Friday Fluff #3: For When Enough is Enough

Thing the first: Thar Be Snail Ogres!

Does this look like a beautiful lady to you?
What is the DEAL with sailors?!
Image by Toriyama Sekien via Wikipedia

I'm sharing a cool Echinoblog post I found in the only way anyone finds anything these days - Twitter. In time for halloween, Christopher Mah describes the mythology of and actual inspiration for several Japanese monsters. This being a Mollusc-centric blog, I will feature the Snail Ogre, Sazae-oni, here, which somehow transfigures into a drowning woman, or something convincingly enough like it to attract sailors, who become the snail's next meal. The real snail this legend is based off of is the horned turban snail (Turbo cornutus1). This image also reminds me of Aku.

There are a number of other monsters on there that are worth checking out and attempting at Halloween costumes, such as the Samurai crab, and/or Stephen Hawking, and the internet darling of the year, the dumbo squid.

Thing the second: Killer Whale Espionage

Because you know you want a giant orca photo...L94 and her baby nursing in BROAD DAYLIGHT! She's not even using a blanket, how indecent! Photo credit: NOAA Fisheries, Vancouver Aquarium

The world is all atwitter, quite literally, about the use of drones in research of the Southern Resident Killer Whales. I've blabbed about some of the recent population growth of this group (here), and there have been even more calves born this year. NOAA just released a video podcast show-and-tell of some recent photos obtained via hexacopter. The contraption, which is strapped to two pool noodles for flotation, flies above the whales to get good pictures of them without disturbing them. They can ID and measure the whales to track growth rates.

Surveillance photos indicate that the babies keep on coming (welcome, Baby L-122!), and the hexacopter provides insight into family life of the growing pods. This year has been a good year for the whales, lots of babies and seemingly well-fed whales. Hopefully that trend lasts.

Thing the third: See Slug Day!

Yesterday was Sea Slug Day! I don't really even have that much to say about it, except that it's worth trolling #SeaSlugDay for the photos, but don't say I didn't warn you that it was a black hole of a time suck! You sort of start to wonder if this group isn't really just an alien race living among us. Or we are a prison planet for all of some other planet's criminals: what with kleptoplasty, and kleptocnidae - they're evidently really just into stealing things, evidently.

Super cutie: O. muricata on E. pilosa

As an undergraduate, I did research on what is the least colorful species in the most colorful group of organisms in the world - Onchidoris muricata. That doesn't mean it wasn't charismatic! I was researching whether this tiny white blob, which you would be well within your rights to assume was some previous beach walker's snot rocker, was interested in eating an invasive bryozoan(2), in the Gulf of Maine. The bryozoan, Membranipora membranacea, was super abundant there, growing all over rocks and kelps. We gave the snot rocket nudibranch a choice between it's presumed preferred food (a native bryo Electra pilosa) and the new bryozoan (which they are probably serving at that gastro street-food from around the world fad place down the street from me), and found that the slug preferred to eat the fancy new food, and could eat it faster.

This was back in 2004, when we wondered, what could this mean for future slugs? Just this year, people are starting to think about whether invasive species are good food for native species - they could be right? Well it turns out that in a lot of cases, they are often beneficial as a supplement to a balanced diet, so they don't harm native species. But on their own, they aren't as good as the diet the predator evolved to eat. So, no you can't have Doritos for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.

Phew, for Friday fluff, that really was some academic non-sense I just prattled on about(3)! Here's a palate-cleansing video... 

Check out this video I found in my archives. Marney Pratt, my Advisor on the project, grew some bryozoans onto a microscopes slide, and fed them a red algae so that they would show up clearly against the background: the red dots you see are individual bryozoans, called zooids. The big white blob is a single Onchidoris, and you're looking at it from beneath, through the side of a tank and the glass slide. Marney filmed this time lapse of the slug eating a single zooid. If you watch closely, there is one zooid that gets slurped out of its little house toward the bottom right. This is sort of like how an oyster drill (predatory snail) consuming an oyster in that "sucks-his-guts-out" is still an applicable description.

SEE! I told you they were charismatic!

References and Miscellany

1. For Turbo Corn Nuts see disambiguation.
2. Bryo (= moss) zoan (= animal). These are colonial organisms that do really cool defensive stuff...maybe some other day though...
3. But if you weren't completely deterred, you could read the paper we (/Marney) wrote here.

New baby orca J-50 spouts rainbows across Puget Sound! OR Acronymous B.I.G.[G.]

In Seattle, orca births are celebrated on the front page of the paper! Go ahead, make your jokes about what yokels we must be, we know better.

Yay baby J-50!

You gotta be kidding me! Photo by Ken Balcom of Center for Whale Research

J-50 is Slick's (J-16) sixth calf, but two of her calves haven't survived, including the calf I announced a few years ago, J-48. 

It's difficult not to get excited about an absurdly cute baby apex-predator, but it's been a rocky month for this pod. They just lost one of the best hopes for the growth of the pod. J-32, AKA Rhapsody, washed up dead on the shore near Courtenay, in British Columbia. A necropsy indicated she was underfed, and had an aborted, nearly full-term, fetus in her uterus. The thought is that she was unable to expel the fetus which ultimately resulted in an infection that killed her. Of the [now] 78 whales in the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) population, only about a dozen are reproductively viable(1) - you don't need to understand population viability analyses to understand why that doesn't sound good.

J-50 is a hopeful sign, maybe the nice round number will be good luck, but this whale faces an uphill climb. Something like 35-45% of SRKWs die within the first year of life. The three pods that comprise this population J, K, and L, are culturally (in terms of diet and dialect) and genetically distinct from other groups of orcas worldwide, even those they live right next to. J pod is known as the "urban orcas", and spend more time than the other pods closer to dense human populations. These whales have astonishingly high levels of toxins, such as PCBs, in their blubber, concentrations which can be as much as twice the level at which seals are known to experience immunotoxic effects. Orcas accumulate PCBs and other toxins from the food they eat over the course of their lives (Figure 1). PCBs are fat-soluble and get passed on to calves in their mom's fatty milk, so females end up with lower PCBs than males (Figures 1 & 2), but first-born calves get the highest dose. 

Figure 1. Yay, boring graphs! Bear with me here: The concentration of PCBs increases in male killer whale blubber as they age. But females start offloading PCBs on calves when they reach sexual maturity. Then whey they stop reproducing they start accumulating again. Reproduced from Ross et al. Mar. Poll. Bull. 2000

Figure 2. Transient killer whales eat marine mammals, higher up the food chain than the salmon that make up most of the residents' diet. That means they get an even higher dose of PCBs. Reproduced from Ross et al. Mar. Poll. Bull. 2000

The resident whales' diet protects them from PCBs relative to transient killer whales (which find seals and sea lions very tasty - biomagnification if you want to sound snooty at your next cocktail party). Ironically, the fish-based resident diet is also a reason they are imperiled. Super classy predators that they are, they really would rather eat Chinook salmon than anything else. Humans are good at copying nature and pretending we invented it, so we decided we also like Chinook...and electricity. We built a lot of dams and et a lot of salmon, so....good luck, orcas!

As a result, in spite of the fact there are at least 50,000 Orcinus orca in the world(2), the SRKW were listed under the Endangered Species Act 10 years ago. There was an awful hubbub about this(3), because globally, the species is no where near in danger. So why should we have to stop eating salmon!? SRKW are listed as a DPS (discrete population segment(4)), meaning they are culturally and genetically distinct enough to be considered a separate population, worthy of their own conservation plan. In spite of added protection, the population of SRKW is now the lowest it's been in 30 years. The 10 year milestone prompted NOAA to put together a report on status of the recovery efforts, and acknowledge that there is clearly ongoing need to improve conservation management efforts.

One major change that conservationists want to make is to dramatically expand the area that is considered "critical habitat" for SRKW, since it has been discovered that, like geese and wealthy retirees, SRKW (at least K and L pods) are snowbirds, and travel as far south as Point Reyes to find food during the winter (Figure 3).

Figure 3. By tracking two whales (K25/Scoter and L88/Wave Walker), researchers found out that K and L pods also get tired of Seattle winter weather. They spend nearly all of their time between January and June time foraging along the outer coast, almost to SF...hipsters. Map by Curt Bradley, Center for Biological Diversity

Given the hell this could raise with fisheries management along the 700 miles of additional coastline being considered, it's pretty unsurprising that this proposal is meeting some resistance. I will undoubtedly be keeping my eyes on this  one.

References and Miscellany
(1) - Female orcas, like elephants and some primates, often live well beyond their reproductive years. How does survival after menopause get selected for? Here's a possibility, and here's a more accessible explanation.
(2) - No one really can come up with a good number for the global population of orcas. Here is one of the better reviews of the data available. 
(3) - The Orca Conservation Network has a great timeline of news coverage of the ESA listing status of SRKW here including efforts to repatriate Lolita, who was captured from L pod in 1970.
(4) - You want more acronyms? I can go all day long!

It wouldn't be a PNW blog without a post about Orcas!

Huzzah! Another reason to fete the season!  Puget Sound welcomes a new addition to J-Pod.

Figure 1. HEY BABY ORCA! Calves are often born orange,
which is cool.

This orange fellow is the son or daughter (often takes a while to sort that out) of J-16 (AKA Slick).  

I love that I live in a place where every time a new orca calf is spotted, it makes news headlines.  There is no shortage of orcas worldwide, but the population that lives closest to Puget Sound, the Southern Residents (Urban Orcas, I like to imagine they follow the trends and have transitioned from grunge to hipster - Figure 2) have been listed as an endangered species.  They are primarily fish-eaters and have different dialects than the mammal-eating transients that also come through the Salish Sea on occasion.  

Figure 2. You try to put a whale in skinny jeans! It's not what nature intended.

J-pod was always my favorite in my Free Willy years.  J-17 (Princess Angeline) was my adopted orca.  Whoops, busted: I had a Free Willy/Keiko phase.  Whatever, I have no regrets!  It turns out orcas are rad, but not in the way Sea World would like you to believe.  Speaking of which, do not try this at home - just don't.  I shouldn't have to tell you why.

I still really love orcas because they do not care what we think of them, and what images we like to project on them (see again, Figure 2).  They will still kill them a great white shark or some baby sea lions, right in front of us, if it please them.  The Southern Residents are beloved, which is easy because they eat mostly fish.  But most orcas, world-wide, eat things we think are cute and defenseless, and they get depicted in nature shows with some very choice, and very alliterative, language.  But they are incredibly smart!  And that's extremely cool!  Ignore most of the dramatics and graphics in this video, except the reaction in the crowd at the end - and then lets talk about how we felt when the orcas got that baby seal (Oh, Animal Planet, how fast and far ye have fallen).  

In other local orca news:  The latest fashion in Orca research happens right here in my own department: Dogs that hunt for whale scat!