Bay Nature January-March 2016

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BayNature j a n u a ry- m a r c h 2 0 1 6

A N E X P L O R A T I O N O F N A T U R E I N T H E S A N F R A N C I S C O B A Y AR E A

The Great Ladybug Convergence

The Language of White-Crowned Sparrows

$5.95

Lichens’ Identity Issues...And Yours Is an Ocean of Trouble Entering the Bay?

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THANK YOU for making our planet a better place—for all and forever.

ALLEN FISH, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in cooperation with the National Park Service

NAFTALI MOED, a former Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy nursery intern and seasonal ranger for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area

(Photo by Matthew Perry)

(Photo by Meghan Steinharter)

GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCY EXTENDS OUR

TO BAY NATURE INSTITUTE’S 2016 LOCAL HEROES ALLEN FISH

NAFTALI MOED

Environmental Education Award

Youth Engagement Award

ANDREA MACKENZIE

MALCOLM MARGOLIN

Conservation Action Award

Bay Nature Hero Award

parksconservancy.org

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c o n t e n t s

january–march 2016

Features 24

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identifying with lichen The Curious Union of Fungi and Algae Lichens may not get a lot of attention.

But look closely at them clinging to rocks or dangling from trees in our local parks and they’ll beguile you with their endless variety of form and color. Look even closer and these remarkable organisms— formed by a seemingly indissoluble union of a fungus and an alga—can call into question our conception of identity. But wait: We humans are compound organisms also, aren’t we?

by Elizabeth Lopatto

the language of sparrows H ow B i rd S o n g s A re E vo lv i n g to C o m pet e w i t h U r ba n N o i s e Pioneering research on the songs of Bay Area white-crowned sparrows done by “birdman extraordinaire” Luis Baptista through the 1990s showed that the birds in different parts of the Bay Area had different “dialects.” Now, 15 years after Baptista’s untimely death, a new generation of scientists is continuing his work to show how these birds are adapting to the increasing noise of their urban environment.

by Kim Todd

Eric Simons

Dave Strauss, dscomposition.com

Stephen Sharnoff, sharnoffphoto.com

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what lurks beneath Is a Silent Killer Entering t h e Bay ?

Noted Bodega Marine Lab oceanographer John Largier wants people to understand that San Francisco Bay is as much an arm of the ocean as it is the terminus of an estuary. And when he detected the signature of a potentially dangerous plume of oxygen-poor upwelling entering the Bay in 2011, he designed an ingenious experiment to prove his point. Unfortunately, over the past three years, the ocean just hasn’t been cooperating.

by Brendan Buhler

Departments 4

Bay View

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Ear to the Ground

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Conservation in Action

News from the conservation community and the natural world

A highly engineered backup plan for the endangered Delta smelt

by Robin Meadows

10 Signs of

On the Trail

12 Into the Breach

Letter from the publisher

the Season

In wintertime, these ladybugs like to huddle together...by the thousands!

by Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton

Paddlers and Ducks Return to Cullinan Ranch In January 2015, the levee was breached and tidal waters returned to Cullinan Ranch on the north shore of San Pablo Bay for the first time in over a century. The ducks, shorebirds, and boaters weren’t far behind.

by Paul McHugh

17 Elsewhere . . .

Shell Ridge Open Space, Garden for the Environment, Sanborn County Park

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First Person Botanist Mike Vasey has a passion for rare plants, wetlands, manzanitas, and life.

Interview by Sue Rosenthal

53 Ask the Naturalist

Why Argentine ants like your home (hint: it’s not the crumbs).

by Michael Ellis

54 Naturalist’s Notebook

The alien in a naturalist’s backyard

by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.Baynature.org

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by david loeb

bay view letter from the publisher of a gorgeous Thanksgiving weekend, it appears there’s a lot to be thankful for, at least meteorologically. The weather has been gorgeous: cold, but with clear, blue skies that bring out the muted colors of the late fall landscape. Standing on a bluff at the Marin Headlands, we gazed west over the water and were able to see the craggy outline of the Farallon Islands etched clearly on the horizon. In between, the intermittent spoutings of southward migrating gray whales were clearly visible against the dark blue water, reminding us of a prehistoric seasonal journey that had only recently been on the brink of disappearing. Significantly, this atmospheric clarity is the result of a more “normal” winter weather pattern—intermittent storms out of the northwest alternating with cool clear days—that is a welcome contrast to the more extreme drought-and-atmospheric river pattern of the past few years.

But of course, beneath the surface (literally), things are not as they should be. As of this writing, the opening of the traditional Dungeness crab season has been suspended indefinitely due to a massive bloom of toxic algae along the Pacific Coast, making these tasty crustaceans potentially deadly for humans.

Throughout the fall, unprecedented numbers of common murres washed up dead on coastal beaches, and large numbers of sea lion pups were showing up emaciated. As we report in this issue’s story on ocean upwelling, “For

Don Weden

A

s i write this letter at the end

contributo rs Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton (p. 10) is a UC Berkeley undergraduate and former Bay Nature intern.

Michael Ellis (p. 53) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-based tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com) and waxes eloquent for KQED’s Perspectives series.

Robin Meadows (p. 8) Robin Meadows is the water reporter for the Bay Area Monitor and also covers cancer and molecular biology. She has bred tropical fish but never by hand.

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the last two years, the Pacific Ocean has been in a state that no one has ever seen it in before.” That’s fine for those of us who like to write about weird natural phenomena, but not so much for the suite of animals that have evolved over millennia to live with one certain set of conditions but now find themselves confronting a different set.

There’s no climate change “smoking gun” for these conditions, though the combination of higher ocean temperatures and acidity points in that direction. But our human fingerprints are all over the conditions that have made life hard, if not impossible, for another water dweller, the Delta smelt. The massive reengineering of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and resulting water exports from the estuary have caused the population of this formerly abundant fish to plummet to near extinction.

Unlike the Dungeness crab, the tiny smelt has zero commercial value. However it does have federal endangered status, so both the fish and its habitat should be subject to the highest level of protection. Yet the massive California Water Fix (aka “Twin Tunnels”) plan pushed

by Governor Brown and Central Valley agricultural interests would only make matters worse for the smelt (not to mention chinook salmon and other Delta-dependent species) by siphoning up to two thirds of freshwater flows from the Sacramento River into two 40-foot-diameter (!) tunnels for export to the south.

On page 8, we report on a program to breed Delta smelt in captivity as a hedge against their extinction in the wild. One can applaud the ingenuity of the scientists involved but still wonder (continued on next page) if the considerable Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 54) is the author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. Info at johnmuirlaws.com.

Elizabeth Rogers (p. 17 ) is a Bay Nature intern.

Sue Rosenthal (p. 38) is Bay Nature’s research editor.

Ann Sieck (p. 17) 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.

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

Volume 16, Issue 1 January–March 2016 Publisher David Loeb Editor in Chief Victoria Schlesinger Editorial Director Eric Simons Associate Director Judith Katz Contributing Editor Alison Hawkes Office Manager Jenny Stamp Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Information Technology Laurence Tietz Design Susan Scandrett Advertising Director Ellen Weis Development Associate Katy Yeh Research Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editors Cynthia Rubin, Kathleen Wong Board of Directors Carol Baird, Christopher Dann, Catherine Fox (President), Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough, David Loeb, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott Volunteers/Interns Drew Baldwin, Julia Busiek, Samantha Cook, Nolan Davis, Paul Epstein, Avihai Guzy, Melanie Hess, Lauren McNulty, Elizabeth Rogers, Jane Scolieri, Kimbery 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)813-1903/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. © 2016 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

Front Cover: A cluster of convergent ladybugs gathers on a dried thistle at Redwood Regional Park in February 2012.

[Sally Rae Kimmel, flickr.com/photos/sallyraekimmel]

letters Dear Editor, I’m a West Marin resident and follow the elk issues closely. The problems the Tomales Point herd faces are similar to the problems faced by the buffalo of Yellowstone. There too, conflicts with ranchers and fears of wild animals spreading disease lead to hazing, starvation, culling, and fencing, even though there is plenty of public land that would be suitable habitat. In fact, the current ranges of buffalo and tule elk are best understood as political phenomena, rather than ecological ones. As a community, as a state and as a country, we need to do some large-scale thinking about how to live with large mammals.

Must they be confined (as our Pierce Point elk herd is) to essentially oversized zoo enclosures or can we accommodate free-range animals? Are we willing to come up with the resources for

ranchers to live side-by-side with wild animals, even as their populations slowly increase from near extinction? And, of course, with the first wolves born this year in California, are we willing to let a natural predator/prey balance be established? Hard questions. I too hope that West Marin will be the place of imagination where these problems can be worked out.

Thanks for publishing Bay Nature. I’m thrilled every time I get my issue. It’s great to have a forum where we in the Bay Area can think about successful human/wild coexistence.

David Ford, Lagunitas Dear Editor, I would like to point out a small inaccuracy in the article on tule elk at Point Reyes. Alison Hawkes writes, “Following the mating season the males drop their antlers and go into velvet…”

Male tule elk are “in velvet” only when they have antlers. The velvety covering on the antlers is rich in blood vessels that

nourish the antlers as they grow and harden from cartilage to bone. In summer, when the antlers are fully grown and hard, the velvet falls off or is rubbed off. This occurs before the mating season. The antlers aren’t actually shed until late winter.

Marjorie Popper, Solvang ( bay view: continued from page 4) effort and expense might be better directed at restoring habitat and freshwater flows.

It’s tempting to think we can engineer our way out of the multiple messes we’ve created, but how many species are we prepared to do this for? And where would these human-reared smelt live if their habitat is wiped out?

I’ve never seen a Delta smelt and probably never will, but it’s an essential part of the complex constellation of organisms that makes this region a biodiversity hot spot and a great place to live. We did a pretty good job saving the whales; now it’s time to Save the Smelt (in the wild!).

Bay Nature’s 2016 Local Hero Awards Dinner

“This Landsunday, Is Your Land” March 20, 2016 UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center 1675 Owens Street, San Francisco 5:30 to 8:30 PM

Celebrating 15 Years of Bay Nature & 100 Years of the National Park Service P r e s e n t a t i o n B y C H r i s t i N e L e H N e r t z , s u p e r i n t e n d e n t, G o l d e n G a t e N a t i o n a l P a r k s LOCAL HeRO AwARD ReCIPIeNtS

Conservaton Action | Andrea Mackenzie

Youth Engagement | Naftali Moed

Environmental Education | Allen Fish

Bay Nature Hero | Malcolm Margolin

Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority Golden Gate Raptor Observatory

UC Davis/Putah Creek Council Heyday Books

A Benefit for Bay Nature Institute

$150 per person

RSVP by March 9th baynature16.eventbrite.com For more info: judith@baynature.org 510-528-8550 x 105

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ear to the ground 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

widespread in San Francisco and able to range farther than we’ve been able to document. “It will be interesting long term to see how this pans out,” Young notes. “Hopefully there are other pairs that we haven’t seen yet, as well as other breeding pairs in San Francisco.”

[Eric Simons]

Jonathan Young, courtesy Presidio Trust

A Banner Year for Monarch Butterflies

Presidio Fox Update

One year ago, Presidio Trust biologist Jonathan Young spotted a gray fox in a tree on the Presidio’s coastal bluffs. It was the first confirmed sighting of the elusive native canid in the Presidio in more than a decade. Now hidden cameras placed by Young show that a family of at least three gray foxes is making a home there.

Young hasn’t seen a gray fox in person since his sighting last winter, but the fox family has appeared reliably in his camera trap images. The foxes reared their young in an abandoned building near Crissy Field—a place safe from coyotes—and now spend their time roaming the north and east edge of the Presidio. Once word of their existence got out, Young says, more observations trickled in: The foxes have appeared on security cameras in the Marina District and been spotted regularly during the day by Presidio Trust grounds crews.

Young says he tells everyone he can to keep an eye out for foxes and, if you see one, to take a photo and add it to iNaturalist, because this is still an active investigation.

Continued observation could provide valuable insights into the behavior of gray foxes in the urban Bay Area. While there’s some scientific literature out there—most of it conducted in rural

areas—Young says it’s probable that foxes, like coyotes, will behave differently in the city. “We don’t know too much,” Young says, “so it’s a great opportunity.”

One of the big unknowns is whether gray foxes can coexist with coyotes.

Coyotes are potentially gray fox predators, and the foxes disappeared from the Presidio around the time that coyotes and nonnative red foxes moved in. The red foxes are gone now, and Young says the hidden cameras show coyotes and gray foxes using the same areas. Gray foxes, which are one of only two canids that naturally climb trees, probably use the trees and the shelter of thick blackberry bushes to keep safe from the coyotes. The building where the young foxes were born was sealed after the foxes left, so Young has proposed constructing sheltered dens for these and other foxes to use in the future.

Young believes the foxes could stick around in the Presidio as long as they stay safe from cars and coyotes. Gray foxes do seem to stay in a particular home territory, he says, although, once again, there’s not a lot of information out there, particularly in urban areas. If the Presidio can host two breeding pairs of coyotes, Young says, you’d think it would be big enough for two breeding pairs of foxes. And as with coyotes, it’s possible the secretive foxes are both more

On a drizzly morning in late November, Bill Shepard walks a path in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. Mallards dabble in a few puddles, I-80 traffic roars along the far side of the lagoon, and nearby an Amtrak train click-clacks along.

A steady stream of bundled-up visitors have been drawn to this spot, eyes cast upward toward the treetops looking for a flicker of orange. Word has gotten out that migrating monarchs are wintering in this park for the first time ever, and it’s a good thing Shepard—an affable, white-bearded, middle-school history teacher who has made a hobby of counting Lepidoptera—is there to direct their gazes. But even he needs a moment to find what he’s looking for.

“I just saw them right where we were,” he says, pausing as he scans the branches of an Oregon ash. “There they are right above us! See them?”

Hanging in several large clumps above us are the monarchs, and with their underwings folded up they look like bunches of dead leaves. Shepard promises the scene turns brilliant when the sun comes out. Why they’ve chosen this urban spot, of all places, to hunker down is a mystery.

All around, it’s been an exciting year for monarchs along the California coast.

Preliminary reports from the Xerces Society-led population counts of more than 180 overwintering sites in California suggest an increase in monarchs compared with last year’s 235,000. So perhaps it was the sheer numbers that caused them to turn up at unusual locations.

Besides Aquatic Park, there’s a new roost at Lake Merritt, and another group of more than 200 has been (continued on page 42) j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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by robin meadows

Luke Ellison, research supervisor at the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Lab, inspects Delta smelt

conser vation in action

Rich Pedroncelli, AP/Corbis

being raised in the lab.

A Backup Plan for the Delta Smelt

L

uke Ellison is holding something most of us will never get to see: a Delta smelt. Graceful, iridescent, and about as long as my finger, these fish are so rare in the wild that just six adults were found during a sample survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta last spring. And the Delta is the only place in the world where this endangered species lives—in the wild, that is.

Delta smelt also live in enormous round outdoor tanks and smaller tanks inside dimly lit trailers filled with the sound of running water. Crowded onto two acres near the edge of the Delta, the neat rows of tanks and trailers comprise the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory (FCCL), which maintains a captive population of 10,000 smelt as a hedge against their extinction in the wild and another 10,000 for research. If the wild smelt die out, the captives will be released in an effort to keep the species going. Just 50 miles east of Berkeley, the lab, founded in 1996, feels a world away amid cow pastures, vineyards, and orchards.

Ellison, the lab manager, deftly squirts eggs from a female smelt into a b ay n at u r e

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dry bowl, where they form a tiny yellow mound. Next he adds milt from a male, gently swishing the slender fish around the bottom of the bowl to mix the milky sperm with the eggs. Then he adds water, activating the sperm and completing this act of artificial conception. “We used to let them spawn on their own in the tank but this way we can choose the pairs,” Ellison says. “That lets us make sure they’re genetically diverse.”

Listed as threatened by the federal government in 1993 and as endangered by the state in 2010, Delta smelt were once common. “In the 1970s, they were one of the most abundant fish in the estuary,” says UC Davis biologist Peter Moyle, a leading expert on California’s inland fishes, including Delta smelt. “We caught them by the hundreds in sampling nets.” Those days are long gone, and last summer’s survey for juvenile smelt found only one. Moyle predicts that the species will go extinct in the wild within the next few years.

To prepare for that likelihood and institute a plan B, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) recently extended FCCL’s funding for four more years. The

effort is costly at about $2.5 million annually. “We need a lot of power to pump and cool water, and a lot of people to handle the fish,” explains FCCL director Tien-Chieh Hung. And why is the BOR investing so much in this effort?

This agency operates the Central Valley Project, which delivers Delta water to Central Valley farms and cities and is therefore one of the main causes of the smelt’s decline.

Another is the State Water Project, which also delivers Delta water to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities, and both projects get water via the Banks Pumping Plant. In what must be unintentional irony, FCCL is a mere two miles north of the pumps that marked the beginning of the end for smelt in the Delta. The pumps, which suck water from the Delta and send it south, also suck in Delta smelt and crush those unfortunate enough to get too close.

While the state installed fish-protecting screens upstream of the pumping plant in 1968, that didn’t change the fact that the pumps divert freshwater flows from the Delta, making the water there too salty and warm for smelt. Drought, of course, does the same thing. Other major threats include invasive fish that eat juvenile smelt, as well as invasive clams that eat the tiny crustaceans called copepods that are the mainstay of the smelt’s diet.

“It’s hard to be optimistic about smelt,” Moyle says. “There isn’t good habitat for them anymore.” Their sensitivity to water quality makes them the aquatic equivalent of a canary in a coal mine—as goes the Delta smelt, so goes the Delta ecosystem. And if the smelt can’t make it, prospects are dim for the Delta’s other at-risk fish, such as green sturgeon, longfin smelt, and winter-run chinook salmon.

Historically found from the point where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow into the Delta to Suisun Bay, most Delta smelt spend the majority of their lives in brackish water, where the fresh water from upstream mixes with the salt

its trailers, tanks, and pools for rearing smelt spans two acres near Byron, at the edge of the Delta.

(above) An adult Delta smelt measuring 66 millimeters shown at twice its actual size. (below) Fertilized Delta smelt eggs at the lab

with about 200,000 eggs in order to end up with 10,000 adult smelt in the captive or “refuge” population.

To boost the refuge population’s genetic diversity, the lab has a permit to collect up to 100 Delta smelt from the

René Reyes, Bureau of Reclamation

wild each year. “We compare the genetics of the wild and refuge fish to make sure we’re not too far off,” Hung says. To assess the lab-bred smelts’ chances of survival in the Delta, he also plans to see if they tolerate salinity and avoid predators as well as the wild ones.

Although similar, captive and wild smelt are not genetically identical and may also behave quite differently, so releasing the captives into the Delta— where they could breed with and alter the wild smelt—is a last resort.

Last year FCCL couldn’t find any wild smelt nearby, so instead it collected from the Sacramento River’s deepwater ship channel, which is in the northeast Delta near West Sacramento. Discovered in the 2000s, this population of smelt spend their entire lives in fresh water rather than living in brackish water as adults and returning to fresh water to spawn as those in the rest of the Delta do. And if the day does indeed come when there are no wild smelt to be found, FCCL’s backup smelt will be ready and waiting for us to share the Delta with them once again.

Dale Kolke, California Department of Water Resources

The UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Lab with

tank. They are so small that “they look like dots with tails,” Hung says. The hatchlings eat even tinier animal plankton, called rotifers, and just-hatched brine shrimp, both of which are grown on site in barrels of bubbling water. Each year the lab starts the breeding process

Dale Kolke, California Department of Water Resources

water from the ocean, but migrate to fresh water to spawn. They live for just one year, so the lab breeds the captive fish annually, in sync with their natural spawning cycle which begins in late January.

The artificial spawning process is a painstaking one. To match up the 300 pairs that researchers believe will ensure the genetic diversity essential to healthy populations, smelt handlers start with a pool of about 2,500 fish. Ellison shows me how to calm smelt in a bath of light anesthetic, inject a minuscule ID tag under their translucent skin, and snip a sliver from their tail fins. The procedure is quick and the smelt barely seem to notice.

Tail fin snips go to the UC Davis Genomic Variation Lab for DNA analysis, revealing who should mate with whom, and the ID tag lets smelt handlers find the fish chosen to parent the next generation among the 2,500 contenders. After spawning each pair by hand, handlers incubate the sticky eggs in transparent columnar tanks, which bathe them in running water that is collected from the Delta and then cleaned and cooled.

As the fish hatch, the water current carries the tiny hatchlings into a raising

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by nathaniel dolton-thornton

signs of the season

Beetlemania: All Together Now When I arrive at the narrow stacks of the UC Berkeley’s Essig Museum of Entomology, senior museum scientist Peter Oboyski has laid out a ladybug specialist’s treasure trove for us to examine: Hundreds of ladybug specimens, representing species from both hemispheres, are pinned in crowded rows to their boxes. It’s hard to believe these creatures are all

tank-like specimen from Mexico is spotless while an elongated black one from Cusco, Peru, has yellow spots and resembles a glamorized tick. But most of the specimens are from California, and to the left of the tank insect I notice a row of more familiar ladybugs from nearby Strawberry Creek. Red with thirteen spots, these represent the convergent ladybug (Hippodamia convergens), one of the Bay Area’s most conspicuous wintertime species.

I’m here to learn its story.

Convergent ladybugs—among the most common of California’s 175 native ladybug species—have overwintered in groups of as many as hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area hills, clustering together on vegetation or rocks.

Born in spring as long alligatorshaped larvae in lowland habitats—most likely along the coast or the Central Valley— adults migrate to the hills in late summer or early fall, following wind currents, prominent features in the landscape, and messaging chemicals called pheromones to overwintering sites. Groups often form in the same general site for generations, swamping logs, trees, rocks, and fallen leaves in waves of stirring red and black bodies. The insects spend the winter in mild hibernation, moving slowly and rarely eating as they wait for temperatures to warm again in late winter or early b ay n at u r e

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Sally Rae Kimmel, flickr.com/photos/sallyraekimmel

“ladybugs”—members of the nearly 6,000-species ladybird beetle family Coccinellidae. A bulky,

life cycle.

Convergent ladybugs haven’t always migrated at these times, though, Oboyski tells me when we sit down.

Most individuals once left their spring habitats in early summer, when plants dried and aphids, their primary food source, declined. But the spread of irrigated landscapes like farms, parks, and gardens has allowed more aphids, and so ladybugs, to persist in low areas through the summer. For instance, many Central Valley ladybugs migrate to the Sierra Nevada, where they eat pollen and nectar to store fat at higher elevations before gathering in the lower foothills to overwinter.

Individuals now tend to migrate later in the season to both Sierra Nevada and Bay Area hills.

A popular and now feted Bay Area location for ladybug sightseeing is along the Stream Trail in Redwood Regional Park, where local resident Jeremy Brautman maintains an elaborate “Ladybug Hotel” for the seasonal spotted wayfarers.

Built from an old cedar and redwood birdhouse with moss and reeds added on site, the structure includes a bamboo “suite,” a lichen-covered “penthouse,” and an oak-leaf “clam shell,” along with amenities such as “fern leaf yoga” and “organic bedding.”

(However, park staff strongly discourage residents from leaving such installations in parks.) Less lavishly accommodated travelers’ groups can be found throughout the Bay Area, including at Muir Woods National Monument, Mount Diablo, Pinnacles National Park, and Strawberry Canyon.

While the convergent ladybug is one of the most noticeable wintertime species, the Bay Area is home to at least a dozen ladybug species throughout the year. Native two-spotted, five-spotted, three-banded, and sinuate ladybugs can all be found here, along with the (usually

Scientists aren’t sure why convergent ladybugs huddle together during the winter, as shown here in Redwood Regional Park in February.

spring. Then, many individuals mate (others will have mated before leaving their spring habitat, but delayed reproduction until after hibernation) before dispersing to the lowlands to give birth, die, and so restart the ladybug’s annual

the lady will see you now Determining a ladybug’s gender requires an expert and a microscope, but females are often bigger than males

The number of spots on ladybugs varies by individual as well as by species

Smelly, toxic blood excreted from joints deters predators The convergent ladybug takes its name from the two converging white lines on its pronotum

Examine the pronotum to identify ladybugs

the British “lady beetle,” German Marienkäfer (“Mary’s beetle”), Norwegian marihøne (“Mary’s hen”), and American “ladybug” are all thought to refer to “Our Lady” the Virgin Mary, while the Irish bóín dé (“God’s little cow”) and Hebrew parat Moshe Rabbeinu (“Moses’ cow”) have other divine connotations.

(Because the ladybug is taxonomically a beetle, many American entomologists prefer the more accurate British name.)

In Turkey, meanwhile, the insect is known simply as ugur böcegi, or “good luck bug.”

Associations aside, the ladybug is a remarkably beneficial insect for humans.

Most ladybug species are important predators of aphids and other agricultural pests, with some species able to consume hundreds of aphids each day.

In the late 1800s, an Australian ladybug introduced to Southern California citrus groves served as an early biological control agent, and this potential for natural pest control remains a popular area of ladybug research.

Unfortunately, other introduced species—particularly the seven-spotted and multicolored Asian ladybugs—have begun to displace native ladybugs in California and throughout the United States, likely by consuming more prey and reproducing in greater numbers.

Both nonnative species are now frequently found in the Bay Area. The Cornell-based Lost Ladybug Project is

Stephanie Penn

spotless) polished, California, and Western blood-red ladybugs. The nonnative seven-spotted ladybug is also a familiar resident. While many species’ common names refer to wing markings, this trait can vary among individuals of the same species, so the best identifying feature is a distinct pattern on the smaller neck-like area called a pronotum.

The abundant nonnative multicolored Asian ladybug, for instance, can have between zero and more than 16 spots, but its yellow pronotum frequently displays a distinct black “M.” Like the convergent ladybug, this species gathers in large groups to overwinter, though it can be a pest for people when it congregates indoors.

As regular and noticeable as these massive aggregations are, scientists are still uncertain about their purpose, Oboyski says. Most ladybug species overwinter, but many do so alone or in small groups. Some scientists believe certain species gather in larger numbers simply to stay warm; others hypothesize it is for predator protection, to find mates more easily before dispersing, or some combination of the three. In general, a surprising amount is still unknown about the seemingly familiar ladybug, particularly its overwintering behavior. As the authors of the 2012 Ecology and Behaviour of the Ladybird Beetles—a book one ladybug researcher called the “ladybug Bible”—write, “Although usually a very long phase of the life cycle, diapause/dormancy [i.e. overwintering], has lately attracted much less research activity than other topics. This is unfortunate….”

Of course, humans have watched and been intrigued by ladybugs for centuries.

The ladybug’s bright red and black coloring serves to warn predators of its toxic blood, which it excretes through its joints when threatened in a process called “reflex bleeding.” But its pleasing design has also made the ladybug one of a small number of insects with almost universally positive connotations. Many cultures attach good-luck myths to the ladybug, an attitude often reflected in its common names, many of which evoke beneficent religious figures: For instance,

researching this shift by encouraging citizens across the country to send pictures of observed ladybugs to the project site (lostladybug.org), where the species are verified and their locations marked on a publicly available map.

The Bay Area currently hosts one of the highest concentrations of observations for the rare native two-spotted ladybug, another focus of the project. We can also help native ladybugs by encouraging them to visit our gardens, but buying a box of ladybugs from the local garden supply store likely won’t do the job, Oboyski tells me. These are usually convergent ladybugs harvested during hibernation, and the insects will disperse on waking. Instead, you’re better off growing plant varieties that will attract native ladybugs, he says.

Before I leave the Museum of Entomology, Oboyski pulls out one more ladybug case to show me. Inside, hundreds of convergent ladybugs from the Western United States are packed tightly together. The collection is impressive, but I know it equals only a fraction of a single aggregation that forms every winter in the hills above us.

Staring at these still specimens, I try to imagine the spectacle: hundreds of thousands of red and black splotches massing across the forest floor, blanketing logs, rocks, leaves, and everything else around them. Luckily, we can see it for ourselves every year. j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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into t h e b re ach

Evening scene looking west across a flooded section

Paddlers and ducks return to cullinan ranch

by Paul McHugh A restored tidal marsh might be described as a primal mud pie, rich and fertile enough to sprout a meringue of fresh toppings. An array of native critters is then lured to the meal, where they proceed to feed, nest, roost, and breed as in ages past.

The shoreline of San Francisco Bay’s northernmost lobe—called San Pablo Bay—has begun to dish out an ample buffet of such sites.

The result is a swath of refreshed habitat that forms a major way station for waterfowl on the Pacific Flyway in the b ay n at u r e

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near term and will provide the Bay Area with one of its last, best chances for helping wildlife adapt to climate change and sea level rise over the long term.

Cullinan Ranch, recently opened for public visitation as part of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, is a crucial link in the midst of this lush, gold-green arc of pickleweed, cordgrass, brush, and brackish water stretching from the broad estuary of the Petaluma River to the Napa River’s eastern bank.

On a bright, clear Saturday morning

of Cullinan Ranch soon after the levee had been breached, letting in the tides

in late September, three people drove out to Cullinan to savor the result of a decades-long effort to escort nature back onto tidelands where it had once reigned supreme. “Soon, this whole region will be a birding mecca,” predicted Megan Elrod, a field biologist with Point Blue Conservation Science, one of the groups that advised the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) on the Cullinan restoration. “This site is already on people’s radar. We just need the plants to take hold, the sloughs to form, and more public access points like this one.”

We prepared to launch a craft from Cullinan’s small-boat dock, a prominent feature of a new visitors’ facility that also includes a fishing deck, parking lot, and 1.4-mile-long hiking and biking route

Beth Huning, SF Bay Joint Venture

on the trail

Paul McHugh

is by kayak.

including great egrets in the foreground and white pelicans in the distance—flocked to the new Cullinan wetlands.

Tom Muehleisen

I’d tried that a week earlier, finding my way out of Cullinan via one of the intentional levee breaches that were used to flood its sprawling pond last January. I rode the ebb out into Dutchman Slough, which writhes along the northern levees of Cullinan, and down to the broad lower reach of the Napa River estuary, then south to the launch ramp in Vallejo, where I hauled out, ate lunch, and did some reading.

After the tide turned, I reversed my course to achieve a round trip of about 16 miles in some seven hours, including wait time for the tidal shift.

Besides many fine close-ups of San Pablo Bay’s resident birds which Elrod dubs, “the usual suspects”—least sandpipers, great blue herons, great egrets, and assorted ducks, gulls, wrens, and sparrows—on that outing I scored unusual sightings of a mated pair of mute swans and a glimpse of an errant Steller sea lion bull who startled me by making a loud snort as he surfaced right

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surrounding network of sloughs, marshes, and rivers

Shorebirds and waterfowl—

th e

One of the best ways to explore Cullinan and its

on

along a levee-top road. Megan and I planned to paddle out into Cullinan’s 1,200 recently sculpted and flooded acres, while Mark Dettling, an avian ecologist who also happens to be Megan’s husband, planned to drive and hike along other levee trails nearby to score his own observations with a spotting scope.

A visitor can explore this broad 14-mile-long crescent of tidal, brackish, and freshwater marshes around the northern shoreline of San Pablo Bay by either land or water. However, Cullinan—as a large tidal pond linked to sinewy sloughs—makes kayaking or canoeing a particularly inviting way to undertake your exploration.

Because it’s now linked to the Bay, water here perpetually rises or falls with the tides, which means one must take those yo-yoing water levels into account when planning an outing. Within Cullinan itself, you’re generally better off launching on a flood tide (when the water is rising) than on an ebb. That way, should you happen to get stuck in a shallow or on a mud bank, all you need do is wait a bit before you can float off.

If you happen to feel more adventurous and are able to burn a full day, you could launch at peak high tide, ride the ebb out of Cullinan and into the larger sloughs that snake through the surrounding Napa-Sonoma Marsh complex, wait out the slack tide in some pleasant location, then ride a flood back.

beside my kayak in Dutchman Slough.

For the briefer outing with Elrod, I selected from my modest fleet of watercraft a two-seat, hand-built, cedar-strip canoe, which Dettling helped me tote over to Cullinan’s new smallboat launch dock. “It’s the first time I’ve used this dock!” Elrod exclaimed. “It was installed well before they breached the levee and flooded the ranch. For months I saw it out here just sitting down on the dirt.”

Now the dock peaceably bobbed on the recently filled thousand-acre pool of beige water. We launched, and a few paddle strokes brought us abreast of a tiny island, where a roosting great egret eyed us dubiously.

“Those little islands are called ‘high-tide refugia,’” Elrod told me.

“We’re starting to see them being built in restoration sites all around the Bay. Refugia can jump-start colonization by marsh plants. As vegetation grows on them, song sparrows and common yellowthroats move in, then black-necked stilts and American avocets, and j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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Napa River. Beyond the Highway 37 bridge is the (unbreached) “future phase” section of Cullinan, with the open water of the recently breached section behind. San Pablo Bay is on the left; Dutchman Slough, to the right, snakes between Cullinan and Pond 3 and then flows into the river.

David Siervert, Airphoto Designs

restoration along the shore of San Pablo Bay—the 300 acres of the Sonoma Baylands (southwest of Sears Point)— encountered challenges establishing the tidal flows needed to form natural sloughs and receiving the sediments necessary for native marsh vegetation to take hold.

So at Cullinan Ranch, Ducks Unlimited—one of ten outfits cooperating with USFWS on the restoration—was asked to help with the design. Russ Lowgren, an engineer with DU, has eight years’ experience crafting habitat restoration in California. A big part of his job at Cullinan was protecting Highway 37, which forms the unit’s southern boundary, from the impact of erosive forces.

This was achieved by burying blocks of “geofoam” (expanded polystyrene) at the proper angle to dissipate wind and wave

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eventually black rails—which will be exciting.” The egret apparently felt so secure on his little island refuge that he didn’t even bother to take wing as we drifted by.

With every paddle stroke, it felt as though we were gliding further back in time. Road noise receded behind us while wide marsh vistas unfurled before us. There’s something about wide-open spaces dotted with wildlife that’s soothing to the soul. We were only a few miles away from the city of Vallejo, yet the distance felt far greater. We might’ve glimpsed only remnants of the vast storms of airborne waterfowl reported by pioneer George C. Yount on his trek through this region in the 1830s, but it seems clear that those remnants can now increase, making this place a tranquil refuge for humans as much as for wildlife.

When astronauts in science fiction hope to colonize a planet, they tend to begin with a process called “terra-forming”—applying measures to encourage biologic life as we know it to root on alien soil. When scientists on Earth try to restore wildlife habitat, they engage in a similar process. But in the case of tidal marshes, gaining skill at it has been a learning process. The first attempt at

Sl

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energy along the edge of the roadway.

These blocks were sealed in a special membrane to reduce potential decay from fuel spills or oil leaks.

Another key concern was exactly how much tide influx to permit. The right amount would allow the waters to drop sediment and build up natural mud banks and sloughs; too much would scour these structures and stymie the growth of native vegetation. “I decided the solution was to connect this bathtub with a straw,” Lowgren told me.

This decision means the thousand acres of water constituting the main Cullinan pond are filled and drained through just three levee breaches. For the paddler, this means two things. Currents inside the pond are negligible, so if the tide is high enough to float your boat, you’re pretty much good to go. However, currents at the breaches can grow potent, on the order of a Class II whitewater rapid. So if you plan to navigate through them, “going with the flow” is a rather important principle.

On this occasion, though, Elrod and I

Aerial view looking west from Vallejo over the

Sally Rae Kimmel, flickr.com/photos/sallyraekimmel

islands constructed in the restored wetland.

public tour of refuge facilities that was tantamount to Cullinan’s coming-out party. “You’re looking at one-fifth of the refuge staff,” he said, as he introduced himself. “Right now, we manage a total of 19,000 acres in the San Pablo refuge, 11,200 acres of which is open water at the north edge of the bay, leased to us by the State Lands Commission.” He waved an arm at the rippling expanse of gold-green vegetation and water that stretched out all around him. “There’s 9,000 other acres inside the refuge’s authorized boundary that we’d like to add, when it becomes available from willing sellers.”

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Cullinan. Just beyond is one of the “high tide refugia”

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View down the ramp of the new boat launch at

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never even neared a breach channel. We simply stroked a mile-and-a-half north and admired least sandpipers, doublecrested cormorants, and a huge raft of white pelicans. Then we swung around and faced a light breeze on our way back to the dock. Wind, by the way, should also be taken into account in this broad, flat, and open area. I’d advise paddling here only when wind speeds are predicted to be 15 mph or lower…unless arm-wrestling Aeolus happens to be your thing.

But if strong winds don’t threaten and you wish to travel more miles than we did, you can circumnavigate the entire perimeter of the flooded Cullinan unit for a full round-trip of about seven miles. Keep an eye out for that trio of levee breaches, especially during an ebb: If you get slurped out of the main pond, hours might pass before you can get back in. And how near you get to noisy Highway 37 on your return leg is, of course, entirely up to you.

Although Brubaker’s budget, like his official staff, is tiny, robust enhancements and enablers for the expansion project are readily available from a host of highly involved and motivated government agencies and conservation organizations. The latter include the aforementioned Point Blue (formerly Point Reyes Bird Observatory), Ducks Unlimited, and Sonoma Land Trust— which bought and restored the nearby Sears Point Ranch, 1,000 acres at the south end of the Lakeville Highway.

(This area was sculpted, breached, and reintroduced to tidal flows at the end of October.) The trust is also working to transfer 1,100 acres of the old Haire Ranch on Skaggs Island to the refuge, adding to the 3,300 acres of the former Skaggs navy base already included.

The former include the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), which is figuring out ways to use dredge materials scooped from shipping channels to raise and sculpt wetlands within the refuge, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which manages 15,200 acres of the Napa-Sonoma marshes between Sonoma Creek and the Napa River.

Right now, San Pablo Bay NWR is seen as a little sister to the much larger Don Edwards San Francisco Bay NWR in the South Bay. However, with predicted sea-level rise, dominance in that relationship could shift. The reason?

Don Edwards is hemmed in by communities and infrastructure, so it will prove

Russell Lowgren

As pretty as Cullinan Ranch and the surrounding preserves are now, they are slated to only improve in both size and biologic values.

Don Brubaker, manager for San Pablo Bay NWR, has been the ringmaster overseeing all the changes here for the last six years. In August, he led a Canvasback ducks, a once-abundant game species, were among the first birds to return to Cullinan after the levee breach.

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th e mak i n g—a n d savi ng — of cu l l i nan r anc h In the beginning, there was a sapphire ringed by emeralds.

in 1987, and the developer’s permits were denied by BCDC and the

surrounded by 306 square miles of green tidal wetlands, marshes

rebuild a water body for use by actual waterfowl arose.

That would be the 470 blue square miles of San Francisco Bay,

where tule elk waded, grizzly bears waddled, and waterfowl rose in

Army Corps of Engineers, the proposal fell apart, and the chance to A parallel vision with a more natural set of goals for Cullinan

dense clouds while feathered wings beat out a whispering thunder.

already existed. In 1970, Congress had approved an acquisition

was dubbed Island #1, because it was among the first considered

Refuge. The acreage within that boundary would be acquired not

Up at the Bay’s north end, in San Pablo Bay, one hunk of marsh

suitable for farming. In the 1880s, men dug out the natural sloughs, piled muck on their banks to make levees, and planted crops inside.

On part of Island #1, some 1,575 acres acquired the name Cullinan

Ranch, and it grew a salt-tolerant mix of oats and barley to supply

boundary for the creation of San Pablo Bay National Wildlife

through eminent domain, but by purchase from willing sellers. In 1991, the owners of Cullinan, unable to develop, answered to the description of willing seller.

The next 20 years were devoted to study, design, permitting,

feed to dairy ranches, as well as fuel for the literal horse-power that

and fundraising. Eventually, commitments were secured for $15

farmed, the ground subsided, dropping six feet or more below sea

organizations. On January 5, 2015, a levee was breached and a mat

pulled cargo wagons and buggies. But as these peat soils were level over the course of a century.

Although levees mostly kept bay waters out, problems with seepage

and salt intrusion still occurred. As farming grew more difficult and the Bay Area’s population swelled, a proposal was made in 1983 to

transform Cullinan into a fancy suburban housing development. It

would be named—apparently without a shred of irony or shame—

Egret Bay. That plan envisioned 8,000 homes, 60 acres of shops and stores, and 1,700 slips for yachts. But the subsided earth made this

fantasy economically unfeasible. Supplying reliable infrastructure, such

million from a mix of government agencies and conservation

of seeds and insects floated up from the old farm fields. A flock of a hundred or so canvasback ducks promptly appeared to pounce on these foodstuffs like, well, a duck on a bug. This was an encouraging sign: Canvasbacks, a highly prized game species, once constituted nearly half the waterfowl commonly present here prior to

farming. But severe declines in their numbers over the past century has made improving the count a major goal of both hunters and wildlife officials.

After the final 300 acres of Cullinan (the easternmost section)

as roadways and sewage lines, would prove prohibitively expensive.

are flooded in 2019, waterfowl here should again number in the

local environmentalists—Vallejoans for Cost-Efficient Growth—

civilization.

And there was yet another obstacle: determined opposition by

Sally Rae Kimmel, flickr.com/people/

backed up by a lawsuit filed by Save the Bay. When the suit prevailed

A father and daughter pause along Cullinan’s new levee trail to look east over the recently restored wetland.

difficult for marshes to migrate inland.

Whereas, with the notable exception of Highway 37, the marshes of San Pablo Bay have room to move, and refuge planners are already figuring out how to accommodate rising waters. At which time, San Pablo will be transformed into a major national wildlife refuge in every b ay n at u r e

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thousands just as they did prior to the arrival of European

Reintroduction of grizzly bears, however, is not contemplated.

sense of all four words. And Cullinan Ranch will form one of its most accessible jewels.

“For people who want to see wintering waterfowl and shorebirds, I’d recommend this place, definitely,” Megan Elrod told me as we packed up. “In fact, I’d like to see it added as a site for the winter shorebird census right now.”

In all, I’ve been drawn to visit Cullinan Ranch and its adjacent marshes more than a dozen times, and not always by boat: Some of the best photos I’ve taken here were scored by walking quietly and slowly along the levee trails, or lingering for a while on the viewpoints, so visiting on foot is certainly an enjoyable option. However, it’s those many long, dark sloughs, writhing off mysteriously, deep into

the marshes, that beckon me the most this winter, as the clouds of migrating birds return. That allure shall compel me to once again pore over a tide book, pick up a paddle, and go exploring.

Paul McHugh is a California outdoors writer who reported for 22 years for the San Francisco Chronicle. His most recent books are: Alcatraz: The Official Guide (Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy); and Deadlines (Lost Coast Press), a journalism and land use murder mystery set in the Bay Area. the waterbirds and shordbirds of cullinan ranch Saturday, February 27, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.

Join Bay Nature and Don Brubaker, manager for San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, and Francesca Demgen, coordinator of the Friends of San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, for a 2.5-mile bird watching walk at Cullinan Ranch.

Space is limited, registration required.

Sign up at baynature.org/field.

Miguel Vieira

Shell Ridge Open Space There are said to be nearly 40 preserves— more than 90,000 acres—cloaking Mount Diablo and its surrounding uplands, a tribute to the heroic efforts of those who love it. Shell Ridge, a 1,400-acre preserve on the west slopes, has ten trailheads that give access to all the rugged hiking you might be up for. We took the Hanna Lane Trail, a mile-long dirt fire road, and hit steep going right away, climbing 200 feet to skirt Bronco Butte and follow the ridge to Flat Top and Haystack Hill, knobs that look east toward the mountain and give a fine sense of space and wildness only a few hundred yards from the houses and roads of Walnut Creek. This side of the mountain is open terrain, sparsely wooded with blue oaks.

Rattlesnake country, so I’ve heard, but ground squirrel country for sure, also busy with acorn woodpeckers.

Mount Diablo was thrust up by the force of dynamic tectonic plates, and on Shell Ridge you feel its bones underfoot and see the rocky seams exposed in every trail cut, where it’s easy to find the shell fossils for which this park is named. The summit 10 miles away seems oddly near.

The Hanna Lane route connects to other trails for hikes of any length; on the Costanoan Trail, in just over a mile you come to the Borges Ranch, a historic district handsomely preserved to show farm life of the early 1900s. Past that, via the Briones-Diablo Trail, you could even eventually reach the summit. details: The Hanna Lane Trail entrance (on Hanna Lane; no fee) has no restrooms or water and has limited parking. Dogs are permitted, and main trails are open to bikes.[Ann Sieck]

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south bay

Santa Clara County Parks Department, Ron Horii

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Blair Randall, gardenfortheenvironment.org

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e olns e wt hheer e .t. r. a i l

Two Gardens If you walk south from Golden Gate Park into the Sunset District, row houses abut the sidewalk, tiny yards have been paved for parking, and traffic whirls by. But a half-mile out on Seventh Avenue, the tall eucalyptus of Sutro Forest loom ahead, and a cascade of vines, trees, and shrubbery crowds the sidewalk on the east side of the street.

A vine-draped arch invites you in; this is the Garden for the Environment, which since 1990 has offered free and lowcost classes and workshops on waterfrugal landscaping and food-growing in city conditions. In a half-acre space, paths loop among fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and raised beds of lettuce. It’s a teaching garden, with signs providing plant identities and a self-guided tour.

California native plants are featured, and there’s a beehive, but the bees are well occupied, so when no class is in progress it’s a comfortable place to linger.

Just south, across Warren Drive, another diminutive green space welcomes visitors: the city’s White Crane Springs Community Garden, where over 70 members grow produce and flowers organically.

Tall trees that encircle the site create a refuge from the city, though they must make growing tomatoes tricky. A grass-roofed cob shed and frequent, charming ornaments leaven utilitarian purpose, and a picnic table is furnished in case you don’t mean to wield a spade. details: Both gardens are open daily, there is parking off Warren Drive, and no restrooms; dogs not permitted. [Ann Sieck]

Sanborn County Park This 3,688-acre park outside Saratoga on the west side of the Santa Cruz Mountains offers thick forests, open meadows, hiking, camping, and even a stage where the Shady Shakespeare theater troupe performs during the summer. The park fills with families, birthday parties, and weddings on weekends, but head up any of the numerous, well-marked trails and you’re immediately enveloped in a shaded calm. Streams ripple through the forest, forming miniature waterfalls and pools where birds gather. Steller’s jays dart down from tall redwoods to take a sip, while dark-eyed juncos are common on the ground, and wild turkeys linger alongside the paved pathways.

From the park entrance, the one-mile Nature Trail is a short, easy walk with interpretive signs about the park’s plants and interesting features, such as Californiana Indians’ use of buckwheat and traces of the San Andreas Fault, which the trail follows, and where the redwood and oak trees grow at odd angles. For a brisk nine-mile hike to the top of the ridge, with an 1,800-foot elevation change, follow the 1 Peterson Trail near the 2 park entrance to the connecting Sanborn and Skyline trails. In all, 18 3 miles of trails climb into the hills or traverse the valley floor. details: From Saratoga, go two miles west on Highway 9 and make a left onto Sanborn Road. Leashed dogs permitted unless marked. Restrooms provided. [Elizabeth Rogers] 1

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identifying with

lichen

Elaine Miller Bond

How the surprising union between a fungus and an alga raises questions about the nature of identity.

In July, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill declaring the lace lichen—found along the Pacific coast and throughout the coast ranges—the state lichen. As of January 1, 2016, California will be the first state ever to designate a lichen as a state symbol.

Lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii, is easily recognized. It is pale green and dangles in strips from trees. It’s sometimes confused with Old Man’s Beard (Usnea sp.), which is also pale green and dangly. Lace lichen’s range stretches from Alaska to Baja California. It’s an important food for deer; it also serves as material for birds’ nests. I see it once, in researching this story, when naturalist Morgan Evans, a former student naturalist aide at Tilden Nature Area in the East Bay hills, removes it from her backpack and spreads it out. Evans is a pleasant and patient woman, whose true love is fungi.

Her interest in lichens is an extension of that, she says. Anyway, she found some lace lichen growing in Morgan Territory Regional Park. She figured I’d want to see it and there isn’t much growing in Tilden that she knows of.

She hands me the lichen, which feels strangely plasticine. It’s pale green—she wetted it so it wouldn’t crumble when she transported it—and dangles impressively, at least six inches long. Lace lichen can grow as long as a meter, and it has a netted structure that b ay n at u r e

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looks, to me at least, more like fishnet stockings than lace. Perhaps fishnet-stocking lichen would be a little too racy a nickname.

Before I tell you more, though, a disclaimer: It turns out lichen identity is fraught with existential issues, not least of which is that lichens are a union between two separate organisms. Basically lichens are fungi—that kingdom of non-plant, non-animal organisms—that have learned to tend algal or cyanobacteria cells like a farmer does a crop. Sometimes called a photobiont, the alga or cyanobacterium makes food for the fungus, manufacturing sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide. In return, the fungus gives the algae a place to live, and in so doing, grows its fungal threads into the bodies of the photobiont, making it easier for the fungus to tap into the nutrients its partner produces. Though photobionts may live free of their keepers—and some do in Tilden, I learn—the fungus’ survival depends on the photobiont. Of the world’s roughly 25,000 lichen species, only a couple can live as a fungus sans its partner.

But scientists have probed what happens to the two organ(above) Anna’s hummingbirds often festoon their nests with bits of lichen. (right) A fallen strand of the recently-designated state lichen, Ramalina menziesii (lace lichen) drapes across a bed of moss on the forest floor.

exploring the east bay regional parks

Richard Droker, flickr.com/photos/29750062@no6

This story is part of a series exploring the natural and cultural history and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The series is sponsored by the district, which manages 119,000 acres of public open space in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

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might not want to tote a heavy guidebook—much less a microscope—into the field. Today here in Tilden, we have a hand lens, laminated papers, and a small guidebook from the California Lichen Society, and we’re going to do our best. You can usually at least get to genus this way.

As for the lichen I am about to attempt to identify: What is identity? I have a few things in common with the fungal partner in the lichen system. For instance, not all the nutrients I absorb are due to my own digestion. Plenty of the cells in and around my body that allow me to operate aren’t my cells at all. I have many bacteria—and some fungi—in what’s called my microbiota, and they’re useful for my continued health. Take gut bacteria, for instance. Most of us don’t notice they’re doing anything until we take a round of antibiotics. Antibiotics are indiscriminate—they’ll kill our helpful bacteria along with whatever’s ailing us. Many people suffer from diarrhea as a result of their lost gut bacteria, since they suddenly can’t process food as well; worse, without our helpers around, our guts become better homes for harmful bacteria like Clostridium difficile (also known as C. diff). I do not mean to denigrate the lichen’s status as a weird compound organism; it’s just that everything is a habitat—Tilden, your neighborhood, your stomach, your own face. It gets worse: Our genes show evidence that we actually absorb the genomes of some viruses into human DNA—if a sperm or egg cell is infected, the virus is incorporated into the fetus.

Identity works only so long as you don’t look very hard at it; I have, at present, no explanation for how it functions whatsoever.

Are lichens fungus or alga? Oh, they are both, (left) The gold dust crustose lichens of the Chrysothrix genus, such as C. xanthina until it comes to the taxonshown here, are easily identified by their omy. At this point we get bright color. (above) The large purple disks down to business: They’re of this fan lichen (Peltigera venosa) contain identified by the fungus. the reproductive spores of the lichen’s A fungus that, remember, fungal partner. This specimen was found on occasionally sticks threads Mount Diablo. into its so-called partner, to more easily soak up nutrients. So, a fungus with digestive cells.

In the middle of its structure. Does this setup sound familiar? A little, right? I tell this to Evans and she laughs. “Right!” she says.

“We’re all composite organisms.”

She tucks away her lace lichen and we head out into the Tilden Nature Area to find some more. We won’t need to walk far or look very hard.

Stephen Sharnoff, Sharnoffphotos.com

Ken-ichi Ueda, inaturalist.org/people/kueda

isms when separated in a lab and grown in cultures. For instance, Schizoxylon albescens is a fungus that can occur both as a lichen and as a solo act, a group of Austrian scientists found in 2011. A genetic analysis showed that the two versions of the fungus are not separate species. Studies have also revealed that once a lichen is broken into its constituent parts in the lab, they can’t be reunited. And researchers have no idea why. Maybe it’s because lichenization—the little-understood process that binds fungal spores and photobionts to create a lichen—may depend on yet another set of organisms: bacteria. It’s possible that bacteria are essential to lichens’ existence, making lichens more like an ecosystem than just a two-party party.

Anyway, if you are feeling uneasy about identity, this is only going to get worse, as Evans tells me. “Species? That’s difficult,” she says. It’s hard to know precisely what species a lichen is without a hand lens or, in many cases, chemicals or a microscope, because what distinguishes different types of lichen are very tiny structures. Essentially, telling them apart comes down to examining the lichen’s structure by microscope; the chemicals help identify, by the color reaction, the presence or absence of chemical compounds, the signatures of various species. This necessity presents trouble for an amateur lichenologist, who

Though lichens appear varied, they mostly adhere to the same basic structure. A lichen’s body is called a thallus—as in, a b ay n at u r e

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Stephen Sharnoff, Sharnoffphotos.com

Stephen Sharnoff, Sharnoffphotos.com

thallus is to lichen as a body is to humans. Its outer surface is the cortex, where filaments of the fungus are packed densely to keep other organisms and the elements out. Below that is the photobiont layer, where the algae (or cyanobacteria, or both!) reside. And below that is the medulla—fungal filaments again; it’s not as dense here, probably to let air circulate. Some lichens have a second cortex below the medulla; others simply attach directly to the substrate, where the lichen lives. (Because lichens are really weird, and refuse to adhere to any rules, I should mention that so-called “jelly lichens” don’t have the nice layers that I set up for you. Jelly lichens are black and gooey, except when they are dry and brittle, and they have cyanobacteria as the “food-making” part. In this case, the cyanobacteria are distributed throughout the structure. Let’s not worry about them— we didn’t see them in Tilden, and they weren’t in Morgan’s flip-book of common lichens, either.)

Lichens aren’t great at forming fossils, so it’s hard to know their history. The oldest certain lichen fossil is from the Early Devonian period, 400 million years ago, and was found near Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1995. Across geographies and epochs, most lichens like to grow on stable surfaces they can adhere to—wood, rocks, cement. There are three major types of lichen: crusty (crustose), leaflike (foliose), and shrubby or hairlike (fruticose). Evans and I will see all three in the Tilden Nature Area.

Lichens can be thought of as air quality indicators. They easily suck up moisture and all the pollutants it carries, in particular nitrogen. Though nitrogen is a fertilizer, it’s also a pollutant, and some species love it, others not so much. The composition of a lichen community shifts in response to pollution levels. For example, nitrogen-loving lichens like Xanthoria candeleria have been spotted recently and newly in Yosemite, thanks to pollution coming from Central Valley agriculture.

Lichen plots all over the West Coast are observed by the U.S.

(left) Ramalina, or the strap lichens, are among the most common lichens in the state. R. farinacea shown here. (right) Bright orange lichens of the Xanthoria genus are, for good reason, called sunburst lichen. X. polycarpa shown here.

Department of Agriculture for air quality and climate data. A 2008 USDA report specifically flagged the Bay Area for having “small hot spots of poor air quality,” based on its lichens. The report also indicated that the San Francisco Bay Area is the second-worst hot spot in the Central Valley monitoring area (right behind the San Joaquin Valley); 8 to 9 kilograms of nitrogen (per hectare per year) are deposited through rain and runoff in the Bay every year; the nitrogen critical load for lichens is 3.1 kg/ha/yr. Lichen communities in zones like this tend toward the bright orange Xanthoria, the sunburst lichens, and other nitrogen-friendly types.

Sure enough, Evans and I do find some Xanthoria polycarpa—the pincushion sunburst lichen, which looks like you’d imagine—on our hike, growing on a buckeye tree right next to the Environmental Education Center. Farther on we see what may be a Ramalina lichen of indeterminate species, which looks like miniature green threads sprouting bushily from a tree branch.

It’s a shrubby lichen, which is considered “advanced” in lichen terms, Evans tells me. Perhaps you are now wondering, “What does ‘advanced’ mean to a lichen, which is not even capable of complaining about the weather?” Right, so: Lichens are 400 hundred million years old, and their history is not super clear, for the fossil-related reasons we discussed earlier.

However! The shrubby lichens, these beardy-looking tangles, are structurally more complex from an architectural perspective and are therefore likely latecomers, evolutionarily speaking.

The Ramalina genus, of course, contains the lace lichen, as well as a few other lichens we see on our hike: Ramalina farinacea, also green, also bushy, but with little green nodules dotting the strands. (Its common name is dotted ramalina.) These bushy

As of January 2016, California will be the first state with an official state lichen.

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Stephen Sharnoff, Sharnoffphotos.com

lichens grow most quickly, Evans says. I strongly suspect they also make the best imitation ZZ Top beards for those of us who cannot grow them; they are nicknamed the strap lichens, but I prefer to think of them as the chin-strap lichens.

Farther on: Chrysothrix xanthina, a.k.a sulphur dust lichen, a common bright-yellow crusty lichen that grows on tree bark. Crustose lichens are considered the most primitive form of the composite.

They’re also known for creating soil: They’re the first colonizers of bare rock and cause the rocks to weather more quickly.

Most of the lichens we see on our walk are on trees, but then we get to an outcropping of blueschist, a relatively rare metamorphic rock. “You’ve got everything on these rocks,” Evans says, clearly delighted. And indeed, there are plenty of lichens growing—from Dimelaena radiata, a pale-white crustose lichen that looks remarkably like dried bird poop until examined with the hand lens, to Cladonia macilenta, a charming green lichen with little red packets on top. Those are the reproductive bodies, Evans says.

Well, reproduction. There’s the easy way to reproduce: dry lichen. Dry lichen crumbles, bits break off, it gets dispersed. The bits attach to a new surface and life carries on. Lichen can also reproduce sexually, but it’s oddly complicated. Only the fungus reproduces within the lichen. The photobiont can’t, thanks to some kind of suppression brought on by the fungus. Once the

fungus reproduces, it creates fungal spores from the disks, cups, bumps, dots, and squiggles that we all can see covering the thallus. Those microscopic fungal spores, let loose in the world, must find a new photobiont in order to survive. If this seems vague to you, that’s because no one has ever seen sexual reproduction in lichens. As discussed earlier, no one has observed lichenization in a lab, and given that a very powerful microscope is needed to see a fungal spore, we’ll never observe it in nature.

The question of what constitutes an individual lichen, and what it is for a “lichen” to reproduce, actually gets even more vexing and existential. For instance: say two species of fungi both manage to capture free-living algae from the environment.

The two fungal species may weave into a single structure, but remain genetically distinct while partnering with the algae.

And because it’s lichen we’re talking about, there’s one more complicating factor. Some mycobionts—that’s the fungus part of the lichen—are just badly behaved. Take Diploschistes muscorum, for instance: It’s a parasitic lichen, and it starts its development on a Cladonia lichen, gradually replacing Cladonia filaments by growing over them and sucking energy from their algal partner, Trebouxia irregularis. At some point, though, the takeover is complete and Trebouxia irregularis is replaced by our Diploschistes’s preferred algal partner, Trebouxia showmannii. At that point, Diploschistes leaves off with the parasitism and behaves like any other lichen.

This is the lichen world’s version of Theseus’s paradox: Is an object that has had every part removed and replaced— as happened with the rotting boards of Theseus’s ship, per Plutarch—the same object? Philosopher Heraclitus would say you can’t step in the same river twice, so these are different lichens; Aristotle would suggest that since the “what-it-is” of the thing has not changed, it’s the same lichen. Take the headache further: Let’s talk people. Most of the cells in your body—save some nerve cells—turn over in the course of your lifetime. Are you still the same person? Yes, right? But some people have absorbed a twin in the womb—we know this because they carry the absorbed twin’s genetic material. (If you have ever known a person who has different-colored eyes that aren’t the result of an injury, they have genetic material from an entirely separate human.) So: Are these people one organism or two? One, right?

But there’s a whole separate genetic entity in there, just as Diploschistes is residing in Cladonia—though, obviously, the absorbed fetal twin doesn’t eventually take over every cell. But how do you tell when the lichen is Diplochistes and when it’s Cladonia? When is the exact moment of change?

So our identifications are somewhat inexact. Better not to think too hard about it.

We walk on a bridge over the spillway from Jewel Lake, which is heartbreakingly low. Even here, we see granular, powdery-looking black packets—some kind of lichen, maybe—growCladonia species come in various shapes, but many have erect stalks. The stalks of the charming lipstick powder horn (C. macilenta) measure from roughly one third to more than an inch tall.

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Ken-ichi Ueda, inaturalist.org/people/kueda

(above) Xanthoria tenax, another of the sunburst lichens, is commonly found on bark, especially in areas with fog. (right) Ramalina leptocarpha also often grows on the

ing on the wooden footbridge.

Which is why, when I take my nightly stroll around Lake Merritt after saying my farewells to Evans, I suddenly notice how naked the trees look. It’s not that there aren’t lichens there—I’ve seen crusty ones. But that’s about it. Most of the lichens I find are Xanthoria tenax. When they’re wet, as the lichens around the lake are, they form little rosettes with yellow-orange surfaces. This species is common in areas with fog, but it’s also a nitrogen lover. And it’s known for handling pollution well. It frustrates and saddens me that our humbler parks are relatively barren of the weird dangling nonsense.

Before I left Tilden, Evans gave me a sample of a lichen we couldn’t quite identify. It’s green and bushy, with multiple flat strips growing from a vase-shaped center. Little cuplike nodules grow from the strips, and there’s brown-black spotting on the strips, which continue branching. I thought it looked familiar, I told Evans; I had a name on the tip of my tongue.

Once I’m home, this lichen immediately attracts the attention of my six-month-old kitten. She fishes it out of my bag and is about to begin seriously gnawing on it—whatever it is— when I rescue it and put it atop my bookshelf, out of her reach.

And then I forget about it for a week.

When I remember I have a lichen sample on my bookshelf, I take it down. It’s hard and feels delicate—pale green. Possibly I have killed it. Then I remember how they dry and crumble and I run some tap water over it, holding it in the palm of my hand.

The damndest thing happens: The lichen begins to move.

The color changes, becoming a darker green—the photobiont coming back to life!—and the lichen itself sort of uncrumples.

It is extremely creepy to feel the lichen move; I hadn’t expected it. Besides which—okay, I know lichens aren’t plants, exactly, but they are certainly plantlike, and how often do you expect movement from plants? I expect it about never, except in the case of carnivorous plants.

I successfully do not drop the lichen in my astonishment, though it’s a near thing. I’m beginning to feel bad for it: chewed on by a cat, dried out, put in a city environment with too many cars and too much air pollution. Then I notice the little cuplike structures on it seem to have grown in places—the lichen

Stephen Sharnoff, Sharnoffphotos.com

bark of broadleaf trees.

has been busy, it seems. It still looks familiar, and when I match it up with photos I see why. It’s probably a Ramalina, with flat strands branching from its base. I gently replace it on my bookshelf. That feels almost right. The bookshelf, of course, was once a tree, and so too were the books on it. They are not trees now, of course. (Unless they are: the genetic material did not change between tree and bookshelf, after all. Though I suppose the wood is now dead, and cured, and changed into something else entirely, with a wholly separate function.) I wonder how long the lichen will be able to enjoy its new habitat, the remodeled forest I keep in my house.

Elizabeth Lopatto and her cat run the science desk at The Verge.

To learn more about lichens, check out the resources and outings available through the California Lichen Society, californialichens.org. lichen walk on mount vision Saturday, February 20, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

Join Bay Nature and Shelly Benson, president of the California Lichen Society, for a lichen excursion on Mount Vision in Point Reyes National Seashore. The pace will be leisurely, with a bit of up and down hill. Space is limited, registration required. Sign up at baynature.org/field

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Dave Strauss, dscomposition.com

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L o b o s C r e e k t r a i l h e a d in the Presidio looks wild. Flushed orange monkey flower, sage, and coyote bush spill over re-created sand dunes. Nearby, the creek empties into the ocean. But close your eyes. A water truck pulls up to a stop sign with a mechanical whine. Car engines growl, foghorns moan, a distant airplane whirs. The noise, which never stops even though it’s barely 7 a.m., makes it clear you’re in the middle of the city.

In the parking lot, a white-crowned sparrow perches at the top of an evergreen tree next to a pickup truck and sings, launching a quick patter: whistle, buzz, two-part trill, and a scattering of notes. It’s music familiar to city dwellers, even if they couldn’t name it. The song is key to the white crown’s survival, helping him attract a mate and defend the territory around his nest, warning off other males with his vocal vigor. But the notes are almost drowned out as a bus sighs to a halt. Thanks to recent restoration efforts, the bird is surrounded by plants, such as lupine, that evolved here over centuries, along with the sparrow.

But there is no restoring the silence, and the noise grows year by year. What will it take for white crowns like this one to survive in this new soundscape? What will it take to be heard?

Down the boardwalk, David Luther, a quiet-voiced, rustyhaired biologist from George Mason University in Virginia, is trying to find out.

“In the past ten years or so, there has been mounting evidence of how human noise is affecting these birds,” says Luther. Not just birds, he adds, but other animals, too. Studies in the developing field of “acoustic ecology” show whales, crickets, and

The Bay Area’s white-crowned sparrows have their own dialects, but their environment is changing and so are their songs.

By Kim Todd

frogs altering their behavior in response to man-made sounds.

While some flee the cacophony, others adjust their internal clocks. Along a river near the Madrid airport, nightingales and European goldfinches sing earlier in the morning before the roar of the planes starts up. In Sheffield, England, robin redbreasts in noise-cluttered areas have started to sing at night. The whole “dawn chorus” has moved away from dawn. And others, like the white-crowned sparrows, are changing their tunes.

Bay Area white-crowned sparrows are famous in ornithological circles for their flexible songs. Like many songbirds, white crowns develop dialects specific to certain areas, the way a California drawl in Humboldt County differs from one in Los Angeles. But their dialects are so distinct, the boundaries so sharp, they have become a subject of choice for researchers studying song learning and evolution. As early as the 1960s, researchers found that San Francisco resident white crowns sound markedly different from those in Marin, just a few miles away. In the East Bay, white crowns in Tilden Park sang different songs than those in Richmond or ones that lived by the Bancroft Library, replacing a trill with a buzz, or swapping out a jumble of whistles. Scientists charted ten dialects in parts of the Bay Area and tracked patterns shifting as a bird became bilingual or a migrant singing a new variation passed through.

But now a new pattern is being carved out. As Luther props up a wooden sparrow on a stick near a saddle between sand dunes, at a spot where a male guards a nest, he is taking 50 years of white-crowned sparrow studies in a fresh direction, gauging the impact of the increasingly noisy city on bird songs. j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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ate urban canyons filled with echoes. In Nova Scotia, American tree swallow young exposed to high levels of noise begged less at the sound of a parent arriving at the nest. Perhaps because they couldn’t hear it. The youngest birds rely most heavily on sound, as their eyes don’t open for several days. And humans are not immune. People living with constant noise have increased levels of stress hormones and risk of heart attacks.

Many birds vanish from areas as noise increases, including the Pacific wren and Swainson’s thrush. Those that sing at lower frequencies, or rely on sound to catch their prey, or nest in cavities seem particularly hard hit. Others, like house sparrows and crows, thrive in city life. The white-crowned sparrow and species like it seem to be occupying territory in between—not exactly thriving in the city, but not disappearing either. They are adapting, possibly evolving. Feeling around for a way to somehow hold on.

(Clockwise from above) Biologists David

brought Bay Area white-crowned sparrow communication to the world’s attention was an ornithologist originally from Hong Kong and Macau named Luis Baptista. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, Baptista began recording white-crowned sparrows near where he lived and worked: the California Academy of Sciences, Lake Merced, Union Square, the Berkeley Marina.

They made ideal study subjects, being plentiful and not particularly shy. Unlike migratory populations of the same species, many Bay Area white crowns stay year-round. In a series of articles about California birds, Baptista described this resident variety, Zonotrichia leucophrys nuttalli, as a “bird of the fog belt.”

Hopping through the grass, searching for seeds or a spider to give the young a burst of protein, it nests on the ground, or a bit higher in a shrub. It breeds in March, raising young through the summer. By the following spring, the young males have learned the songs they need to seek mates themselves.

Over the years, it became clear to Baptista that birds from different neighborhoods had developed unique dialects within

Sebastian Kennerknech, pumapix.com (3)

There’s no doubt they are changing. Luther and his colleagues have documented that these Presidio birds have clearly shifted to a dialect more audible above the urban din. And they sing even that dialect at a higher minimum frequency than in past decades, likely in an effort to rise above the low-frequency rumble of cars.

Now the researchers want to understand how the birds made that change, and more important, at what cost, catching a glimpse of the future of the song, and the bird, and the nature of the city.

“What are the potentially evolutionary effects?” he asks, setting up a speaker in the male’s territory. He’s preparing to play a

Luther and Kate Gentry record whitecrowned sparrow songs and calls at the Lobos Creek dunes in the Presidio.

Luther measures the volume of sounds in the environment, including bird songs, and observes how birds respond to the presence of a decoy sparrow.

rival’s song, either a traditional one or one at an even higher minimum frequency, and take notes on the white crown’s response. “Do the birds care, and how do they care?”

Luther sits in the dirt, presses Play, and waits. as the urban footprint expands, scientists are asking how cities are reshaping nature.

Peregrine falcons nest in skyscrapers. Coyotes dodge cars in downtown Chicago. Studies have shown that city shrews in Minnesota have larger brains than their rural counterparts, that city song sparrows are more aggressive, that white-footed mice in New York contain genetic mutations not present outside the city.

Increased noise is one of the most prominent and damaging effects of urbanization: Car alarms screech and buildings cre-

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The man who

Luis Baptista carried his bulky audio-recording gear to sites around the Bay Area in pursuit of white-crowned sparrow songs. The academy has

California Academy of Sciences (2)

archived his many field notes, including these from 1990.

the simple pattern of whistles and trills. In 1981, he wrote to birdsong expert Peter Marler: “In San Francisco, for instance, I’ve found pockets of birds with funny endings. The birds in front of the academy have different introductions than the ones in the back. I visited Alcatraz Island last week; the dialect there is almost identical to that which I recorded at Fort Baker (Marin County), except that Alcatraz birds have developed a peculiar ‘terminal flourish.’”

Baptista had a notably keen ear. In addition to speaking five languages, he was able to whistle the songs of individual sparrows. When his recordings were translated into spectrograms (pictures of sound), though, it was easy for even a novice to see that populations had distinct dialects, marking a Treasure Island bird from a Richmond dweller. He labeled the variations: the Lake Merced dialect; the Presidio dialect; the San Francisco dialect, emanating from the city’s noisy core; and so on. He considered many reasons for these variations—a mishearing that catches on because of isolation or an advertisement that a male is local to and fit for a specific meadow or plot of trees. He became fascinated with the “cultural evolution” of song and determined, among other things, that male birds most often learned the song not of their fathers, but of their rivals.

Sometimes, he noted, they would even pick up a different species’ tune to do battle, and he recorded white crowns singing the songs of a Lincoln’s sparrow and a strawberry finch.

The sight of Baptista lugging around his huge tape recorder and microphone was soon a familiar one to local birdwatchers and park rangers. Newspapers and magazines fed off his enthusiasm and charisma, referring to him as “Birdman Extraordinaire,” “The Sparrow Man of Golden Gate Park,” “The Man Who Speaks Sparrow,” and “Maestro of the Bird

Symphony.” A colleague told The New York Times that Baptista was “the Henry Higgins of the bird world.”

Over the course of his career, he produced more than 120 scientific papers, coauthored The Life of Birds with J.C. Welty, and served as Associate Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. This reputation was one of the reasons that Luther, in the late 1990s, not long out of college, just back from the Amazon and casting about for a project, wrote to Baptista and asked if he needed help. He did.

Together they recorded birds at the Presidio to see if they were singing the same songs their ancestors had when Baptista put them on tape in 1969-70 and 1990. In the 1970s, Baptista noticed the San Francisco dialect making inroads into the Presidio, and now Baptista suspected the Presidio dialect might be going extinct.

Luther recalls that working with Baptista was as exciting as he’d hoped. “The guy had so much energy, unbounded energy. We’d be talking about something, then all of a sudden he’d just jump up on the table… He would imitate some of the different dialects, and then he’d be waving his arms like he had wings.” Then, Luther says, Baptista would sit back down and calmly suggest they conduct a statistical analysis.

Baptista’s death from a heart attack at 58 in 2000 took everyone by surprise. Luther had been with him just the day before.

Baptista had been full of suggestions and plans, handing Luther a manuscript with 30 years of his white-crowned sparrow work and suggesting Luther could use the references, if he needed.

But when Baptista died, Luther left to get his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shelving the research and the white-crowned sparrow recordings, unsure of what use they would be now.

Several years later, another young researcher, Elizabeth Derryberry, found herself curious about change in bird songs over time. How and why do calls alter? Would a significantly new song result in evolution as populations became acoustically isolated from one another? To find out, she needed historical recordings to compare with those she hoped to gather. Baptista’s legendary decades of data on white-crowned sparrows seemed perfect, but where were the songs? The Borror Laboratory of Sound in Ohio didn’t have them. Neither did the Macaulay Library at Cornell. Finally, Peter Marler suggested she try the j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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Golden   Gate Park 

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HISTORIC SAN FRANCISCO DIALECT (1969)

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Scattered throughout the city’s streets and parks, the SF dialect was originally sung at a lower minimum frequency than it is today.

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Over decades, the SF dialect completely replaced the other two dialects, and today is sung at a higher minimum frequency than in the past, likely due to noise pollution.

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HISTORIC LAKE MERCED DIALECT (1969) This dialect began to wane in the 2000s and is all but extinct today.

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Each dot represents a territory where an individual male was recorded. Today white-crowned sparrows are found primarily in parks.

map by molly roy, mroycartography.com; bird illustrations by valerie hamill, vhamill.com

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California Academy of Sciences, and hurry, because the old the extinction of the Presidio dialect, but the fact that the diabuilding was set to be torn down. lect that outcompeted all the others—the San Francisco—had the highest minimum frequency and was least likely to be lost In 2003, the stately facilities of the academy in Golden in traffic noise.

Gate Park were being dismantled, with exhibits from penguins Since the time Baptista charted the birds, San Francisco to sea bass and archival insects moved to a temporary site in had shifted. MP3 players replaced eight-track tapes. The Loma downtown San Francisco while a shiny new LEED-certified facility was to be erected in its place. As Derryberry walked into Prieta earthquake changed traffic patterns. People came for the chaos, the iconic Foucault pendulum was coming down. dot-com riches rather than the Summer of Love. More cars Everyone was busy packing, but Douglas Long, collections mancrawled across the Golden Gate Bridge; the city grew measurager for the Department ably louder. Luther and of Ornithology and Derryberry documented Mammalogy, said she the increase in noise in we d on’t often get to see how could peek into Baptista’s a paper for the journal o t h e r s p e c i e s ca rv e u p t h e office and see what she Animal Behavior, where they l a n d s ca p e . b u t t h e r e , i n t h e could find. showed that birds sang the d i g i ta l r e c o r d e r , w e r e She was surprised he still San Francisco dialect at a b o u n da r i e s a n d b o r d e r l a n d s , had an office, three years higher minimum frequency m a p s o f t h e c h a n g i n g c i t y. after his death. But there it than when Baptista had was: an unfinished manuscript on the desk. The clutter of recordrecorded them in the 1970s. ing devices and field journals. Old reel-to-reel tapes exposed to the We don’t often get to see how other species carve up the sun, causing Derryberry to worry they would disintegrate, if they landscape. But there, in the digital recorder, were boundaries hadn’t already. “His desk was just like it was when he died,” she and borderlands, maps of the changing city. says.

N o w L u t h e r and Derryberry, who became friends in a Digging through drawers and boxes, she found recordings graduate school animal communication class, have joined forces that had been converted to digital audiotapes (DAT). She called her adviser and crowed, “I found them.” with the support of a National Science Foundation grant to He replied, “Get them all.” delve deeper. For three summers, starting in 2014, they and their Less obsolete than the reel-to-reels, DAT was still hard to graduate students are exploring sites around San Francisco, access. Fortunately, with the help of San Francisco’s ample learning more about Baptista’s birds. supply of audio engineers, Derryberry was able to listen to the “It’s amazing how things come full circle,” Luther says. recordings, convert them, and begin unraveling the mystery of While Luther watches sparrows attack his speaker in the shifting birdsong. field, Derryberry conducts complementary experiments in a lab She compared Baptista’s 1979 recordings of male whiteat Tulane University. Recently, her graduate students captured crowned sparrows singing at Tioga Pass, just outside Yosemite three- to four-day-old white-crowned chicks from San Francisco National Park, to recordings she made there herself in 2003. neighborhoods and whisked them in a van to New Orleans, When she played the newer songs to females in cages, they driving only at night (the baby birds wouldn’t eat in a moving crouched and shivered their wings, indicating they were ready vehicle), staying at motels that allowed pets during the day, and to mate, almost twice as often as when she played the historical feeding them constantly. songs. Free-flying males at Tioga Pass responded more aggres“It’s probably the most involved experiment I have ever done, sively to the current songs than to Baptista’s recordings. The birds and stressful,” Derryberry says. had a marked preference for contemporary tunes, demonstrating As the male chicks learn to sing, Derryberry and her cohorts the way a song’s evolution might create a genetic barrier between populations that would eventually produce new species.

Meanwhile, Ph.D. completed, Luther finally returned to the San Francisco recordings and discovered that, as Baptista had predicted, no one sang the Presidio dialect anymore. He eventually published the work in a paper coauthored with Baptista, but framed it in a way his mentor hadn’t intended, not just looking at White-crowned sparrows can be spotted low to the ground in scrubby or open habitats throughout the Bay Area.

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Hear the white-crowned sparrow sing! Listen to different Bay Area white-crowned sparrow dialects and learn about some of the quirky individual birds the researchers have come to know. Visit baynature.org/extra.

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Jennifer N. Phillips

will play them high-frequency songs and low-frequency songs along with recordings of urban noise. Will the birds copy the more traditional songs—the low ones—or the songs that are easier to hear—the high ones?

It turns out that raising the minimum frequency, for these birds, may come at a cost. An experiment with great tits in the Netherlands found that females still prefer the low-frequency version, the one not upshifted out of the range of traffic. Males who spent more time singing at higher frequencies are more likely to be cuckolded. So there’s an apparent choice: Be macho or be heard.

Derryberry and Luther aim to see if the white-crowned sparrows in the Presidio face the same choice, if there might be something maladaptive about the new song. She sums up the fundamental question this way. “Is there a trade-off ?” she asks.

“Are urban males less sexy?”

Some animals have clearly evolved to live near humans, making changes on the level of genes and not just malleable behavior, separating from their more rural ancestors into new, urban species. Not just pets, like dogs, but creatures like the house sparrow, Passer domesticus, a bird that is willing to nest in gutters and parking garages and perch on cafe tables to glean muffin crumbs. Fossil evidence shows house sparrow bones in a cave near Bethlehem, dating from 400,000 years ago, a spot frequented by early humans.

House sparrows thrive not just near people, but in cities specifically. As early as 1869, the article “A Chirp about Sparrows” in the New Monthly Magazine mentions that “the London sparrow is one of the institutions of the great metropolis” and adds that those that “be London born and bred” are particularly pert and voracious. Many observers mention that their sooty, smoky color blends in with the dirty air. They, like pigeons, crows, and starlings, seem framed for city living.

White-crowned sparrows appear to be adapting and evolving in similar ways. Territories in the city are smaller. Comparing plumage with study specimens at the California Academy of Sciences and UC Berkeley, Luther and Derryberry found that coloration on the back of urban white-crowned sparrows is darker, a trait present in many city bird species. No one is sure why, though a recent study suggests the darker feathers store toxic metals, keeping them out of the birds’ bodies and protecting them from the toxin’s effects.

This aspect of Derryberry and Luther’s work, the potential for rapid evolution to a city bird, is the next frontier of urban ecology research, according to John Marzluff, a University of Washington professor and author of the book Subirdia, about the rich avian life—not just house sparrows and pigeons—flourishing in the suburbs. And it makes him somewhat optimistic.

He doesn’t doubt some species will suffer, but he thinks

A white-crowned sparrow that researchers have dubbed Battery West male 1 defends his territory near the Golden Gate Bridge against a tape-recorded song.

some others may make it, even through the trials of climate change. “If birds are able to adapt in the course of decades to the most inhospitable habitat, where we live,” he says, “it’s hopeful they might be able to handle the other challenges as well.”

The rebuilt California Academy of Sciences is a gleaming monument to contemporary natural history, with a four-story indoor rain forest, a glass room where scientists at work are on display, a cafe featuring platters of local cheeses. Upstairs in the Baptista archives, dozens of boxes trace his interests, from his first notes on bird dialects to feathers bird-lovers mailed him for identification, plans to document a disappearing human dialect from his home island of Macau, and ideas for one of his last talks, about ties between birdsong and music. He includes examples of Mozart composing “A Musical Joke” in imitation of a starling and quail calls in a Beethoven symphony.

In the boxes, letters on embossed letterhead and typed in duplicate give way to Xeroxes, then printouts of emails. The technology changed, just like the recordings, and the museum exhibits, and the birdsongs. But constant through all these details and formats, from species to species, through space and time, is the content of the message: “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”

Kim Todd’s essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Sierra, and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. Her most recent book is Sparrow.

Support for this article was provided by the March Conservation Fund of San Francisco. Ivan Samuels of MCF formerly studied white-crowned sparrows for Luis Baptista in Golden Gate Park.

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Troubling ocean conditions have challenged scientists.

Is a silent killer

by Brendan Buhler

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Early one July morning, a boat left Sausalito looking for evidence of a silent killer from the depths of the sea that might be coming into San Francisco Bay. The research vessel Mussel Point had a crew of three: a technician, a researcher, and a captain— a deeply tanned and weather-beaten man of the sea who spent the early part of this voyage half-watching the Tour de France on his iPad while the scientists drank coffee. The morning light played across the unruffled waters of the Bay in that sparkly Thomas Kinkade sort of way that makes you wonder if nature has any taste at all.

The expedition by a team from UC Davis’ Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory was to be some of the last physical labor of more than two years and more than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of science —all of it being conducted, nervously, during some of the strangest conditions ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean. This was the part that gets buried in journal articles under the heading of “Methods,” but actually consumes most of the money and effort. The RV Mussel Point was out looking for five buoys.

Each buoy is anchored to the Bay floor by 200 pounds of heavy steel chain links and a nylon rope. Midway along this rope is a subsurface float to keep the line taut. Also along this rope is the whole point of this contraption, sensors that repeatedly measure and store the water’s temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen content. The sensor

Lech Naumovich Photography, lechphoto.com

entering the Bay? package will sit in the water, tracking the killer’s movements and lethality. The sensors are tightly secured to the rope. At the very end of the rope is a bright orange hard plastic float the size of a beach ball that is topped with a 10-foot-high aluminum mast, which is itself topped with a reflector panel. It should be very easy to see.

The first buoy to be retrieved is located off of Tiburon.

At least, that’s where they left it. Plotted it with GPS and everything. It is, alas, not to be seen.

The technician, David Dann, says they tried to place the buoy out of everybody’s way, but the Bay is a busy place and you never know when a boat’s going to run over a buoy and cut it loose. Dann says he hopes they don’t have to come back for the sensor with scuba gear. The Bay is a turbid murk with near-zero visibility, heaped with trash and spider-webbed with pipes. It’s not, he says, the safest place to dive.

The Tiburon buoy abandoned for now, the Mussel Point motored off to the next location, just off Potrero Point in San Francisco, where, any minute now, they should find the next buoy. Any minute now. Right around here.

Nope.

The researcher who built these buoys, Matt Robart, says the current is really ripping along. He put a lot of slack into the mooring line to keep the buoys at the surface of the water, but maybe not enough. He shrugs. With the j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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The killer they hope to find with these buoys is a pulse of water from the ocean’s depths called an upwelling, and it makes for a strange villain, says John Largier, a professor of coastal oceanography at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Lab, who leads this team and is the principal investigator of what the upwelling means for the San Francisco Bay. We sit at the eastern boundary of the North Pacific Gyre, a great clockwise swirling of the ocean from the Philippines to Japan to southern British Columbia to the tip of Baja California.

Our coastal slice of this southward-flowing water is called, straightforwardly enough, the California Current. Every year, through the spring and summer, a northerly wind blows down the west coast of North America. As it blows, the frictional force of the wind tugs at the surface of the ocean, pushing it south, while the rotation of the earth creates the Coriolis effect, turning the water clockwise and pushing it off to the current’s right as it heads down the coast. Because we are on the west coast, that means the surface water is being pushed offshore. That water has to be replaced, and it is pulled up from the depths below the continental shelf. This is the phenomenon called upwelling, and it occurs from north of Oregon to south of Baja California. The water that it brings up from the depths is colder, saltier, lower in oxygen, and richer in nutrients from decomposed plant and animal life than the water on the surface.

And mostly, the upwelling is pretty great. All those nutrients from below create a great feast of phytoplankton, the base of a food web that feeds zooplankton, bait fish, predatory fish, porpoises, whales, sharks, seabirds—“it’s like the Serengeti Plain out there, a wonderful grassland that’s fertilized by the upwelling, and these grasslands are grazed on by all sorts of animals, Bodega Marine Lab research associate Matt Robart watches for signs of a research buoy near San Francisco’s Central Basin.

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except the animals happen to be little half-inch zooplankton,” Largier says. But the zooplankton are eaten by larger fish, birds, and mammals. For humans, the upwelling supports commercial and sport fisheries, whale watching, and the cool waters and fogs that give coastal California such a moderate summer climate. At least, usually it does.

For the last two years the Pacific Ocean has been in a state that no one has ever seen it in before. It is behaving very weirdly, with large numbers of whales feeding right off the Golden Gate and algal blooms spreading, and people like Largier wondering how far that weirdness might go. Might it go all the way into the Bay? When we think of the Bay, we don’t really think of it as part of the ocean. We kind of realize it’s connected to the ocean when a whale gets lost in it or we notice a huge container ship, but we don’t usually think about the water itself as linked with the ocean. Usually, we think about the water in the Bay in terms of the water that comes downriver out of the Delta. Is there runoff pollution? How much was diverted? Whither the smelt?

That sort of thing. After all, there are sensors measuring water quality every few miles throughout what scientists refer to as the “Bay-Delta system.” But there is no one measuring what comes in from the ocean—even though, until you get to the Carquinez Strait, the Bay is mostly seawater with a dab of freshwater thrown in.

When Largier started looking at what he calls the “ocean watershed,” it seemed like the problem would just be in understanding how the ocean works, and then how it interacts with the Bay. And then things outside the Golden Gate started changing, and the problem became much greater—and much more urgent.

The threat of the killer became far more serious. Why? Well, first it helps to know a little about how the ocean ought to work.

The vast majority of life in the ocean lives in the warm water near the surface, in the euphotic zone, so called because only here is the water bright with sunlight. Where there’s light, there’s photosynthesis, meaning all those one-celled phytoplankton that feed the zooplankton that feed the little fish that feed the bigger fish that feed the seals that feed the sharks. The phytoplankton and the wind churning the surface of the water are also saturating this top layer with oxygen. Of course, everything that lives

Eric Simons

price of fuel being what it is, every hour running the Mussel Point costs $249.

“Yeah, we just burned about 400 bucks looking for those moorings,” Robart says.

The next spot is at Mile Rock, outside of the Golden Gate and there, at last, is a buoy. They snag it and attach it to the boat’s winch. As they haul it aboard, the mooring line is absolutely filthy with life, so much so that Robart has to slough it off before it reaches the spool, depositing upon the deck big, briny, snot-colored clumps of writhing little worms.

The captain, Steven Neil, looks on and says, “You could make a helluva burger out of that.”

Robart says, “Some would call that a delicacy.”

“That’s a big pile of shit,” Neil says.

The little wrigglers are Caprellids, better known as skeleton shrimp. They latch onto anything in the ocean—grasses, seaweed, rockfish, buoy moorings—and wait with their gnathopods poised to snatch any smaller creature that passes by. Could these be the tasty and sustainable protein of the future?

“Nah,” Robart says. “Mostly shell. I ate one one time—you gotta try it, right? All crunch.”

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also dies and, when you die in the ocean, you sink. As all these carcasses fall out of the euphotic zone, they’re being decomposed by aerobic bacteria that are inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. “It’s a moving compost heap,” Largier says.

Below the bright and vibrant layer of life and light, there’s a layer in the ocean that’s darker, colder, full of nutrients and lower in oxygen. (It’s also more acidic, thanks to that carbon dioxide, but that’s an entirely different giant problem.)

Over the last few decades this cold, low-oxygen layer has expanded. It’s growing wider, and it’s reaching closer to the surface, so that marine life that once lived or ventured into those depths has been forced upward into an ever-shallower and warmer surface layer. Now when there’s an upwelling, that cold, suffocating low-oxygen layer can be dragged higher and can spread wider than ever before.

We’re used to thinking of dead zones as the direct result of human pollution in places like the Gulf of Mexico, where every spring, agricultural runoff flows down the Mississippi and induces a runaway choking algal bloom. The algae then dies off and is consumed by bacteria that take in oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide below the river plume, creating an unbreathable oceanic wasteland thousands of miles across, driving away fish and dolphins and birds, creating the watery equivalent of an electronic dance music festival, a place utterly unfit for multicellular life.

But since 2002, these horrible dance parties have been popping up along the West Coast, seemingly without direct human pollution. The most dramatic case was probably in 2006, off of Oregon’s Cape Perpetua, on a seafloor that normally teems with sponges, rockfish, sea slugs, and crabs. But after dead crabs started washing ashore, scientists sent down a remotely operated submersible and the footage it returned showed vast and barren tracts, alternating with what look like the aquatic version of Matthew

The signature offshore pattern for California, known as the California Current, features regular northwest winds (1) that stir up the surface, causing colder water to rise up from the depths (2) in the process known as upwelling. Meanwhile, the constant decomposition of organic matter that sinks into those depths (3) causes the cold lower layer to also have less oxygen. Scientists have traditionally considered the Bay safe from intruding low-oxygen upwelling because of the sandbar (4) just outside the Golden Gate that rises above the low-lying layer. But growing evidence over the last few years suggests the upwelling is backing up behind—and sometimes flooding over—the bar, posing a risk to marine life (5) in the Bay.

Brady’s images of Civil War battlefields, the bodies of all the crustaceans and other animals too slow to get away piled atop one another, claws outstretched to the current, waving lifelessly.

The big problem with a dead zone that comes in near the shore isn’t that it chases off the fish. The fish are largely fine, if a little stressed; they’ve just gone somewhere else. The problem is what happens to the slower creatures on the ocean floor who can’t escape from the throbbing bass and low oxygen levels. We’re talking about crabs, clams, and such. When the oxygen saturation drops below 5 milligrams per liter, they suffer stress; when it drops below 2 milligrams per liter, they start to die. The crabs go first, after maybe an hour. The clams last longer because they can clam up and outlast a brief dose of hypoxic water. But eventually, they too will die. If this kind of hypoxic dance party came into some place really full of crabs, like the Bay, the carnage would be obscene.

The intrusion of upwelling into the Bay is very much like the fog that sweeps in above the surface: a cold, dense layer, sinking under a warmer layer above it, backing up behind hills and mountains. So the changing character of the upwelling, though a large and growing problem along the coast, didn’t look like a concern for San Francisco Bay, because the Bay is protected by a shallow sandbar outside the Golden Gate, and by the fact that it is a large and active body of water. The upwelling backs up behind the bar, like fog backing up behind Mount Tamalpais, but the deepest and coldest low-oxygen water rarely or never overtops it. And even upwelled water that does make it over the bar and into the Bay gets churned up just inside the Gate in the central Bay, like fog mixing away into the atmosphere.

Then in April 2011, the attention of Largier and his colleagues was caught by data from a regular monthly survey of the Bay done by the U.S. Geological Survey. It showed a continuous layer of j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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Find more coverage of the causes and impact of the current unprecedented ocean conditions at baynature.org/extra.

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BML research associate Matt Robart scrapes hundreds of skeleton shrimp off a buoy mooring line near Mile Rock, Eric Simons

low-oxygen water along the bottom of the central and south Bay. The oxygen levels were less than 5 milligrams per liter—low enough to look like the sign of a water quality problem caused by organic pollution, Largier says. But the water was also cold and salty, and clearly from the ocean. Here, sneaking over the sandbar and slithering across the bottom of the Bay, was the killer upwelling.

Excited and alarmed, Largier wrote a study proposal and sent it off to California Sea Grant. By early 2014, he had $293,000 to support a grad student for a couple of years and to pay for the time of his coastal oceanography group staffers to collect data and run the data analysis. And so, by March 2015, Matt Robart had sensor buoys built and deployed: one near Tiburon, one off Potrero Point in San Francisco, one at Mile Rock outside the Golden Gate, one near Point Bonita, five in a semicircle following along the crest of the sandbar outside the gate, another out in the Gulf of the Farallones, and one right off Stinson Beach.

It was just in time for upwelling season.

The plan was to pull the buoys out of the water in July. It took a little longer than expected. The team eventually found the Oakland buoy, but it was being pulled so strongly by the current that they had to suit up and dive down the line to cut the sensor off of it. The top of the Tiburon buoy, they later learned, had been found by a concerned member of the public who thought it was trash and cut it loose; only after he had hauled it in did he realize it belonged to Bodega Marine Lab. After he returned it, lab staffers were able to go out and dredge the rest of the mooring off the bottom and recover the sensor. Two other buoys were never recovered, Robart says, but they were less expensive and not as critically located. Overall, nine out of 11 buoys came home to the lab with their sensors.

The research team peered into the data, looking for signs of the upwelling sneaking into the Bay. Maybe they would see these dance parties starting, while they’re still just low-oxygen intrusions like in 2011, and not the kind of deadly hypoxic carnival that hit Oregon in 2006. Because if they could find it then, we would start to know under what conditions the Bay is vulnerable and where it is most vulnerable before one of the worst symptoms of the changing ocean came into the Bay. They didn’t find it. Or, rather, Largier says, they found it, sure, but it was muted and then thoroughly mixed up and obliterated by the time it reached Angel Island.

What happened, basically, was more global warming, in the form of California’s massive drought and the nonexistent snowpack of 2014-15. See, for the upwelling to sneak into the Bay, Largier believes, the Bay needs a surface layer of warm, formerly fresh water from the rivers: the runoff from snowmelt. This warm buoyant layer will, somewhat counterintuitively, allow the deep ocean water into the Bay—because it prevents the cold upwelled water from mixing with the rest of the Bay (best time is during neap tides when currents are weak). Under those conditions, the upwelling could slither in like icy death for the Bay’s

just outside the Golden Gate.

crabs. And it’s perfectly reasonable to believe this will happen, because the upwelling starts in March and goes through June, just like the snowmelt. The two forces peak at different times, but it’s easy, Largier says, to imagine them overlapping, and that’s likely what happened in 2011 when cold water with less than 5 milligrams per liter snuck in along the bottom of the central Bay and the south Bay. Largier and his team were perfectly situated this year to catch the upwelling sneaking in and describe the process.

But: no snowmelt, no sneaky upwelling intrusion.

Now the grant is done and so is the study. What they hauled out of the Bay, besides a lot of writhing, snot-colored skeleton shrimp, was a messy, incomplete, and frustrating glimpse of the ocean’s influence on the Bay as it looks now. The Bay might keep looking like this; it might not. Nature is not cooperating with her interrogators.

Largier says this kind of thing happens all the time when one is trying to observe complex natural systems (and not, say, working on a theory in a lab with a near-limitless supply of lab rats to run experiments on). It’s also very difficult, bordering on impossible, to line up funding and do a study quickly enough to catch anomalies in the climate.

It’s hard to say what comes next, Largier says. The forces changing the upwelling seem likely to continue. Perhaps it will come sliding back into the Bay when we have a snowpack again, perhaps in a La Niña year. With the way the climate is going, Largier says, it’s hard to predict if the upwelling will make it into the Bay. “Maybe,” he says, “in the end it’s not actually going to happen.”

But Largier will keep worrying about the upwelling making it over the bar and in through the Golden Gate, because it could be a huge disruption of life as we know it in the Bay. Maybe he’ll be able to round up some funding to put a sensor or two in the water in the coming years. Maybe a permanent sentinel buoy.

Maybe he’ll be able to collaborate with someone who has funding, or with people using the Bay. “We have to try and keep an eye on it,” he says.

Brendan Buhler is an award-winning science writer and co-author of Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes (2015). He lives in Petaluma.

This story is supported by a grant for coverage of the changing ocean from the Schwemm Family Foundation.

Support California sea otter research and conservation programs. Make a tax-deductible donation on line 410 of your state income tax return, or ask your tax preparer to do it. Learn more at www.wildlife.ca.gov/Tax-Donation or www.seaotters.org.

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Mike Vasey: The Magic of Manzanitas Interview by Sue Rosenthal California doesn’t have an official state shrub (Texas has two!), but our state’s iconic manzanitas—the shiny red-barked shrubs found in chaparral and many other habitats—seem like a shoo-in for the honor. And no one knows these beautiful plants better than Mike Vasey, who along with co-authors Tom Parker and Michael Kauffmann has produced a book that will help acquaint the rest of us with this fascinating group: A Field Guide to Manzanitas: California, North America, and Mexico (Backcountry Press, 2015). Vasey and Parker have been studying the genus Arctostaphylos for 25 years, traveling up and down the state and into Baja to document the 104 known species and subspecies in California and Mexico. But Vasey’s interest in the natural world doesn’t end with manzanitas. He is also the director of the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which promotes the understanding and protection of valuable coastal wetlands.

And for his Ph.D., which he recently completed at UC Santa Cruz, he researched the influence of the summer marine layer (i.e., fog) on chaparral along the central coast of California. His infectious enthusiasm for all of these topics and more is inescapable. sue rosenthal: How did you first become

rare over time because of changing conditions and so on—the newly evolved versus relict species. So I decided I wanted

Mike Vasey standing on a hillside overlooking Ensenada Bay in Baja, Mexico, where he was searching for a rare form of the manzanita following a recent fire.

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Jeff Bisbee

interested in natural history and plants? mike vasey: I was living in Marin County in the 1970s and hiking a lot. I had a camera with a nice macro lens, and I gravitated to flowers, plants, and landscapes. I began to wonder what I was taking pictures of, so I joined the native plant society and took a couple of classes at the College of Marin and really got fired up.

I think the seminal event was a talk by [evolutionary biologist] Ledyard Stebbins on the five Mediterranean-type climate regions in the world. I became completely enamored with evolutionary ecology, and I realized that this was something I really wanted to study. I was working in a totally different field at the time, but I was getting more and more into natural history, so I went to San Francisco State to do my master’s while still working part-time.

But I wasn’t studying manzanitas; I was working on a rare flower, bird rock goldfields, Lasthenia maritima [which only grow on sea stacks]. What really interested me was the question, What makes species rare? There are all kinds of ways for species to become rare. They can start out rare, or they can contract and become

to do my research on that question.

And one of the species that interested me right off the bat was the bird rock goldfields, which [botanist] Robert Ornduff considered a newly evolved species. I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge one day, and I saw the Farallones out there, and I said, “Yeah, I know they’re out there; I want to look into that.” It took me quite a bit just to get permission to go out there, and by then I was really getting into it and I realized I didn’t need to do anything else; it was more than enough for a thesis.

I spent a fair amount of time out on the Farallones and going up and down the coast, climbing bird rocks. I eventually got this 13-foot Boston Whaler with rails on the front. I would go out with somebody and stand outboard of the rails while they brought me in on the lee side of the rock, and I would jump off and climb the rock.

f irst

A Mariposa manzanita (Arctostaphylos viscida ssp. mariposa) growing near the edge of Yosemite National Park shows off the genus’ signature smooth

person

red bark.

mv: One day out of the blue, we got an email from Michael Kauffmann, who’s the Backcountry Press publisher, asking, “Would you guys be interested in doing this field guide to manzanitas?”

Tom and I share the belief that this is an incredibly fascinating group, but it’s kind of locked away from the average person because it’s incredibly diverse and it takes some time to get to know and understand the plants’ characters, more time than the average person is willing to spend plowing through The Jepson Manual. So we were really excited about the idea of a book that has nice photographs, shows habitat, shows the species, has regional keys, and puts everything together in one place. We were excited about empowering people to get to know this group because it’s like sharing a great secret that’s been locked away behind technical jargon.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to know this group so well, traveling to all these places to see the manzanitas. Because it’s not just seeing the manzanitas; it’s seeing the places, and the places are fascinating.

They almost invariably have other species of interest and unique vegetation types. It’s just fun! It’s sharing a passion with others. And it’s also sort of like citizen science. We’re saying, “Get out there and check it out!” Because we might end up with a lot of information about new entities, new places. sr: In the book you say there are 104 manzanita species and subspecies in California and Baja.

Why so many? What makes them so susceptible to hybridizing and forming new species? mv: I think long-lived woody shrubs, Jeff Bisbee

It was the adventure of a lifetime! I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. And probably nobody would let me do it again because of the birds that nest out there. But it was an amazing experience. sr: And how did you become interested in manzanitas? mv: As I said, local rarity was my big focus. And during the 1980s, I spent a lot of time in the field with Stebbins. He was one of these guys—for him, going on a plant expedition was like fishing. If he didn’t find a new species, or a new variety, or a new locality, he was really unhappy. He felt like he’d been shut out.

So I got this chance to go with him to all these amazing places looking for rare plants. But when I chose the goldfields for my thesis, I kind of left the other ones I had been thinking about, which were some locally rare manzanitas.

Then, in 1991, just after I’d started teaching at San Francisco State, I went down to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and met Nancy Morin, editor of Flora of North America. When I complained to her about the taxonomic treatment of the genus Arctostaphylos in The Jepson Manual [the botanists’ bible of California native plants] she suggested I consider doing my own treatment of the genus. I said, “Well, I don’t want to just rearrange the deck chairs by doing another treatment without any more information. So if we can come up with some money to do a little bit of molecular genetic work, and put that in the context of other things we know...” I also said I wanted to partner with Tom Parker. He’s a vegetation ecologist and a colleague at San Francisco State, and we’ve been great friends for many years.

So Tom and I started going to various places to see and collect specimens of manzanitas. I made a huge number of field trips: I chased them all down, basically. So the material that [later] went into the field guide was a 25-year endeavor. And Jeff Bisbee worked for at least a couple of years on taking the photos. Tom and I have never stopped working on Arctostaphylos; we probably won’t stop until the day we die! sr: What was the motive to create a book that’s for more of a lay audience than a scientific one?

woody plants in general, benefit over evolutionary time through hybridization, through mixing, new combinations.

Many manzanitas have evolved to regenerate by seed germination after fire rather than resprouting from the roots of the old plant. So from an evolutionary perspective … let’s just say there are two different “seeders” that live in the same population and are capable of exchanging genes, hybridizing. They produce a lot of fruit over time, and that fruit goes into the seed bank. It’s not germinating every year, it’s just getting stored in the soil over time. Then a big fire comes along—whoosh! The old plants die, a bunch of seedlings come up, and if there are hybrids in that population of seedlings, maybe they have an advantage that other ones don’t have.

If you think of California’s chaparral fire regime, where a place might burn every 50 years, that’s 20 fires in a thousand years. And if you take that another thousand years … All of those fires are selection events that can push j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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V. T. Parker

an optimal genotype into taking over a stand of plants. It’s a very different mode of evolution.

And let’s say you go through a 200- or 300-year warming and drying trend. The manzanita that needed a little cooler, moister habitat, by the time 300 years goes by, it’s gone. It just can’t handle the change. But maybe there’s another species that mixes with the first species and brings some other characteristics that allow it to live in different climate conditions. After 500 years, suddenly those new guys are the game; the other guys are gone. sr: Do you have any thoughts about what our climate-changed future holds for manzanitas? mv: On one hand, I’m worried about it; on the other hand, I’m really not that worried about it. From the perspective of losing a lot of unique and interesting species, particularly those that live along the coast, I’m worried. There’s really compelling evidence from climate change modeling that interior conditions are going to push toward the coast. A lot of manzanita species that are pretty well adapted to interior conditions could end up moving toward the coast. If the fog regime changes, if the rainfall regime changes in the coastal uplands, then the coastal species, which are by far the most diverse group within the genus, are vulnerable to being displaced by warmer, drier species. And you don’t have as much diversity in the warmer, drier end of the system.

But we don’t know: It could go the other way; we could get more fog rather than less. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen. And there’s another piece: Most of the species we’re talking about have become established over thousands of years in particular “edaphic

archipelagos”—islands of particular soil types, like serpentines, or granites, or dunes, or really hard mudstones like chalks—that are pretty infertile and support these manzanitas. If climate changes dramatically so their ability to manage water intake, for example, isn’t sufficient, where can they go? They can’t move.

But that being said, it’s a very dynamic group, and things are going to be shifting.

As long as there are opportunities for these guys to hybridize and take advantage of new circumstances, they probably will. You might end up a thousand years from now with maximum diversity along the southern Oregon coast. sr: Do you have a favorite manzanita? mv: Hmmm … I would have to say I don’t, but what comes to mind is one that’s very hard to get to, the Sierra Juarez manzanita in Baja, Arctostaphylos

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Mike Vasey recording observations in a recently burned area of Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, near Santa Cruz, in June 2009.

peninsularis juarezensis. It’s so incredibly beautiful—a tall manzanita with vibrant pink flowers, magenta almost. It’s growing in boulders in the Sierra Juarez, a really unique setting by a big shallow lake. I’ve been there twice, and I just love that place and that species. It knocked me off my feet. sr: How about in the Bay Area? mv: That’s really tough because there are so many great ones here, whether it’s on Montara Mountain, or Kings Mountain, or Mount Diablo, or Huckleberry Preserve, or Mount Tam, or Point Reyes, or San Bruno Mountain, for God’s sake. There are so many places here where the habitats are fascinating, the vistas are gorgeous, and the manzanitas are really cool.

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What Outcome for Tesla Park?

Liam O’Brien, sfbutterfly.com

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in eucalyptus trees in San Francisco at Rob Hill in the Presidio, where normally only a few wayward ones flit through. Meanwhile, the numbers at Monarch Bay golf course in San Leandro, a regular roosting spot, have nearly doubled to 12,800 this year.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what’s driving this bumper crop.

Could the butterflies have some kind of sixth sense about the oncoming El Niño? After all, the last time monarch numbers approached this height was the year of the last big El Niño, 1997–1998, when they registered 1.2 million. Arthur Shapiro, a UC Davis entomologist, douses that notion. “As far as we know, butterflies can’t predict the weather,” he says.

One noteworthy change this year has been the rediscovery of caterpillars during summer months in their traditional breeding grounds in the Central Valley. Shapiro created and maintains the longest-running database on butterflies in the nation, tracking sightings along the I-80 corridor from the Sacramento Delta to the Great Basin.

“A decade ago I got desperate messages —‘I’m a schoolteacher in Woodland and I can’t find any caterpillars,’” he says. The butterflies seemed to be choosing places in the Sierra or toward the coast to lay their eggs. In the fall, a few caterpillars would make a brief appearance in the Central Valley, but these late bloomers may not have been reproductively successful, Shapiro says.

This year the monarchs were, inexplicably, back to their old ways. “There were oodles,” Shapiro says. “Basically, they were doing the same stuff they were doing in the ’70s and ’80s.”

While scientists try to wrap their heads around that, monarch advocates are tracking this year’s roosting spots carefully. Will the first major rains flush out some of the newer roosts, like Aquatic Park, and push the butterflies elsewhere? How well will the monarchs survive what could be a wet, gusty winter?

“There’s the thrill of lots of monarchs and then there’s the holding of the breath to make sure they make it through the winter,” says Mia Monroe, a Golden

[Shepard] and I will keep going back to the same sites.”

At Aquatic Park the clouds part and the sun comes out. It’s still chilly but a few monarchs take flight and dance daintily around high in the sky. Shepard smiles below his uplifted binoculars.

[Alison Hawkes]

(continued from page 7) spotted

Gate National Parks park official who coordinates the Bay Area monarch count.

“That’s why die-hard fans like Bill

In August, in the midst of this year’s drought-abetted fire season, a large blaze ripped across an expanse of open land in the hills southeast of Livermore, and the charred remains have fueled an ongoing debate about the land’s ecological value and its future.

The Tesla property, as the 3,100acre parcel in Corral Hollow is called, was purchased by the state in 1998 in order to expand the abutting Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area. Conservationists have long opposed inclusion of the parcel in a park designated for off-road vehicles, (continued on page 44) because studies

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Celeste M. Garamendi, teslapark.org

to

the most significant fire in decades as sparking greater ecological diversity.

“The flora we have seen at Tesla bounces back and is even enhanced in some cases by fire,” says Heath Bartosh, a botanist who researches fire succession in plant communities, many of which have been overrun by nonnative annual grasses. “Wildfire cleans out the weeds.

It’s like a reset button.”

Bartosh has been studying the aftermath of the 2013 Morgan Fire on Mount Diablo, roughly 20 miles to the northwest of Tesla. He has applied for a research permit from the state parks department to begin a similar study of post-fire Tesla, which would offer him a point of comparison on fire-follower flora in the northern part of the Diablo Range, a 180-mile-long inner coast range system that extends roughly from Mount Diablo to the northern edge of Kern County.

Tesla sits at the intersection of several biotic zones, notably the coastal hills of the East Bay and the more arid

Photos: Richard Valenti

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have shown that Tesla is home to several rare and endangered species and special-status plant communities and serves as an important corridor for wildlife.

In addition, the area has cultural significance, containing remains of indigenous settlements and of a 19th-century coal mining town. In January 2016, after years of delays, a commission of the California OffHighway Motor Vehicle Recreation division (OHMVR), part of the state parks and recreation department, is expected to vote on the plan to develop trails for motorized vehicles and other forms of recreation on the Tesla property.

The fire, which burned three-quarters of the Tesla property, has introduced another wrinkle into the long-running debate about its future. While some off-road vehicle advocates see the burn as having cleared the way for new motorbike trails—after all, there’s nothing left, right?—conservationists see

(continued from page 42)

Central Valley, making it particularly rich in biodiversity and a target of conservation efforts. Peripheral populations like those in Tesla can develop genetic distinctions that add to the evolutionary potential of a species in the face of pressures like climate change. Desert olive, a small shrub characteristic of the Mojave eco-region far to the south, is one of those plants that reaches its northernmost extent here. Will it come back strong after the fire? What other plants will make an appearance? Bartosh doesn’t know, but (continued on page 47) he’d like to find out.

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Don Edwards: Congressional Champion for Wetlands Even if you don’t know who Don Edwards was, you might recognize his name, thanks to the very large national wildlife refuge that tracks the edge of much of the South Bay. It’s a lovely area to visit at all times of the year, but especially during the months of the fall

Relax in Alaska photo by Betty Sederquist

and winter shorebird migration.

It must be nice to have a wildlife refuge named after you. And by all accounts, Don Edwards, who died on October 1 at the age of 100, deserved it. His passing gives us the opportunity to ask, “Who was this man and how did we wind up with 30,000 acres of wetlands in the heart of Silicon Valley?”

“It’s staggering to think that without him, development would come right down to the water. We would have no hope for restoration,” says Florence LaRiviere, a contemporary of Edwards’ who has led the citizen fight for the refuge for more than four decades.

to

to deal with floods and fires and other catastrophes,” and so no new study is warranted. In the meantime, Carnegie staff members are doing their own review of the fire’s impact on Tesla.

“It’s a moonscape; it’s scary,” says Elise McFarland, a State Parks interpreter. But the vast majority of oaks have survived, parched though they are from drought, she says: “The oak trees have green on their tips where they are regenerating.”

It’s a reminder that fire can give birth to something new.

To find out more about the future of Tesla, visit Friends of Tesla Park at teslapark.org. [Alison Hawkes]

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When the commission votes in January it will decide whether to adopt a new general plan and environmental impact report for Carnegie and the Tesla expansion area.

The plan calls for extending offroading trails onto the Tesla site, along with the construction of campsites, a parking lot, and several vehicular entrances. Certain areas are designated as “limited recreation” to protect sensitive cultural and ecological resources (and assuage the concerns of conservation advocates). But Friends of Tesla Park, a group seeking to reserve the land for passive (nonmotorized) recreation, is calling for a new environmental assessment of Tesla given the ecological processes set in motion by the fire.

“In fact, the fire makes the need for protection even greater,” says Celeste Garamendi, a neighbor to Tesla and founder of the group.

OHMVR division planning manager Dan Canfield says the environmental analysis is meant to be “flexible enough

(continued from page 44)

Back in the 1960s when plans for infill threatened to turn the Bay into little more than a shipping channel, LaRiviere saw a small notice in the newspaper inviting anyone worried about the loss of the Bay’s wetlands to come to a meeting at an office in San Jose. She was a young mother at the time and enjoyed evening walks along the marshes in Palo Alto with her family.

“There was a picnic table at the edge of the marsh and we loved it,” she says.

“We loved the shorebirds, especially in the evenings. Then we heard marshes would be destroyed for building.”

So she went to that meeting, called

by Art Ogilvie, a Santa Clara County planner. Soon they were making plans to create the first national wildlife refuge in an urban area. But to put it bluntly, there were very well-meaning people in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who simply did not see the point of trying to coax nature into such a large metropolitan area.

“After some time we realized that we were going to need (continued on page 48) j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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strong congressional support, and that’s when we went to Mr. Edwards’ office,” LaRiviere says.

Don Edwards, a San Jose native who represented his South Bay district in Congress for 32 years, is probably best known for drafting every civil rights bill in the House of Representatives for two decades. It took little effort to convince him that a wildlife refuge for the South Bay was needed, given its key location along the Pacific Flyway.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who was an aide for Edwards for eight years (and succeeded him when he retired), remembers he would place a call every morning from his desk in Washington to one of the chairs of the Interior or Appropriations committee and ask, “Where are we on this wildlife refuge?”

“He nagged them. He was good spirited about it, but he nagged them,” Lofgren remembers. “It took a long time to do this. It was years and years from the initial vision to completion.”

There were, of course, plenty of bumps along the way, Lofgren says, but Edwards’ bill finally passed in 1974, designating 23,000 acres as the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

The fight was over, albeit temporarily.

The group that first turned up in Ogilvie’s office had since become the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, and in 1985, they returned to Edwards’ office with another request— to expand the refuge. Again there was opposition, this time notably from the city of Newark, LaRiviere recalls. But in 1988, Congress approved a doubling of its authorized size—if the land could be acquired from willing sellers.

In the years since, some notable sections have been added, including 11,000 acres of former Cargill salt ponds and Bair Island off Redwood City. Progress, yes, but according to LaRiviere and her committee colleagues, the refuge is not yet complete. Yet there’s no doubt about Edwards’ legacy, and the renaming of the refuge in his honor in 1995 confirmed that. All of us—and hundreds of thousands of birds—owe the congressman and his citizen accomplices a huge debt of gratitude. [Alison Hawkes] (continued from page 47)

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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 in print (Bay Nature magazine), online (Baynature.org), on the air, and in the field. Through tax-deductible contributions, the Friends of Bay Nature support this independent voice for local nature and conservation. The Friends listed below are individuals whose donations were received between September 4 and December 3, 2015. Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to Friends of Bay Nature $1,000 + Lee Ballance & Mary Selkirk Louis Berlot & Joyce Cutler David Frane & Charla Gabert Jorgen Hildebrandt Harriet & Robert Jakovina Mia Monroe Jumbo & Trevlyn Williams $500–999 Anonymous Douglas Booth & Margaret Simpson Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Phyllis Browning Ron & Rosemary Clendenen Jacqueline Desoer Nancy Falk Catherine Fox Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Karen & Robert Jachens Gudrun Kleist Craig Lanway Peter & Sue LaTourrette Ann & Michael Loeb Tamia Marg John & Valerie Metcalfe Ed Ehmke & Mary Jane Parrine Anita Kelley Pearson Margaret & Oscar Rosenbloom Mike Sabarese David Sacarelos Sue Schoening Sam Schuchat Jeffrey Wilson $250–499 John Atwood Stephen Barnhart Denise Filakowsky Gerson Bakar & Associates Philip Gervais Joyce & Marty Griffin Lenny Gucciardi Kathleen Hall & Leslie Murdock Eugenie & Walter Halland Eva & Paul Heninwolf Lynn MacDonald Marilyn Mangle Daniel & Lynne Russell Alice Shiffman Arnie Thompson $100–249 Anonymous (4) Brenda Baker Cyndi Bakir Leslie Barclay Christine Bertko Jan Blum Helen Bodington Connie Bowencamp Donald Breyer David Bridgman

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Membership Programs for All Save money and time with a Park District Membership through the Regional Parks Foundation: • Personalized Membership Card • Free Day-Use Parking • Free Swimming During Swim Season* • One Annual Dog Pass • Subscription to Regional in Nature and Compass magazine and much more!

Find out more about Memberships at www.RegionalParksFoundation.org; or call the Membership Department at 510-544-2220. * Certain restrictions apply

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ask the naturalist m i c h a e l q: During the hot days this fall, ants entered my

Orleans around the turn of the last century and they have been on the march across our continent ever since.

A few years ago, researchers discovered a mega-colony—and I do mean mega—that ranges from San Diego to San Francisco, 560 miles long, and may contain one trillion ants! In the Mediterranean there is an even larger colony that spans 3,700 miles. So what defines an ant colony? It’s not that there’s a gigantic labyrinth of tunnels connecting all those ants. Rather, a colony, which can include thousands

of queens, is defined by a lack of aggression between the individuals of that colony.

All researchers agree that the extraordinary success of Argentine ants is due to reduced aggression, and therefore cooperation, among the members of the supercolony. But what’s the reason for the harmony? That’s a question researchers have been arguing about for more than 20 years.

Initially it was believed that the lack of genetic diversity among the ants

explanation for the Argentine success, it just isn’t that clear. Welcome to the real world! But the bottom line remains: Argentine ants are one of the top 100 nasty introduced critters that have spread unchecked throughout our planet.

Finally, Virginia, biopesticides and a tidy kitchen will not stop the invasion.

These ants are only a sixteenth of an inch long and can squeeze through quite narrow cracks. The only way to stop them is to totally seal up your house.

Good luck with that.

e l l i s

Eric Lowenbach, Mojavemorning.com

house. Then they left. This winter they came in again during the rain. What drives them inside when it’s both hot and cold, and why are there so many of them?!—Virginia a: Well, Virginia, in my experience these pesky little invertebrates come to visit mostly in the fall and winter when the temperature drops and the rains begin. I want to reassure those folks who’d love to blame their roommates or spouses for the invasions that they have absolutely nothing to do with bad housekeeping. These ants basically strive for and thrive in the same perfect Goldilocks conditions that you and I enjoy—75 degrees and dry. So, idyllic conditions are what they’re seeking when they invade your space. (But they’re happy to take advantage of any food you’ve left around once they’re there!)

The “they” we’re talking about is not just any ant species that happens to be in your neighborhood: “They” are Argentine ants.

If this were a movie, there would be a scream right now—Oh my GOD!!!! NOT ARGENTINE ANTS! Ants are one of the dominant insects on the earth, and there are 14,000 different species of them. In California 250 species exist, and more than 100 of them live in the Bay Area. The only regions without ants are Antarctica and the high Arctic.

Get used to them.

As the name implies, Argentine ants are not native to our stomping grounds. Their original range in South America is limited to lowlands along the Parana River, but clearly these ants have what it takes to thrive all over.

They’ve colonized six continents and many oceanic islands. They were first identified in North America in New

reduced antagonism and encouraged collaboration and therefore resulted in widespread success. But Stanford researchers have discovered quite a bit of genetic diversity within colonies, even those close to each other. It appears that environmental conditions and food resource availability may have more to do with the reduced aggression than genetic relationships. When there is plenty to eat, peace reigns. Maybe.

Argentine ants have disrupted many local ecosystems by outcompeting the local species, especially in urban areas.

But again the Stanford folks, who have conducted a long-term study of the ants at Jasper Ridge, have found some native species are good at resisting the invaders. As much as we’d like a simple

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j o h n

n o t e b o o k

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Coyote Ridge Open Space Preserve Acquired October 2015 Photo by Stephen Joseph

The Open Space Authority Congratulates Bay Nature on 15 years of Outstanding Nature Education from Sonoma to Santa Clara County!

We’re Lichen What You Do!

Photo by Mamatha Rao j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 6

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Berkeley’s goal is to send Zero Waste to landfill, but its infrastructure is outmoded. The transfer station was designed to accommodate an incinerator that citizens stopped. The facility is now dilapidated, and piecemeal improvements have created a hodgepodge. In 2005 a consultant o l e t írecommended n d e l o s rebuilding T r a b a jit,a but d onothing r e s Uwas n i done d o s atqthat u e time.

C u iAtd last a n City e nCouncil C a s ais considering the rebuild as part of its climate action plan. Public Works is exploring interdepartmental DENTE cooperation for economic development and advantage, and Urban Ore donated a facility redesign to designed thande30que Zero Waste facilities es y the City in 2007. Urban Ore’s architects se nos haya dañado o sefor haya a nuestro have personal político, ymore asegure communities in the US and abroad. los The Berkeley redesign features a giant solar-powered building uidado en de nosotros mentalmente. servicios de los individuos que abusado with room for recycling andeste City staff to recover the most un mundo viven y respiran contractors la política durante resources. tiempo No need resources or hope. Let’s rebuild!de que •Merecemos el derecho atrapados criticotoenabandon la historia del cuidado – What Can Be

e, nuestra os a otros dor, usted manda que sted es un ed vive en u relación veedor de familiar, diferente. años y proveedor de marcar ar, pero What Is un hasta aquí, de nuevo, rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, sobre el ador de siempre avanzando acercándonos, emas que endientes extraño.

UHW, ha ya durante ención de gidos por a Loretta campaña conforme continuamos construyendo ndado de el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” Estamos reventando la dico y los dores. En burbuja cuando nuestro Comité un grupo de Constitución sugiere un cambio sido los que combine el espacio de nuestro uecido sus Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva plan para posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El

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

del hogar a nivel Federal y Estatal.

CUHW, al salir de la burbuja, emerge con nuevas ideas ahora que estamos en período electoral este agosto. Nuestras elecciones estatales incluirán dos semanas en las que puede votar en línea o llamando a un número sin costo, usando su número de celular o un teléfono fijo.

Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa de Voluntariado de Incentivos para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros miembros en los negocios al mostrar sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual representa un ganar-ganar para todos.

Hemos establecido oficinas en más de 9 de nuestros condados.

La mayoría de las oficinas tienen bancos de llamadas y capacidad de difusión de web y cuentan con grandes pantallas. Contamos con otra acción que es también otra burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las actualizaciones por email y mensajes de texto que alertan a los miembros de los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. Yo personalmente quiero salirme de la burbuja en la que se considera la reforma de IHSS en California y sugiero que empecemos con

se nos pague bajo el esquema del Seguro Social por una vida de trabajo por un miembro de la familia.

•Merecemos vacaciones pagadas, merecemos el derecho de que se nos trate con compasión y respeto por las

Recycling Processing

dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios médicos y oportunidades de educación, al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. ¡No solamente lo merecemos,