Foxes, along with raccoons, skunks, and feral cats, are classified as mesopredators—a rung down from apex predators like mountain lions. Coyotes, befitting their protean nature, are sometimes classified as apex predators (particularly in the absence of mountain lions), while in other situations they function as mesopredators.

Sherry Grivett, San Jose, CA

mostly appear in open grasslands and chaparral east of the hills: around Inspiration Point in Tilden and Wildcat Canyon; in Briones, Black Diamond Mines, Diablo Foothills, Morgan Territory, and Sunol. How many are out there is anyone’s guess; no comprehensive study has ever been done, so our knowledge is based on evidence gleaned by park biologists and other experts.

“Reports wax and wane,” says Regional Parks Wildlife Program Manager Doug Bell. “Parks like Diablo Foothills and Sunol have healthy populations, but they’re not exploding.” Ecological Services Coordinator Steve Bobzien talks about cycles: “Some years there are few public reports or staff observations. Other years reports of coyotes come from everywhere.”

They share the parks with other mammalian predators, and relationships within that guild are complicated. Coyotes and bobcats get along like dogs and cats. “I once saw a coyote tree a bobcat, then hang around waiting for it to come down,” Black Diamond Mines supervisor Rex Caufield recalls. Wildlife biologist Natasha Dvorak has been surveying a recently acquired parcel near Black Diamond where a coyote pack lives; her automaticcamera data suggest that a resident bobcat avoided the vicinity of the coyotes’ den while they had pups.

Farther afield, in Ventura County, coyotes have been documented killing bobcats, especially females.

Coyotes defer to mountain lions, although they will scavenge the big cats’ deer kills. (How can you tell which predator made the kill? “Typically it’s a hindquarters takedown by coyotes,” says Bobzien. “Whereas mountain lions break the neck, or penetrate the skull, or asphyxiate the prey, and go through the thoracic cavity like a surgeon.”) But it’s risky business; mountain lions can easily kill coyotes.

Among canids—wolves, coyotes, and foxes—competition is fierce, sometimes dog-eat-dog deadly. Historically, wolves may have limited coyote populations in parts of California (the

"Now, in the absence of their historic competitors and predators, coyotes are back and doing quite well."

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A coyote chases a bobcat in the East Bay hills. (The bobcat escaped.)

Jen Joynt

oseph grinnell, founding director of uc Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, coauthored the landmark Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relations to Man with Joseph Dixon and Jean Linsdale in the 1930s. The authors recognized three coyote subspecies—valley, mountain, and desert—in California, but warned that the boundaries were blurry: “The coyotes display a greater range of variability without geographic coordination than does any other group of mammals we have studied.” With that caveat, Grinnell and his colleagues described mountain coyotes as larger and more wolflike, desert coyotes as scrawnier. Decades later, Benjamin Sacks at UC Davis defined coyote genetic clusters specific to the Central Valley, the Cascades, the Sierra, and the Central Coast Range and speculated that coyotes disperse into habitat that is similar to that of their birthplaces’.

Despite their apparent ubiquity, coyotes are not present in all of the regional parks. Except for Big Break on the edge of the Delta, you won’t find them in most of the shoreline parks, even at Coyote Hills, or in heavily wooded places. They

c santa cruz professor emeritus michael soulé coined the term “mesopredator release” to describe what happens in habitat fragments where coyotes and other higher-level predators have been eliminated: foxes and feral cats take an increased toll on ground-nesting birds and other prey species. In San Diego County, Soulé and Kevin Crooks found that some bird species had become locally extinct in coyote-free chaparral patches. In the East Bay parks, the constraining effect of coyotes on smaller predators may benefit California quail. Bobzien reports “a substantial quail population” at Camp Ohlone, where coyotes are present and feral cats are absent. The apparent high density of mountain lions adds a layer to these relationships but does not seem to affect their dynamics.

The domestic cat is the mesopredator we house and feed.

Coyotes do kill cats in neighborhoods bordering the regional parks and elsewhere. Many of the coyote incidents logged by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife since 2004 involve cats, along with the occasional small dog or backyard chicken. “One guy called as the representative of a Wildcat Canyon neighborhood complaining about cat predation,” recalls former Stewardship Manager Joe DiDonato. “They had lost a couple dozen cats.”

What else are coyotes eating? Gary Snyder included a catalog

Coyote pups await their mother’s return to their hillside den.

of the contents of coyote feces in Yellowstone in Mountains and Rivers Without End: everything from elk bones to shoestrings and tinfoil. Dvorak found deer, rabbits, other small mammals, grasshoppers, and one long-nosed snake in scat samples from her survey area; no remains of birds or feral pigs. DiDonato has witnessed two deer kills: an adult doe and a fawn. In general, though, direct predation on large mammals appears to be uncommon. DiDonato has seen coyotes gathering on ranches at calving time, not to prey on the calves but to eat the afterbirths and the newborns’ milk-rich feces. Coyotes consume a lot of fruit: dates in Tucson, apples in Seattle, avocados, stone fruit, pyracantha and manzanita berries. Some raid watermelon patches. Dumpster-diving is neither unusual nor universal; Arizona and Southern California coyotes appear to eat more anthropogenic refuse than their Chicago counterparts.

Field studies, including Bekoff ’s work at Grand Teton National Park, suggest that food resources influence coyote social structure. Packs form to defend clumped resources like elk carcasses from other coyotes, rather than to patrol a hunting preserve for small prey; it doesn’t take a village to catch a mouse.

A typical pack consists of a mated alpha pair, one or two adult betas, and the year’s pups. As with wolves, only the alphas breed and they’re generally monogamous. Betas assist in defense and babysit the pups.

Some pairs lack helpers and maintain larger territories. There are also roamers, tolerated at the edge of a pack’s territory, but not part of it socially, and solitary transients with extensive ranges. During its lifetime a coyote may assume more than one of these roles. Helpers may eventually inherit the territory, and packs may be neighbors for years, even decades. Young males and females appear equally likely to strike out on their own.

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Coyotes in the regional parks fit this pattern: They’re observed mostly in pairs or small packs. “We see singles and small groups, on the order of three,” says Bell. “Three is the magic number.” Caufield notes occasional larger units at Black Diamond: “Sightings are usually of individuals, but they do gather occasionally in groups of three to five, though we don’t often see them travel or hunt together.”

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used to be ranches where coyotes were strictly harassed and developed a healthy fear of humans. They’re just a few generations removed from intolerant rancher behavior.” Will they unlearn that fear? Coyotes do respond to changes in human behavior.

L Steve Zamek, featherlightphoto.com

Sherry Grivett, San Jose, CA

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A range of coyote behavior on display: (above) howling, (above right) pouncing, (below) listening, and (below right) walking along the road.

has shifted from the open range to the urban/wildland interface.

A compilation by Robert Timm, formerly of UC’s Hopland Research and Extension Center, included 89 coyote incidents involving injuries to humans or close calls in the state between 1978 and 2003, almost all in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties. The most notorious was a fatal attack on a three-yearold girl in Glendale in 1981, one of only two known human fatalities. Many encounters occurred as dog owners attempted to defend their pets. Locales varied: front yards, public parks, golf courses, corporate campuses.

For whatever reason, the East Bay has not had a problem with aggressive coyotes, either in the regional parks or elsewhere. No attacks on humans in Alameda and Contra Costa counties have been reported to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife since it initiated its current incident tracking system in 2010. Two-thirds of 38 logged incidents involved pets

Jaymi Heimbuch, JaymiHeimbuch.com

Matt Knoth

ome call it the song dog, and the coyote’s howls and yips are social glue and advertisement to rivals. Alphas howl more than betas; transients are mostly silent. One author described 11 types of vocalization: solo growls, barks, and yelps; group howls and yip-howls; and more. An alpha usually kicks off the group yip-howl, with others joining in. When Brian Mitchell, now at the University of Vermont, was a UC Berkeley graduate student, he and his adviser Reginald Barrett analyzed the calls of captive coyotes in Utah and a wild population at the Nature Conservancy’s Gray Davis Dye Creek Preserve in Tehama County. They concluded that the barks and howls of individuals were like signatures, with distinctive acoustic properties, and that howls were better for long-distance communication. The barks of a mated pair were atypically similar, as were the howls of two siblings. It’s hard not to be reminded of the private languages of families and the verbal shorthand of long-term couples.

Our local coyotes vocalize most often at night, but there are always exceptions. “They can howl any time of day,” Bell says. “I was walking down a trail through a dense oak slope in Morgan Territory one afternoon and started hearing coyotes howling from a rock den. I sat down and listened to them for 20 minutes. It’s quite magical.” In Bobzien’s experience, howling tends to peak after midnight. “If you’re in Tilden in the evening, you can hear them howling as soon as it gets dark,” says park supervisor Sergio Huerta. Caufield has heard dusk and dawn choruses at Black Diamond Mines. A lot of it is intramural: “Where are you?” “I’m over here!”

Those songs are not music to the ears of sheep ranchers.

They’ve traditionally responded to coyote predation on their flocks with lethal force, often hiring professionals to do the job. Control of “problem” coyotes became institutionalized in 1895 in the federal agency currently known as Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Eighty years ago, Grinnell and his co-authors estimated that 10,000 were killed in the state annually by government hunters, sheep and cattle ranchers, fur trappers, and others. Nationwide, federal agents took almost six million coyotes between 1916 and 1999, about a third of those after 1976. More recently, in fiscal year 2013, the agency killed 5,094 coyotes in California alone, by shooting from the ground and from aircraft, poisoning with cyanide cartridges, and other methods.

That approach appears to be changing as livestock ranchers buy into alternative approaches such as guard dogs (or llamas

or livestock, including poultry.

None of the Regional Park staff I spoke with could recall a case of coyotes attacking park visitors or employees. “The vast majority of reports involve people seeing coyotes following them, or not backing down,” says Bobzien. “The people feel like they’re being stalked. The coyote is being a little too curious.” Huerta summarizes incidents in Tilden: “Coyotes followed people walking with their dogs, getting fairly close as if walking with them, but not making threatening gestures.”

Similar reports of curiosity stopping short of aggression come from Morgan Territory and Diablo Foothills. I’ve experienced

or donkeys) and motion-activated scare devices. Project Coyote, a Larkspur-based advocacy group, has helped develop a model Livestock and Wildlife Protection Program in Marin County.

The county shares the cost of guard animals, better fencing, and improved animal husbandry methods and reimburses ranchers for depredation losses. Since the program replaced previous lethal controls, sheep kills by coyotes have declined by 62 percent. Meanwhile, the arena of human-coyote conflict

that myself, although not in a regional park: a coyote once paralleled my path through Mitchell Canyon on the north side of Mount Diablo, veering off to pounce on a vole or dissect the cone of a gray pine; not approaching, not fleeing; damned if it was going to let me interfere with its afternoon. Coyotes have attacked dogs in Black Diamond and Briones, though typically when the dogs were running loose.

Why the difference between Southern California and the East Bay? It could be geography.

In Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis calls the Los Angeles region “unique in the Northern Hemisphere for the intensity of interaction between humans, their pets, and wild fauna,” noting that even cities like Denver and Seattle do not “enfold wild terrain in the complex fashion of Los Angeles.” DiDonato speculates about a legacy of fear: “The big East Bay parks

ike other wildlife, coyotes are affected by the ongoing drought. “With three dry years, the coyotes appear to be stressed out,” says Bobzien. “There may be a lag effect, with low numbers next year because of low survivorship.” DiDonato has seen field camera detections decrease within the last few months. Although coyote litter size is typically four to nine, the pack that Dvorak studies has only one surviving pup, and it appears to have a bad case of mange.

If the long dry spell is reducing coyotes’ normal prey base, they may venture into unfamiliar areas in search of food—and into more conflict with people. Bekoff suspects that’s a factor in the current rash of coyote attacks on cats and small dogs in Seal Beach, which has generated scare headlines (Washington Times: “Deadly coyotes spread across U.S. suburbs devouring family pets”) and local agitation for lethal control. “If they have enough food, they’re going to stay put,” he says. “They’re not working hard to expand their range. But if the drought affects their diet of small rodents, that can definitely change their use of space.”

Wildlife biologists and coyote advocates agree that coexistence is possible. “Human behavior is precipitating the problematic behavior of coyotes,” contends Bekoff.

Feeding coyotes is not just a bad idea: it’s against state law and park regulations. When it happens in the parks (at Black Diamond, emaciated young coyotes were hanging around the parking lot, being fed sandwiches, Bobzien recalls), park staff have to intervene.

Common sense is essential to coexistence. Dog owners can protect their pets by keeping them on leash in coyote country. House cats should be kept indoors, for their own safety and the sake of any wild birds in the neighborhood.

Residents along the wildlands interface can avoid leaving pet food outside, secure their garbage, pick up fallen fruit, and clean up around bird feeders (birdseed attracts rodents, which attract predators). For the rare close encounter, hazing is the recommended response to aggressive or overly familiar coyote behavior: yell, wave your arms, and throw something. “Most will be put off,” Bekoff says.

“People often put us on the defensive, asking, ‘What are you going to do about your coyotes?’” says Bell. “Our line is that they’re everybody’s animals, part of our natural landscape. Our job is to enjoy them.” The trick is to strike a balance between respect and fear. We do have a lot in common with our fellow opportunists. There’s a bit of coyote in all of us.

Frequent Bay Nature contributor Joe Eaton lives in Berkeley and has written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Estuary News. j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 5

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an ocean garden

images and text by josie iselin

The Fine Art

of Seaweed

april 21, san francisco, ca. i fell in love with seaweed at the kitchen counter.

ecosystem engineers of our planet. It fixes carbon, generating the base of the food chain, and creates habitat; it is fundamental not only to life in the sea but to all life on earth.

What if Rachel Carson had been able to observe firsthand the intense diversity of the wild California reefs? Marine algae alone number more than 700 species on the Pacific coast. Compared to the monochrome presence of knotweed (Ascophyllum) and bladderwrack (Fucus) on the Maine coast, a California shoreline can seem like a wonderland. The wrack line of its beaches is full of washed-up kelps, and its tide pools are crowded with delicate seaweeds that range in color from reds and magentas to iridescent blues.

My adult life in California includes a close kinship to the beaches I walk regularly, especially Fort Funston in San Francisco, with its wild drifts of massive kelp, and Duxbury Reef in Bolinas, where years ago my seaweed journey began. It was there that I held an innocuous scrap of Cryptopleura violacea up to the sky and, with a gasp of wonder at the intensity of color and the fabulousness of form, decided to bring it back to my studio and place it on my scanner. Among the many treasures the beach has shared with me, seaweed is perhaps the greatest discovery of all.

I had returned with a sack full from the windswept beach at Princeton-by-the-Sea, and as I dropped each specimen into a tub of salt water, its form and color and translucent sensuality awakened. Pale pinks mingled with bright greens and yellow oranges. Rounded fronds, bumpy textures, and slender tendrils unraveled. I focused on one green algal mass.

The delicate connections between the razor-thin blades were surprisingly strong, and as I unfolded them, one by one, I could see their tiny serrated edges. I felt like I was discovering a secret that few had seen.

In 1955 Rachel Carson published The Edge of the Sea, a lyrical and intimate prose portrait of the intertidal world—that universe of life that resides just below and between the tides. The rockweeds and kelps are an integral part of her explanations of the rocky intertidal zone; her home base was the seaweed-strewn rocks and beaches of southern Maine, and so how could it be otherwise? Carson saw the integral nature of all organisms living at the seashore. Her ecological view (rare at that time, when most scientists were nose-down in the study of specific species) is as contemporary today as when she wrote about it, and she celebrates seaweed as one of the great

(clockwise from upper right): Bonnemaisonia californica, Pacific Grove; Osmundea spectabilis (pepper dulse), Cambria; Halosaccion glandiforme (sea sacs), Fort Funston, San Francisco; Smithora naiadum, Bodega Head b ay n at u r e

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Some Basics

The common name “seaweed” implies a kinship to plants, but that is misleading. Algae of all sorts were established in the oceans well before the arrival of vascular plants on land, which resulted from the migration of a few ancestral green algae from the top of the surf zone up onto terra firma. Vascular plants inherit their chlorophyll (and thus their green color) from these ancient algal migrants, but the relationship ends there.

The term “algae” covers the domains of microalgae as well as marine algae, multicellular algae, or macroalgae, all three of which are synonyms for seaweed. Microalgae are the invisible single-celled organisms that populate our oceans and waterways and produce more than half the oxygen in our atmosphere.

Macroalgae, or seaweed, produce another 20 percent. All of this oxygen is generated as a by-product of photosynthesis, and seaweeds and kelps are astoundingly good at this lifegiving process. Both land-based plants and oceanic flora use the energy of sunlight to split water molecules and transform carbon dioxide into organic matter. But seaweeds do not expend precious resources fighting gravity—the buoyancy of the ocean pulls them upward—and, as a result, they are masters of efficiency when it comes to converting light energy into chemical energy, and from there, into metabolic energy, or growth. Giant kelp can fix from 1 to 4.8 kilograms of carbon per square meter of plant per year, growing almost two feet a day. Other species display even higher productivities. The kelp forests of the oceans rival the rain forests of the continents in terms of oxygen production.

What Color Is Your Seaweed?

Color is perhaps a seaweed’s most striking characteristic: the intensity of its magenta, the subtlety of its golden brown, or the clarity of its kelly green. William Henry Harvey, a colorful Irishman who traveled the world collecting specimens in the 19th century, was the first to use color as the basis for identifying seaweeds. In 1839 Harvey segregated algae into the three taxonomic groups of green, brown, and red that we still use today.

A seaweed’s color is determined by the combination of pigments housed within its cells. Green algae, like plants, have chlorophyll a and b. They are, in fact, typically green. Brown algae, which include kelps and rockweeds, have a third, brown accessory pigment that, when combined in different amounts with the green chlorophyll, creates their array of colors ranging from olive green to golden brown to yellow-orange. The six thousand or so species of red algae have red and blue accessory pigments that overshadow the single chlorophyll a pigment.

When these pigments combine, the color can be dazzling: striking scarlet, maroon, pale pink, or deep purple.

While plants on land have the full spectrum of daylight available to them, seaweeds must be resourceful with whatever light filters through the dense ocean waters—some reds and browns live at depths of 100 to 200 feet. Chlorophyll a is the powerhouse activator for photosynthesis and efficiently collects the longer red wavelengths available in the surface waters and on shore, reflecting the greens back to our eyes. It is present in all seaweeds, but brown, red, and blue pigments have evolved alongside it to capture the shorter wavelengths of blue and green light that penetrate the deeper waters where the red and brown seaweeds find their space.

(clockwise from top center): Ulva lobata, Stone Beach, San Mateo; Chondracanthus exasperatus (Turkish towel), Duxbury Reef, Bolinas; Cumathamnion decipiens, Bodega Head; Mazzaella volans, Bodega Head b ay n at u r e

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seaweed architecture

Bull Kelp

september 12, fort funston. Today, thousands of Nereocystis (left) were washed up along the sandy expanse of Fort Funston. The giant, mature bull kelps, with hard bulb, sturdy stipe, and streaming blades, collected in huge entanglements tumbling in the surf, their staggering size and quantity only hinting at the profusion of growth beyond the waves. Between the bundles of wrack, I noticed single kelps washed up on the sand: tiny, miniature versions of the giants, their perfectly spherical bulbs as wide as a fingernail, their blades, like golden wings, delicate and luminous in the morning sunshine. While the scale differential is as a seedling to an ancient redwood, the transformation from tiny kelp to giant does not take centuries but merely weeks and months. The remarkable transformation of the inorganic into the organic—of sunlight and seawater into the long stipe, substantial bladder, and winged blades that grow up to 100 feet from the ocean floor toward the surface—happens in a single season, out of sight, in the deep subtidal domain of the cold northern Pacific.

I have a photograph of my nephew at about age 12 trudging along the sandy expanse of Limantour Beach on the Point Reyes National Seashore. He has the stipe of a great bull kelp draped over his shoulder, and he is leaning into the weight of it, the bulb and blades trailing behind him 30 feet or more. I think he must have fancied himself a slave in ancient Egypt, hauling stones to the pyramids. The scale of the enormous kelp brings that kind of thing to mind.

From tiny and intricate to enormous and singular, the diverse shapes found among the tangle of seaweed at the ocean shore are all indicative of strategies to confront the three tasks essential for success in the intertidal zone: holding on, gathering light and nutrients, and defending against being eaten. A scientist would refer to a seaweed’s morphology while a designer would use the term form, but in either case, the complex and varied shapes that exist across all seaweeds derive from some basic building blocks. The overall body of a seaweed is called the “thallus.” What glues the thallus to the benthos, or sea bottom, which is usually a rocky substrate, is a holdfast.

Some holdfasts become large and ancient structures in and of themselves. Others are round and flat and remarkably small given the task at hand.

Emerging above the holdfast is the stipe, a “stem” that supports branches and the blades, or the “fronds.” A blade might be as thin as a single cell or as stretchy and tough as contemporary denim, and closer inspection may offer clues to its identity: There might be a distinct midrib, or a network of slender veins. The branching patterns can be as simple as a single stipe reaching to a single blade, a bifurcation (splitting in two), or an enormously complex system that looks like a lifeless tangle when draped over a rock at low tide but reveals a specific growth pattern when floating in water.

Feather Boa Kelp

(left to right) Egregia menziesii (feather boa), Half Moon Bay; Macrocystis pyrifera (giant kelp), Cambria; Nereocystis luetkeana (bull kelp), Fort Funston; Neoptilota densa, Cambria b ay n at u r e

june 8, duxbury reef. I went out to the reef today. It was a minus tide, and the long stretch of exposed rock struck out into the Pacific, pointing south toward the Golden Gate Bridge. I looked for my favorite seaweed, the feather boa kelp, or Egregia menziesii (left). I went out to the far southern tip of the reef, where the lowest tide teases the rocks with a few hours of exposure and where there are a number of Egregia holdfasts.

In February they were battered and worn. Now, from the same holdfasts, the Egregia emerged abundant and fresh, 20 to 40 feet long, olive green fronds splayed along the surf channels, devoted to these rocks for a few hours before floating aloft with the rising tide. What a strange creation this kelp is. Like a bizarre feather boa, its paddle-shaped blades line the edges of a straplike midrib covered with tiny spikes. Intermittent rounded bladders, sporting whimsical, winglike blades, help to keep the massive rope afloat in its subtidal life, to catch the sun’s rays and

perform the work of photosynthesis.

How could something this funny-looking be so successful?

Without having to devote precious resources to combating gravity, it uses the buoyancy of water to its advantage. And always having the nutrients of the ocean available to it—like other kelps—Egregia is enormously efficient at producing more of itself. While the holdfast might be 15 years old, this 45-footlong blade had grown in just a few months.

Josie Iselin is a San Francisco-based photographer, writer, artist, and book designer, with seven books and many gallery shows to her credit. Find her at josieiselin.com.

All text and images excerpted from An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (Abrams, 2014).

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author a specimen of Niebla on the rocks at the Marin Headlands (seen in close-up below).

e’re climbing. the morning is hot, and our destination is up a steep hill in the Marin Headlands, but the pace and the conversation of my companion, Stephen Sharnoff, are both quite relaxed.

“Walking and hiking are my favorite ways to spend time outdoors and always have been,” he says. And Sharnoff has spent immeasurable time outdoors, spurred by a passion for the beauty and fascination of the living world. Subjects he has studied, mainly through photography, range from slime molds to the farm landscape of Provence, but one subject above all is associated with his name: lichens. And lichens—a durable union between an algae and a fungus—are the reason for our walk up this coastal headland.

They are also the subject of Sharnoff ’s definitive A Field Guide to California Lichens. Its publication by Yale University Press in 2014 represents the final chapter in a story spanning many years and many miles. I sought out Sharnoff to learn why and how he devoted so much time b ay n at u r e

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and energy to a relatively obscure life form. In his typically generous fashion, he invited me to visit the place where his journey into the world of lichens began.

Two-thirds of the way up the hill, he leads me off-trail on a scramble along the hill’s crumbly contour. He wants to show me an exceptional lichen community living on a weathered stony outcrop above the Pacific Ocean. He points to a boulder that sports a bright yellow crust on its shaded face and a shrubby tuft of gray-green along its crest. The former is Acarospora socialis, a fairly common species found on rocks in California. The latter appears to sprout up out of the rock.

Touching it lightly, Sharnoff explains, “This is Niebla—found only along the immediate coast of California from this point south. It’s one of about 20 lichen species that are unique to this life zone.

With no rainfall at all for about half the year, they survive by soaking up fog off the ocean.”

This particular Niebla specimen could really use a drink of fog right now. “It’s extremely dry and brittle now but will be

far more pliable—and colorful—when it gets wet,” he says. “When lichens take in water, their outermost layer becomes translucent so the algae just beneath can photosynthesize. They seem to literally glow with color then.”

Along with his late first wife and fellow lichen enthusiast Sylvia, Sharnoff first visited this site in 1975. The Sharnoffs learned that ecologists had dubbed this area a “fog desert.” The pair subsequently found the same peculiar lichen assemblage, and fog desert habitat, at numerous locations between the Marin Headlands and northern Baja California, all within a mile of the ocean.

“I remember looking at the lichens on the rocks here for the first time and being amazed by their abundance, diversity, and strangeness,” Sharnoff says. “Sylvia and I had already been taking pictures of lichens for some time, but that was the moment when we really started to think the project should become much bigger... that lichens were a whole new universe worth exploring.”

The new universe became the Sharnoffs’

Stephen Sharnoff, sharnoffphotos.com

Claire Peaslee

Interview by Claire Peaslee

of tiny, three-dimensional subjects is hard, because the depth of field becomes very limited at close-up range. Using a tiny aperture improves the depth of field, but that calls for a lot of light on the subject. A single flash makes a very harsh light, with deep shadows, so Victor invented super-adjustable brackets that held two flashes that we could position and aim anywhere we wanted. We could take pictures of an area about the size of a half-dollar coin and still get clear, well-focused photos, without fussing with tripods. We became practiced at

after the bear-puppet mascot our daughter had given us, the “Bearly Fitz.” cp: It seems your lichen adventures could fill a book. Which ones are particularly memorable? ss: Very early on we were invited on an expedition with Brodo and his wife, an entomologist, to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Charlottes have been isolated from the mainland of British Columbia long enough to evolve animals and plants that are distinctly different from their mainland counterparts. These island endemics include lichens and also exceptionally large black bears. Irwin

Stephen Sharnoff, sharnoffphotos.com

(left) Photographer Stephen Sharnoff showing the

Stephen Sharnoff: For the Love of Lichens

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life adventure during a quarter-century of study and travel. Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, before her untimely death from cancer in 1998, was the source of keen curiosity and persistence that drove their “lichen project.”

Stephen has since remarried, traveled and lived abroad, completed his field guide to California lichens, all but completed a photographic guide to Sierra Nevada flowers, and begun his next big inquiry. Yet Sylvia’s curiosity continues to inspire his work, particularly with lichens. Over the course of several visits with Sharnoff, I asked him about this long-lasting passion for lichens. cp: Why lichens? ss: At the time we began, in the early 1970s, only a few scientists, and a few artists, had really noticed lichens. Though they add texture to trees, shrubs, and rocks, lichens seemed to be almost invisible to most people. Focusing on lichens was an example of Sylvia’s talent for picking up on subtle things that others had missed. It was her particular genius to see that this was a niche waiting to be filled: There were well-illustrated books about birds, flowers, mushrooms, almost everything that has a presence in the landscape, yet lichens managed to remain overlooked in spite of being strange, often beautiful, and sometimes quite conspicuous. cp: So how did you set out to address that oversight? ss: Our journey really started with Sylvia’s father, Victor Duran—someone who could do or make just about anything. At various times he was a botanist, entomologist, carpenter, machinist, and photographer. In the 1930s Victor became head of the Scientific Photography Laboratory at the UC Berkeley, a position he held for about 25 years, until his retirement. The lab provided photo services for scientists on campus, mainly for biologists. Vic’s skills as an inventor and machinist were put to constant use, and he pioneered a number of techniques of close-up photography, often making his own equipment.

Victor gave us an enormous boost right from the start by making us some special equipment. Getting good photos

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First f i r s t Person person

Acarospora socialis, a common species of rock-loving lichen in California.

composing our pictures while bracing our elbows against trees and rocks, holding the heavy camera-plus-flash apparatus in position. cp: You and Sylvia braced your elbows on many surfaces across North America. How did your journey take shape? ss: We exhibited our lichen photos at the Oakland Museum in the mid-1980s, and that show then went on tour. That’s how we met the eminent Canadian lichenologist Dr. Irwin Brodo, which led to our collaboration with him on Lichens of North America (Yale University Press, 2001).

Sylvia and I made several long trips— probably some 30,000 miles in all— between 1992 and 1995 to get the photos for the book. We outfitted an old-style motor home, and it was so full after we packed all our gear that we named it

arranged for transport by helicopter to some remote sites, where he found a number of very rare lichens.

Another occurred in 1993, at the end of our first year in the Bearly Fitz. We met up with a group of Oregon State graduate students who were working with Steve Sillett in the Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades. They had placed a platform 180 feet high in an old-growth Douglas fir to document the mosses and lichens growing there. They rigged some climbing gear in a neighboring tree, and Sylvia and I hauled ourselves and our gear up there to photograph their work and some of the lichens they found. cp: And now, after many years, you’ve finally completed A Field Guide to California ( continued on page 41) Lichens. j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 5

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climate change: Dispatches from the Home Front

Right now the Bay is only rising by about a quarter-inch per year, a rate double the 20th century average. Within the next 15 to 20 years the rate is expected to speed up dramatically.

Overall, the National Research Council projects a 5- to 24-inch rise for San Francisco Bay by 2050, and 17 to 66 inches by 2100.

So this is not something we can put off for the grandchildren anymore. “We don’t want people to get to the point where they want the security of a big sea wall. We want people to have other solutions to go to that feel just as safe and don’t cut them off from the Bay,” says ecologist Letitia Grenier, shepherd of a forthcoming roadmap for local adaptation.

There isn’t much resistance. In the last two years, Marin, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties have all taken steps to get with the program, and numerous existing flood control projects have added sea level rise to their agendas. “On a weekly basis someone asks us to make a presentation, or calls our help desk for advice, or wants us to start the conversation in their county,” says Lindy Lowe, senior planner in charge of bcdc’s Adapting to Rising Tides project (art). “It’s a sea change in attitudes to adaptation.” art has developed a step-by-step process that can help shoreline communities scope out what’s at risk and then select a response. Hayward’s shore made perfect fodder for a demo.

“It’s really low-lying,” Wenger says. “You have parks backing up to habitat, backing up to utility lines and wastewater plants and the San Mateo Bridge landing. So if you start moving any one piece, it’s a lot of people at the table.”

In Hayward’s case, they brought Caltrans, East Bay Municipal Utility District, city and county officials, and the parks people to that table. The group decided resilience and recreation were just as important as the economic value of the industrial zone at the water’s edge. They also recognized that their existing levees

flooded trails. So it’s not just about the building. They need climate change on Bay Area ecosystems. The series is a partnership with the Bay Area Ecosystem Climate trails and they need marshes or they’re not going to have Change Consortium (baeccc.org). More at baynature.org/climate-change. anything to interpret.”

I’ve never met her, but ot a very burly building” is the way planner Wenger sounded pretty gung-ho over the phone for a point Maggie Wenger describes the Hayward Shoreline person on the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Interpretive Center. It’s a homey, roomy place Commission’s (bcdc) advance team on sea level rise. She isn’t the only one. Everyone I interviewed for this story seemed to have crafted of wood and seasoned by Bay fog and salt moved on from the “doom and denial” phase of the climate spray—the kind of structure you’d imagine Roosevelt’s wpa crews might have built in a national park. It sits on short stilts change conversation to constructive, creative talk about how to right in the middle of an 1,800-acre marsh, as well as squarely adapt to the up to five feet of sea level rise projected for the Bay in the memories of thousands of Area by the end of the century. As Save schoolchildren and other visitors who’ve the Bay’s restoration manager Donna Ball come here to learn about the Bay. The put it, “I like a challenge, I like a puzzle.”

Hayward Shoreline is both a beloved The trick is, the pressure is on. We’ve open space on Alameda County’s heavily built our cities right up the edge of the urbanized bayshore and one of the lowBay, and it’s a big Bay so there’s lots of lying assets that planners like Wenger low-lying waterfront. More than 270,000 homes, hundreds of miles of roads and know are most at risk from sea level rise. bridge approaches, two international “It’s already in trouble,” she says. “When airports, 22 sewage plants, and most of there’s a king tide or a storm event, their the public access sites on the bayshore trails flood. And they can’t take kids on are in the flood zone, according to bcdc. (above) Aerial view of the Hayward Shoreline No wonder the National Oceanic and Interpretive Center, next to the east end of the San Atmospheric Administration (noaa) Mateo Bridge and the Hayward Regional Shoreline. put the Bay Area on its top ten list (right) Hayward Area Recreation and Park District of American metropolitan areas most Recreation Supervisor Jennifer Koney navigates the shoreline trail during a recent high tide. vulnerable to sea level rise.

Bay Area institutions, agencies, and nonprofit groups to comprehend, mitigate, and adapt to the impact of

Courtesy Hayward Area Recreation and Park District

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Our Coast, Our Future

“Dispatches from the Home Front” is a series of articles highlighting groundbreaking work being done by

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hiddenecologies

by ariel rubissow ok amoto nowhere to go but up Increased Rate of Sea Level Rise Spurs Flood of New Ideas

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and flood control protections were not up to the task.

The group is currently exploring the idea of building a new more habitat- and wetland-friendly levee. They invited four engineering students from the University of Santa Clara to visit the site and get the lay of the land. For their senior project, the students will design and present four different approaches, both for experimental softer levees and hard walls as needed.

“The Hayward group understands that trying to find a solution that brings together habitat and utility infrastructure and flood protection ends up a lot better for everyone, in terms of costs and benefits, than any other possibilities,” says Wenger. cool tools bcdc’s step-by-step art process goes online this January with a new, more intuitive website. But the real buzz these days is about the “flood map” produced by noaa and Point Blue Conservation Science under the “Our Coast, Our Future” project. Click on this new interactive tool and the Bay Area pops up on screen, and what you notice first is the light blue ring around the Bay that’s vulnerable to the advancing sea.

The new tool lets you type in any location around the bayshore and see the impacts of various likely scenarios—from different degrees of sea level rise to wave heights and the flooding potential from a constellation of extreme tides, storms, and rising seas.

Being self-absorbed, I choose the “flood potential” option and zoom in on my haunts. Turns out living on one of San Francisco’s seven hills keeps me high and dry. But the Safeway where I shop down near Fisherman’s Wharf and the route I bike to the Golden Gate are engulfed in pink stuff on the screen— pink being the gentler version of a warning red color, I assume.

Worse is the Foster City soccer field my daughter practices on. Most of Foster City, a canal-front town built on fill, is in the pink, as are the glossy glass edifices of Oracle, standing in

Flooding the Bay

The new Our Coast, Our Future map tool lets users explore the effects of sea level rise around the Bay Area. From a base map of the whole region (left), you can zoom in on a specific area and then choose a set of conditions to subject it to. The map on the right shows “flood potential” for the Oakland airport shoreline, with minimum inundation in light pink and maximum inundation in dark pink, in a scenario with three feet of sea level rise (projected by 2100) and a king tide. Explore for yourself at http://data.prbo.org/apps/ocof/

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1. A traditional levee with a 3:1 or 4:1 slope acts as a backstop

to protect the developed land behind it, but offers little ecological value.

2. A saturated, permeable seepage zone lies between loose surface soils and a compacted clay

layer, allowing for the gradual release of treated wastewater from the channel above into the marsh below.

3. A gradual 30:1 slope from the Bay to the top of the platform buffers waves and storm surge, provides vegetated upland habitat, and allows for migration of lower marsh vegetation as sea level rises.

4. Taller, dense vegetation in a “wet” meadow and brackish high tidal marsh stabilizes soil, reduces wave height and energy, and provides a wildlife refuge in high tide or storms.

5. Tidal salt marsh faces the Bay.

Redwood Shores just across the canal.

Apart from the flood threat to the shoreline headquarters of more than a handful of Silicon Valley giants, the tool also underscores something the U.S. Geological Survey warned of last year: 90 percent of the Bay’s current wetlands could start drowning by mid-century. “Our natural shoreline areas are our first line of defense and what we’re going to lose soonest.

They’re already sitting in water,” says Lindy Lowe. “But we can’t forget that they offer both onsite and offsite benefits. So we’re not just talking about losing species, habitats, water quality benefits, views, and Bay Trail experience; we’re also talking about the flip side—the job these natural areas are doing protecting our lives and property.” revised road map Another tool, scheduled for release in early 2015, is an update to the 1999 “Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals.” This timely update taps the expertise of more than 200 scientists and resource managers and is funded primarily by State Coastal Conservancy.

The original “Goals” report was a regional call to action to restore 60,000 acres of tidal wetlands around the Bay. The document spawned an unprecedented push for ecological restoration in a shore zone that had lost 85 percent of its historic wetlands to farms, cities, ports, and military bases. Over the last 15 years huge, new, carefully planned and constructed mosaics of fledgling habitats—like Marin’s former Hamilton air base and the North and South Bay salt ponds—have been reopened to the tides, resulting in 13,000 acres restored and 30,000 more planned.

Add this to existing wetlands, and the region is on the way to the 100,000 acres deemed necessary for a healthy ecosystem.

But since the report came out the rising sea has made our wetlands—and our goals for them—a moving target. Unlike the stalwart walls of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, these are soft, vulnerable places shaped and shifted by water and weather.

“As hard as it was to get things restored 15 years ago, it was easy compared to now. All you had to do to get it mostly right was find a bayland with the right elevation in relation to b ay n at u r e

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storms or higher tides. Restoring creeks—many of which have been dammed and altered to control flooding—could also help deliver more sediment from the tops of watersheds to the drowning shore.

“There’s tons of uncertainty—if we have a smaller rise in the seas and a bigger supply of sediment we might be fine, but we should plan as if we won’t,” says Matt Gerhart of the Coastal Conservancy. “With the goals update, we have a roadmap for experimenting and testing ways to move whole landscapes.” hybrid habitats Beyond the enormous benefits of wetlands as sponges for a swelling Bay, many people are at work on a variety of new kinds of adaptive features in our landscape. Chief among these is the “horizontal levee.” Rather than a stark, steep, bare, rip-rapped barrier between us and the water, these new-style levees would protect us without sacrificing habitat. As proposed by various ecologists and restoration engineers, they would have a wider footprint, featuring a gradual rather than steep slope on the bayfront, as well as vegetation and refuge for wildlife fleeing high water. In a way they would compress a whole range of habitat types that would otherwise be lost—from mudflat to marsh to upland—into a much smaller space.

A couple of prototypes of horizontal-style levees incorporating transition zones have been built in the North Bay,

the tides and open the levee,” says Grenier, the update’s point person on new science. “But now, even if you stay on top of the elevation issues, you’ve got to think about watershed management, and freshwater flows, and where you can get more sediment, and how to tackle the other stressors climate change brings. So we need to be more dynamic and flexible in our shoreline designs.”

The goals update is what it says—an update based on lessons learned and the changed climate outlook. It asks how the thousands of acres of restored wetlands and their surrounding habitats can be made more resilient. In some spots baylands are hemmed in by concrete, but in others there are opportunities for adaptation. It might be an old creek bed or an ancient culvert in need of an upgrade. It might be a pasture or a parking lot or a retired oxidation pond at a sewage plant.

Or there might even be some open space on the inland side of the marsh rather than a wall of bungalows and tech-hives. All of these places are now opportunities for what scientists call transition or migration zones—room for habitats to spread inland or upstream away from the advancing tides.

The goals update reads well, even in draft—it’s organized and to the point and includes subregional to-do lists and 32 case studies, along with myriad recommendations. A whole new chapter discusses transition zones and how to build them, whether it’s a barrier beach assembled from oyster shells, a wide vegetated levee, or a meadow fed by treated wastewater, among other ideas. Other chapters explore what might happen to wildlife. “If we manage for single species we might lose much more than if we manage to sustain functioning ecosystems. We need bigger patches of habitat, and they need to be connected by more than just a fringe marsh or a denuded creek so animals can move around the Bay and up into healthy creek corridors as conditions change,” says Grenier.

Grenier is most excited about a new focus on making creek connections to the baylands more natural—many are unnaturally encased in concrete. Doing so may offer more transition zones and more places to create fresh or brackish water marshes.

“They build up faster than tidal marshes,” says Grenier, giving them an elevation advantage in the face of floods from harsher

Extensive restoration work of former wetlands at Sears Point on San Pablo Bay features the construction of a two-and-a-half-mile-long horizontal-style levee. Highway 37 is in the background.

and several more complex designs are on the drawing boards.

At the Sonoma Land Trust’s Sears Point restoration site along San Pablo Bay, Ducks Unlimited just built one to protect both baylands and a railroad track. The first phase of this two-and-ahalf-mile-long levee is “as wide as a football field,” according to engineer Austin Payne. If you lined up all the trucks necessary to bring in this dirt, they’d reach from San Francisco to San Diego.

“The levee is floating on top of 70 feet of bay mud,” says Payne. Bay mud is not that solid, a fact engineers took into account in their design. Instead of just giving the levee a gentler slope on one side, they added slopes to both sides. Once the levee sinks a projected six feet into the unconsolidated Bay mud under its own weight, the plan is to push all the extra dirt on the inland side up onto the top so that in ten years, it could be raised without any more dirt trucks. The gentler bayside levee slope, meanwhile, would remain habitat friendly. “The design allows us to stay flexible and control costs in the face of sea level rise,” says Payne.

The horizontal levee is just one innovative addition to the shoreline that can buffer us from waves and extremes. Other useful additions might be more eelgrass and oyster beds, and restoration planting palettes incorporating diverse species that can withstand wider temperature extremes. Also touted by adaptation teams are human-made islands where wildlife can scurry and birds can build nests out of reach of high water.

Forty newish mounds poke out of Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh, for example, shaped from local marsh soil and native plant material. During the long wait for the completion of

Robert Janover, robertjanover.com, courtesy Sonoma Land Trust

The features of a “horizontal levee” built next to a wastewater treatment plant.

Horizontal levee drawing by Peter Baye. Sources: Peter Baye, Jeremy Lowe

Nature-Friendly Shoreline Protection

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Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkeley.edu/hiddenecologies

Joan Hamilton

As we walk up Mount Diablo in late September, the landscape is parched, quiet, and still. Life seems suspended— until a tiny insect lands on Kip Will’s shoulder. It’s a brown, tick-like parasite that makes a living sucking blood from deer. Most hikers would brush it away with a scowl. But Will waves me over for a closer look. “A hippoboscid fly,” he says. “They’re so cool!”

Will is an expert on insects and other arthropods—creatures with external skeletons and no backbones.

beetles aren’t the only quarry. Will is chasing down the effects of the 2013 Morgan Fire in Mount Diablo State Park. Each month around the time of the new moon (when the darkness makes arthropods more active), he traps for four nights. His plan is to keep

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Documenting Post-Fire Insect Life on Mount Diablo

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these high tide refuge islands, biologists provided local endangered Ridgway’s (aka clapper) rails with an adaptable alternative—floating thatched cabanas.

A different kind of bird island—this one designed for nesting shorebirds—dots the newly flooded salt pond south of the Dumbarton Bridge. The idea is to provide breeding sites for avocets, stilts, and terns displaced by tidal marsh restoration. After studying bird use of these new features, the usgs rewrote the recipe for success. “Lots of islands in a pond don’t seem to support any more nesting birds than a few islands in a pond, so we should be creating a few small islands in as many places as we can,” says usgs’s Alex Hartman.

One point is clear—whatever lessons learned and new tools Aerial view of the bird nesting islands constructed as part of the restoration of Pond SF2 next to we have to work with, shoreline managers also have a whole the west end of the Dumbarton Bridge. new set of responsibilities. “Park districts and nonprofits into their student programs and art exhibits,” Wenger notes. and birders and people who care about shoreline habitat are They see it’s an issue not only for their future but for discussion realizing they’re going to have to go back to places they thought by the whole community.” they had already restored,” says bcdc’s Wenger. “It’s a big shift to be thinking less about acres and more about whether this marsh is sustainable or that marsh is going to drown.”

Ariel Rubissow Okamoto is the editor of Estuary News, the quarterly “We need to green the pink stuff, and keep the green stuff journal of the San Francisco Estuary Partnership. She is also co-author of from going pink,” says biologist Julian Wood of Point Blue, Natural History of San Francisco Bay (UC Press, 2011) and a frequent contributor to Bay Nature. one of those nonprofits involved in baylands restoration.

Sitting on its stilts in the middle of the pickleweed, Support for coverage of climate change and sea level rise provided Hayward’s Shoreline Center is using its dire straits to good ends.

by Google, Inc. and Bay Nature donors.

“They’ve done a tremendous job of incorporating sea level rise

doing this for five years, after which he hopes to have the best record yet of which arthropods live on the mountain and how they’re responding to the fire.

Will and a student, Alyssa Zhang, have fashioned 60 “pitfall” traps, designed to catch arthropods that crawl on the ground. Half are placed inside areas that burned and half outside.

Raccoons made mischief with some of the traps Will and Zhang installed in July, so they’re spending this morning with a pick, shovel, drainage pipe, plastic cups, and chicken wire, shoring them up. After two hours, Will is covered with sweat and dust. “Isn’t science glamorous?” he quips. Less laboriously, Will sets up four traps for flying insects, traps that are invisible to park visitors unless they know where to look.

Over the past few months, Will has seen fewer arthropods in the burned areas than in the unburned ones. But that could change. “There’s a lag time,” he says. Right after a fire, arthropods have little to feed on (though a few species, such as termites (continued on page 38)

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As his duties as a UC Berkeley associate professor and museum director allow, he roams the world to find new species and figure out where they fit in the arthropod family tree. His specialty is woodland ground beetles. With 4,000 to 5,000 species worldwide, and 100 species in California, they’re in the third largest beetle group, called carabids.

Today, though, woodland ground

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sweet spot for the landowner to make that happen.”

Santa Clara’s efforts are part of the three-county “Healthy Lands and Healthy Economies” collaboration that will continue with the release of valuation reports for Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties later in 2015. To see a copy of the Santa Clara report or find out more about Measure q funding, go to openspaceauthority.org [Alison Hawkes] (continued from page 7)

10 Cargo Way, San Francisco, CA 94124 • BayNatives.com • (415) 287-6755 Volunteer or Donate Today! www.RegionalParksFoundation.org 100% TAX DEDUCTIBLE

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Marching north along Ocean Beach on the San Francisco shoreline, Dan

Will Elder, National Park Service

A Voice for Native Plants Turns 50

Until a few years ago, few people knew about the rare plant communities that persisted quietly in a lightly used city park in the Oakland hills. If people were aware of Knowland Park it was largely because of its proximity to the Oakland Zoo, which sits in a corner of the park and manages it for the city.

But then word got out about the Zoo’s plans to expand further into the park, including up on to the western ridgeline where development would impinge on the park’s maritime chaparral ecosystem, an increasingly rare habitat that hosts a number of locally rare plants. A neighborhood group of park users, calling themselves Save Knowland Park, formed to block the Zoo’s expansion plans. And they found an important ally in the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society (cnps), a statewide nonprofit founded 50 years ago to educate the public about California’s native flora and advocate for its protection.

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Book a visit from the BayMobile today: aquariumofthebay.org/baymobile sparetheairyouth.org

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In 2011, the zoo unveiled its latest plans to build a “California native” exhibit to showcase a range of animals that had lived in this area long ago, many of them (like jaguars) now absent from California. But the conservationists objected to building such an exhibit— and the aerial tram that would carry visitors above this “native” habitat— on top of one of the region’s most threatened native habitats.

The groups opposing the expansion sustained a major setback at the end of 2014 when Oakland city officials approved one of the remaining regulatory hurdles for the zoo’s plans.

But cnps volunteer Laura Baker, who’s been a key organizer of the opposition, refuses to see the city’s move as a total loss. “It would have been wonderful to have the City Council turn this down,” says Baker. “But this is about more than the outcome of that decision. We had hundreds of people who came to the City Council to say we want our park protected. That’s conservation in action.”

That long view comes (continued on page 40)

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Sand Shortage Threatens Ocean Beach and Snowy Plovers

Baykeeper in April, and in July the organization appealed the case to the state’s First District Court of Appeals. “They basically ignored the coastal impacts of sand mining, and that includes impacts on species on the coast,” says Sejal Choksi-Chugh, Baykeeper’s project director.

“The sand we find throughout the Bay is both geochemically and mineralogically consistent with what is found on the outer beaches,” Barnard says. “The primary source of sand is coming down from the San Joaquin– Sacramento Delta and almost all the mining sites lie along that path.”

The outcome of the case could determine whether Hanson and Jerico, which are still awaiting project approval from the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, will be able to proceed with their proposed mining plans. It could also set a precedent for how sediment is managed in the Bay, with consequences for coastal beaches and the birds that inhabit them. [Jimmy Tobias]

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This article is part of a monthly series of photos and articles on the transformation of Mount Diablo following the 2013 Morgan Fire, funded by special donations from Bay Nature readers. You can find additional entries in the series, including slide shows and iNaturalist sightings, at baynature.org/diablo.

[Joan Hamilton]

But Ocean Beach, Murphy says, is in bad shape. Besides being overrun with foot traffic and free-roaming domestic pets, the beach has a serious erosion problem. Wind and waves have already reduced its southern portion to a narrow strip of sand and they are constantly chipping away at what’s left.

The erosion is a headache for the City of San Francisco, because it threatens major nearby infrastructure like the Great Highway and the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant. It has also spurred some environmentalists to take aim at industrial activities, specifically sand mining, which they say contribute to the problem. Their efforts, grounded in new science about sediment transport in the San Francisco Bay, could help determine whether western snowy plovers and shorebirds like them have a future at Ocean Beach.

Sediment transport in the Bay Area is a complex phenomenon but, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological

Survey (usgs), it works like this: Sand, gravel, and mud flow from the mountains and foothills into the San Joaquin–Sacramento Delta and other tributaries into San Francisco Bay, where some of the material remains while the rest flows out toward the ocean.

There, currents may carry the smaller sand particles out the Golden Gate and down toward Ocean Beach and beyond.

Today, however, much of the sediment is trapped behind dams, diverted by flood control structures, removed by dredging, or sucked up by private sand mining corporations before it can reach the open water.

“The outer coast, from San Francisco to Pacifica and beyond, has some of the most rapidly eroding beaches in the state,” says Patrick Barnard, a usgs geologist who led a series of major studies on sediment transport in the Bay Area. Barnard’s research indicates that human activity has reduced the sediment load leaving the Bay, and that sand mining is “certainly a contributing factor” in this phenomenon.

Sand mining, which uses hydraulic suction to slurp up sediment from underwater mineral deposits, has been ongoing in San Francisco Bay for more than 70 years. The mining companies sell the extracted sand for use in the manufacture of a variety of construction and agricultural products, including asphalt and concrete. And it looks as if this practice will continue. In October 2012, the California State Lands Commission (slc) granted Hanson Marine Operations and Jerico Products new 10-year leases to mine state-owned underwater parcels near Angel Island and in Suisun Bay and approved the companies’ plans to extract more than two million cubic yards of sediment each year.

San Francisco Baykeeper, a local nonprofit, filed suit against the commission a month later, citing Barnard’s research and arguing, among other things, that the state’s final environmental impact review failed to use the best available science and inadequately accounted for coastal erosion. A state judge ruled against

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Murphy stops and points his binoculars at a clutch of birds that look like cotton balls with beaks. “There they are,” says Murphy, a veteran birdwatcher and volunteer with the Golden Gate Audubon Society. “It’s a small flock.”

Four western snowy plovers, small shorebirds listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, scoot back and forth across the sand. They leave trails of three-pronged footprints in the wave-swept terrain on this cool September morning.

Coastal dunes, like the ones at Ocean Beach, are the birds’ preferred habitat. A handful of the estimated 2,500 breeding adults left on the Pacific coast spend the winter here each year. “If beaches like this are cared for and controlled, the plovers will be okay,” Murphy says. “Otherwise, they’ll go extinct.”

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and charcoal beetles, move in to take advantage of the dead wood). After rains come, there’s a flush of greenery—and more creatures arrive to feast on the plants. By that time, charcoal beetle larvae will be maturing in the dead wood. Next in line are their parasites. Some of these fire-following insects might not show up in his traps until the second or third year of the study.

When we return to check the traps later in the week, we find a sprinkling of ants, flies, bees, wasps, moths, termites, spiders, bristletails, centipedes, and a scorpion. That’s impressive, given how lifeless the mountain seems in the fall.

But it’s nothing in the fecund world of arthropods. There’ll be more quantity and variety after the rains come—this year and in the four years of the study to follow.

The mere thought of rain gets Will talking about rain beetles. They’re three-cubic-inch scarab beetles that eat the roots of grasses and live in oak woodlands. Mount Diablo looks like good habitat for them, but they’ve never been recorded here. To see them, you have to be out in the dark in the rain.

“Is there any better thrill than seeing the flash of beetle as it flies through the mist-filled track of your headlamp light?” Will asks in his blog.

The night after our first meeting, a quarter-inch of rain splashes down on the study site. I ask Will whether that drew him out in the dark with his headlamp. No, he says, because rousing rain beetles takes an inch or more.

“We’ll just have to wait.”

(continued from page 37)

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to th e grou n d

and state levels.

Local chapters rely almost exclusively on volunteer commitment —Baker herself is a volunteer with the East Bay chapter’s Conservation Committee. But the chapter also raises funds to pay for a part-time conservation analyst who has played a key role in successful efforts to defeat development in Dublin’s Doolan Canyon and oppose a waterfront hotel-casino complex at Richmond’s Point Molate, among other battles.

On the horizon is the long-running campaign to block expansion of off-road vehicle recreation from the Carnegie State Vehicle Recreation Area that abuts the biologically sensitive state park property outside of Livermore known as Tesla. There’s no guarantee of victory every time, but it’s important to keep speaking up for native plants. “We’re

( letters continued from page 5)

little to no gains for the hardworking people you profile (“Meet the Future,” Oct.–Dec. 2014). Between these hardball tactics and the damaging Public Employees Pension Reform Act, the prospects for these new workers have dimmed considerably.

A career park ranger who might have retired at age 55 with a modest pension will now have to work until at least 67, in a physically punishing job, for the same benefit.

Sadly, the drain of talent from the park district is due not just to retirement but also to voluntary departure, as many experienced workers like me wearied of management’s disregard for the lifeblood of the district: the field staff you rightly acknowledge.

Matt Harray, Berkeley

Mack Casterman

ear 40

from being part of an organization that has been involved in efforts protect native plants and their habitats for five decades. The small group that met in Tilden Park in 1965 to save the park’s renowned native plant garden has since grown and spread up and down the state and now has 10,000 members in 34 chapters, including seven in the Bay Area. Baker said it’s issues like Knowland Park that bring more people into the conservation fold and allow the organization to grow. “Conservation cannot be a specialized activity for entitled people. This should be part of everybody’s life,” she says.

The organization sees its role as providing science-based botanical information to the public in the service of native flora. cnps maintains the state’s first rare plant inventory that’s heavily used for scientific research and conservation planning. But advocacy based on both science and an aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of native plants has always been part of the organization’s mission at both the local

tiny, but we’re mighty,” Baker says.

To kick off its 50th anniversary year cnps is sponsoring a major conference on the conservation of native plants and habitats, featuring field trips, workshops, plenaries, and exhibits. The conference will be held in San Jose from January 15 through 17, with preconference workshops and field trips starting January 13.

For information go to cnps.org/2015.

For more information about visiting and protecting Knowland Park, go to saveknowland.org. [Alison Hawkes]

Dear Editor: Your article “Mushrooms to the Rescue!” (Oct.–Dec. 2014) was very inspiring, both in terms of what is already known about the ability of mushrooms to clean up bacteria and human-generated waste and what remains to be found out. But I’m troubled by what you don’t mention. We know some mushrooms are extremely dangerous for human consumption. So what would happen if some of these mushrooms and/or water filtered through them got into the drinking water? You mention two mushrooms, oyster and Stropharia, and refer to others, but you say nothing about whether any of these are safe for human consumption. And what if humans eat the mushrooms that have consumed the E. coli bacteria?

Conversely, if these mushrooms, e.g., the oyster and Stropharia, can consume the E. coli, could they be used by themselves to cure things within our own bodies? Clearly there is a whole world of opportunity here, for both wonder and danger.

Dorothy Duff Brown, Berkeley

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Bay Nature responds: The world of mycoremediation is relatively new, and it’s complicated by the infinite

SorensensResort.com

variety of mushroom species and types of toxins. So some of these are questions that do not yet have answers. The mushrooms mentioned in the story, though, are edible, and there’s little concern about oyster mushrooms run amok in fields.

Each mushroom species has its own particular effect on the toxin it’s being used to clean up; many mushrooms do eat, break down, and so destroy toxins. That’s what oyster mushrooms do with petroleum and other hydrocarbons, and what Stropharia does with E. coli. Because the toxins are broken down, it would not be dangerous for humans to then eat these mushrooms. But mushrooms can’t break down heavy metals, so in such a case those fruiting bodies would need to be cleaned up like any other hazardous material.

The short answer: It varies considerably from mushroom to mushroom and from toxin to toxin, and the research on mycoremediation is still in its infancy. The mycologist Paul Stamets is an excellent resource for more information.

Dear Editor: I was disappointed to see yet another full-page ad from Drakes Bay Oyster Company (dboc) in the October– December 2014 issue of Bay Nature.

Whom your publication takes money from and promotes says a lot about your values. Would you accept money and run ads for the Pacific Legal Foundation, one of the Koch brothers’ front groups, or other rabidly anticonservation groups? Then why run an ad for dboc, which has been in bed with antienvironmental organizations while trying to gut the Wilderness Act and privatize public parkland?

Your magazine celebrates the natural world and conservation in the Bay Area. Yet dboc has done tremendous damage to one of the Bay Area’s most important natural areas. The company has trashed Drakes Estero, one of the most ecologically valuable estuaries in the Bay Area, leaving behind pollution, trash, and invasive species, a legacy that will cost the public and the National Park Service millions of dollars and many years of effort to clean up and repair.

Jeff Miller, Point Reyes

( first

person continued from page 31)

ss: Yes. I already had most of the photos I needed for the book from our earlier travels.

But because I ended up having to write the text as well, the book took a lot longer to finish. California with its great diversity has about 1,500 of the 5,400 lichens known from across the continent, and the book contains about 500 of those species.

Finishing the California lichen book has meant closing a long chapter of my life. I’ve spent 40 years photographing lichens! Now I’m moving on to other interests, and while I’ll always notice and love lichens wherever I encounter them, I’m no longer making any sort of project out of them. But lichens opened a door into a new world, which was, of course, the world that was always here. cp: And at present? ss: My most recent project is essentially done; it’s a guide to Sierra Nevada flowers, illustrated mostly with my photos. It should come out in the next year or two.

But I always have a new interest! Right now, it’s old-growth Douglas fir forest.

Why do we have major parks dedicated to preserving redwood groves but nothing of the kind for Douglas firs? People never think about those really ancient, towering trees, in forests so full of diversity. That’s because large, primal stands of oldgrowth Doug fir hardly exist anymore! ✤

Soon after our Headlands walk, Sharnoff took off from his Berkeley home, in search of sites in Northern California where old-growth Douglas fir survives. His objective: to explore, photograph, engage with people, and doubtless salute the fungal-algal beings he encounters along the way, the ones that started him on this path. marin headlands lichen tour

Marin Headlands Lichen Walk Sunday, March 1, 10 am–2 pm Join Bay Nature and Shelly Benson of the California Lichen Society for an exploration of the beautiful lichens above Rodeo Lagoon. Space is limited.

Sign up at baynature.org/field.

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su pport f or bay natur e The Bay Nature Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes exploration and stewardship of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Through tax-deductible contributions, the Friends of Bay Nature invest in the growth and development of our capacity to serve as an independent voice for local nature and conservation. The Friends of Bay Nature listed below are individuals whose donations were received between Aug. 29 and Dec. 2, 2014.

Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to special events and outings. $5,000 + Jorgen Hildebrandt 2,500–$4,999 Christopher & Kathryn Dann $1,000–$2499 Brian Ashe & Cynthia Rigatti Ron & Rosemary Clendenen Susan Bodenlos & Ashok Khosla Mark & Paula Lowery $500–999 Anonymous (1) Tania Amochaev John Bennetts Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Helen Cagampang Kim & Robert Carroll Peter Daly Jacqueline Desoer Eric Folmer Rita Haberlin Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Elizabeth Fishel & Bob Houghteling Karen & Robert Jachens Gudrun Kleist & James Morel Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Ann & Michael Loeb Virginia Loeb John & Valerie Metcalfe Russell Nelson & Sandy Slichter David Sacarelos Greg Sarris Sue Schoening Jake Sigg Virginia Slaughter Phoebe Watts Jumbo & Trevlyn Williams $100–499 Anonymous (1) Sandy Biagi & David Ogden Jan Blum Helen Bodington David Bridgman Ann & Winslow Briggs Bob Case Glenda Cook Heather Furmidge Lenny Gucciardi Diane Guerin Dolores Hansen Darla Hillard & Rodney Jackson Beth Keer Carol Lane Craig Lanway Rick Lloyd Ralph Mihan Michael Mooney Kathryn Morelli Christine Mueller Clare Murphy Elizabeth O’Shea Anne & Charles Olsen

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Phyllis Payne Anita Kelley Pearson Grace Perkins Derek & Janice Ransley Jeff Reichel Joanna & Thomas Reynolds Frank Rubenfeld Daniel & Lynne Russell Ken & Marjorie Sauer Patricia Scofield Steve & Wendy Smit Carla Soracco George Strauss Delia & John Taylor Chris Thorman William Toaspern Mari Tustin $50–99 Don Broderson Douglas & Rosemary Corbin Margaret & Robert Davenport Kathleen Diamond Irene Ehret Joan Ferguson & Craig Uhrich Sam Foushee Sue Haffner John Harris Rebecca Haseleu John Hess & Gail Sullivan Peitsa Hirvonen Jon Johnsen Katharine & William Loughman Charles & Meredith Moore Robert Muller Mary Nicholson Ruth Nuckolls Mary Roberts Wayne Rodoni Michael Rogers Pat Sesser Fred Setterberg Igor & Shirleymae Skaredoff Nicki Spillane Rosemary U’ren Cynthia & Robert Wantland $25–49 Andrew Aldrich Tom & Lili Beggs Ardith Betts William Davis Susan Floore Elaine Geffen Kelly Graham John Holloway Barbara & David Meschi Emily Moskal Robert Rutemoeller Anthony & Carol Somkin

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Bay Nature Funders are foundations, agencies, and institutions that have provided grant or sponsorship funding of $1,000 or more for general support, specific editorial content, or other programs over the past 12 months.

To learn more about how you can support Bay Nature, contact Development Director Judith Katz at (510)528-8550 x105 or judith@ baynature.org. You can also donate directly online at baynature.org/ donate.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Funders Clif Bar Family Foundation craigslist Charitable Fund Dean Witter Foundation Dorothy & Jonathan Rintels Charitable Foundation Thomas J. Long Foundation S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation Publisher’s Circle Anonymous (4) Gertrude Allen Robert & Angela Amarante Alan & Helen Appleford Elizabeth & John Ashley Carol Baird & Alan Harper Lee Ballance & Mary Selkirk John Bennetts Louis Berlot & Joyce Cutler Sandy Biagi & David Ogden Susan Bodenlos & Ashok Khosla Richard Boswell & Karen Musalo Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Nina Brooks Phyllis Browning Andy Butcher Helen Cagampang Kathleen Cahill & Anthony Chorosevic Kim & Robert Carroll Roseanne Chambers Jon Christensen Ron & Rosemary Clendenen George & Sheri Clyde Peter Daly Christopher & Kathryn Dann Tom Debley Frank Delfino Jacqueline Desoer Carol Donohoe Ed Ehmke & Mary Jane Parrine Clayton Englar Paul Epstein & Jennifer Traub Margaret & Todd Evans Cheryl & Tom Fields-Tyler Kay & Leslie Filler Eric Folmer Catherine Fox Harald & Sabine Frey Norman Fritz & Fran Mueller David Frane & Charla Gabert Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Dan & Hilary Goldstine Tracy Grubbs & Richard Taylor Rita Haberlin Dolores Hansen Bruce & Leslianne Lee Hartsough Claudia & Scott Hein Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Eva & Paul Heninwolf Jorgen Hildebrandt Jan Hintermeister Mary Hufty & Daniel Alegria Louis Jaffe & Kitty Whitman Harriet & Robert Jakovina

Los Vaqueros Interpretive Center and Marina For the latest activity schedule, email goltman@ccwater.com.

Jerry & Lola Kent Nancy Kittle Gudrun Kleist & James Morel Kimberly & Matthew Krummel Craig Lanway Karen Larsen Peter & Sue LaTourrette Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Ann & Michael Loeb David Loeb Virginia Loeb Paula & Mark Lowery Kathryn McNeil John & Valerie Metcalfe Mia Monroe James Morgan Barbara Moulton Bruce Naegel & Constance Roberts Russell Nelson & Sandy Slichter Larry Orman & Marice Ashe Anita Kelley Pearson Jane & Richard Peattie Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Dan Rademacher & Tamara Schwarz John & Frances Raeside Margaret & Oscar Rosenbloom Sue Rosenthal Lester Rowntree & Meg Conkey Daniel & Lynne Russell Mike Sabarese David Sacarelos Sara Sanderson & Eric Weaver Greg Sarris Janet & Victor Schachter Bob & Brenda Schildgen Sue Schoening Susan Schwartz Jake Sigg Chuck Slaughter & Molly West Virginia Slaughter Patricia Snow Cindy Spring & Charles Garfield Max Stoaks Timothy Tosta & Nancy Martin Aleks Totic Scott Tyle Barbara Vance John Waterbury Phoebe Watts Mariquita West Bart & Nancy Westcott Peter Wiley & Valerie Barth Jumbo & Trevlyn Williams David Wimpfheimer

Come visit us!

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Saturdays and Sundays 9:00 am–4:00 pm 925-240-2440 Directions: Drive to 100 Walnut Blvd., Byron, then drive about a mile to the southern end of Walnut Blvd.

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holdfast. In fact, if you find a sea palm washed up on the beach, check out the holdfast: You’re likely to find that it is still holding on to a piece of the rock. The rock often breaks before the holdfast does!

So how do they gain such a tight hold in this dynamic environment? Sea palms, like most algae, reproduce by spores, and these tiny spores settle into nooks and crannies in the irregular rock surface. There they secrete a kind of glue made up of polysaccharides (sticky sugars) that ensure a tight fastening.

Fingerlike appendages called haptera grow to become the large holdfast, which further moors the seaweed against the force of the waves.

The other structural advantage of the sea palm is its tough, thick, hollow but flexible stem, or stipe, which allows it to stand up in the air. Sea palms are the only marine algae that do not require water to support their stipes.

The main competitor for space in these extremely exposed but nutrient-rich habitats are mussels, but the sea palms often win out. The fiercest surges often scour rocks of mussels, while sea palms flourish in wave-battered rocks by taking advantage of the weird little cracks and crevices the world offers. Adaptation and flexibility win again.

U

AVOCET RESEARCH ASSOCIATES

q: “How do seaweeds, such as sea palms, stay in place while being battered by powerful waves?”

—Alan, Berkeley a: At McClures Beach on the north end of the Point Reyes peninsula there’s a large rock at the edge of the ocean.

From atop that rock, you can peer over the edge and watch the powerful waves—which have traveled unimpeded several thousand miles across the North Pacific—pound against the hard granite.

But growing on that battered rock face, not only surviving but thriving, is a type of marine algae called sea palms. As the waves smack over them the sea palms bend completely over and then bounce right back up into the air. “What? Is that the best you can do?” they seem to be saying to the raging surf.

Postelsia palmaeformis do indeed look like palms and it is no coincidence that the profiles are similar. Land palms can endure hurricane/typhoon winds of hundreds of miles per hour. Both types of organisms have evolved the perfect shape to take the toughest conditions Mama Nature can throw at them.

Such a metaphor! When life seems overwhelming, don’t resist—be flexible!

Bounce back and get ready for the next big wave or titanic wind.

But sea palms are ancestral to and much more primitive than land palms.

Sea palms are a kind of brown algae, and unlike land plants that get nutrients through their roots, they take in nutrients and gases directly from the ocean water through their cell walls.

The structure that anchors the sea palm to the substrate may look like a root system, but it exists solely to keep the seaweed attached to the rock. Hence its common name,

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Following in the

Bartrams' Footsteps Exhibition & Programs

December 15, 2014 February 15, 2015

University of California Botanical Garden botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu | 510-643-2755 200 Centennial Drive, Berkeley, CA 94720

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n a t u r a l i s t ’s

n o t e b o o k

Speaking up for the birds of San Francisco Bay

Join us for our annual Waterbird Festival in Richardson Bay on January 31st.

Information at richardsonbay.audubon.org Surf Scoter, by Richard Griffin

b y b ay n at u r e

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RECYCLING REUSE AREA AREA es y de que se nos haya dañado o se haya RECEIVING a nuestro personal político, y asegure RECEIVING PROCESSINGlos servicios de los individuos que SEPARATING uidado en abusado de nosotros mentalmente.

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Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra CERAMICS años y burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa proveedor de Voluntariado de Incentivos de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, ar, pero para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros sobre el rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, miembros en los negocios al mostrar AREA CERAMICS AREA ador de siempre avanzando acercándonos, sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cualSOILS RECEIVING RECEIVING/SORTING emas que PROCESSING representa un ganar-ganar THE para todos. PROCESSING SELLING endientes Hemos establecido oficinas MIXING UNIVERSE extraño. en más de 9 de nuestrosOF condados. SELLING UHW, ha LaTOTAL mayoría de las oficinas tienen RECYCLING ya durante bancos deORE DEVELOPMENT llamadas y capacidad © URBAN ASSOCIATES, 2007 ención de de difusión de web y cuentan con Illustration by Mark & Nancy Gorrell, 2007 List of 12 Mast er Categories ©1989 by Daniel Knapp and Mary Lou Van Deventer. Anyone may use them with attribution. gidos por grandes pantallas. Contamos con a Loretta otra acción que es también otra The resource pipe has no end - that’s the point! After we Reduce our resource use campaña conforme continuamos construyendo burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las discards, Reuse andactualizaciones Recycle. Total Recycling recirculates manufactured el our “Puente Hacia unwe Mejor Futuro” ndado deand por email y mensajes dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros Estamos reventando la dico y losproducts and already-refined resources. de texto que It alertan a los miembros de trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios burbuja feedstocks cuando nuestro Comité dores. Enprovides los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. for new products, building y oportunidades de educación, Constitución sugiere un cambio To Endquiero the Agemédicos of Wast e un grupothedeeconomy Yo personalmente while preventing unnecessary que combine el espacio de nuestro salirme de la burbuja en la que se al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. sido losmining and logging. No waste is good waste. ht tp: //ur banore.c om uecido sus Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva considera la reforma de IHSS en ¡No solamente lo merecemos, plan para posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El California y sugiero que empecemos con

“CUHW está rompiendo todos los mitos al enfocarse en los miembros.”

URBAN RE