Catalina Island Leadership Program

Phoenix Country Day School

Kelp Forest Information Links

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuaries

http://www.mbayaq.org/

Getting Some “Backbone”

Boarded on a ferry with your fellow classmates, half asleep, you are completely prepared for the class trip that has been talked about for months. Suddenly, though, a bump knocks you out of your exhausted daze and you peer questioningly out the boat’s window. Is this a dream? You’re surrounded by perfectly blue water and sandy yellow beaches. Stepping off on to the land, CELP instructors greet you with open, bronzed arms. You just know that this trip will be the time of your life… and, as many have discovered, it was. However, the trip to Catalina Island was not all fun and games— to many students’ dismay, there was work involved. We snorkeled, participated in teamwork activities, went on hikes, learned about the island’s history, and more. However, amongst all these different exercises, the main idea was learning about the ocean and all the marvelous things that live within it. Our particular subject to explore was about the often overlooked, little creatures that keep our ecosystem in check. These small but mighty individuals are known as invertebrates.

Picture being a poor Mexican farmer who relies on his crops to keep bread on the table. One morning, with no prior signals, you awake to find that your fields are flooded, your house is practically gone from a tornado, and your family is no where to be found. As you wade through sewage littered with dead bodies, you know that this year is an El Niño year. El Niño is a warm coastal current that flows south along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru. El Niño is a Spanish term meaning, “the child”. What occurs during an El Niño is that there is a change of current in the oceans that causes cold, nutrient rich water to upwell and spread to other places, while warmer, less nurturing water takes its place. El Niño not only affects the water, though. This epidemic has been known to cause unusually powerful hurricanes, flash floods, severe droughts, and freak blizzards. El Niño was even thought responsible for the eruption of the El Chichon volcano in Mexico. Farmers can lose whole fields of crops while others, somewhere else on the planet, prosper from the sudden impacts. But how does this affect the invertebrates?
Well, as we found out earlier, kelp cannot tolerate water temperatures that are much higher than sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Being in the Channel Islands, Catalina was highly affected by the El Niño changes this year. While normally water on the beaches of Catalina are colder and nutrient rich, providing the perfect environment for kelp and therefore for invertebrates, this year the water was warmer and caused the once lush kelp forests to almost disappear altogether. And, once the kelp is gone, so are the creatures that our team had set out to study.
One small but fascinating creature that was affected by these El Niño changes is known as the Bat Star. One very small Bat Star was seen in Catalina, but not at Howland’s Landing where we stayed. It was spotted at Emerald Bay in a rocky crevice surrounded by red algae, sea grass, and giant kelp. The scientific name for the Bat Star is Asterina Miniata. These creatures live from Sitka, Alaska to Baja, California in the sandy bottoms of the intertidal zone up to nine hundred feet deep. The Bat Star feeds on clams, crabs, and a variety of other fish and plants— either dead or alive. Bat Stars are important because they clean up old, lifeless organisms from the sea floor, a job that not many other creatures take care of. Bat Stars also come in a variety of colors such as orange, red, yellow, green, purple, and brown!

You may know about nudibranches because of their dazzling colors and peculiar body structures, or you may not know them at all. Either way, nudibranches are fascinating creatures and also a proud member of the invertebrate family. First, some general information about nudibranches. They are closely related to sea slugs, though usually smaller and more colorful than their relatives. They range in length from less than half an inch to nearly two feet long! About 2,500 species of nudibranches have been identified, but many haven’t been discovered yet. Branches, along with octopuses, clams, and oysters, belong to a group of animals called mollusk. Nudibranch means “naked gills” in Greek and Latin. This is because some nudibranches have gills on the outside of their bodies, where protective tissues do not cover them. Nudibranches feed on sea anemones, sponges, worms, small fish, and jellyfish. They acquire their bright colors from foods such as the orange sea pen, a blue jellyfish, or a red sponge.
They sprout from beneath rocks like orange carnations, ooze along the bottom at the speed of an hour hand, and slurp their way through mud. Everywhere from the coral reefs to the deepest part of the ocean, from Monterey to Baja, California, you can find them. These invertebrates live on the rocky and soft bottoms of the low intertidal zone and out to 100 feet. They are echinoderms who look similar to sausage-shaped slugs, and range in color from dark green to brown. Sea cucumbers live on a diet of dead plankton, sand, fish excrement, and other seemingly “gross” items that collect on the sea floor. Sea cucumbers got their name from the black tipped spikes covering their bodies, making them resemble the vegetable that we are all familiar with. Something interesting about these little guys is their control over body consistency: when a predator is around, they become stiff, but when they’re hunting for food, they’re flexible and squishy.

In general, an invertebrate’s ideal habitat is to be in the intertidal zone, and sometimes even deeper. The intertidal zone is an area in between the land and sea that is covered by the sea during high tide, and is uncovered during low tide. In these areas invertebrates favor the rocky structures, and occasionally sandy bottoms and reefs. We all know that invertebrates love kelp. It’s where they make their homes, find their food, and hide from possible predators. However, not all invertebrates are this way. In fact, many invertebrates like the stingray, sea cucumber, or sometimes sea urchin don’t live in kelp at all. Stingrays can float freely about the water, sea cucumbers rest on the ocean floor, and urchins are happiest stuck to rocks or in crevices. Still, there is still one thing they all have in common: water temperature. In general, invertebrates can’t tolerate water much warmer than kelp can, which is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The main algae types that the invertebrates of Catalina depend on are sea grass, red algae, and giant kelp. There were other types of kelp and of algae that invertebrates depended on, but they weren’t talked about as much by the CELP instructors. Those major types of sea plants were some of the only ones we saw.
All in all, the trip to Catalina was enriching in so many ways. My team and I discovered things that ordinarily would never have crossed our paths in day-to-day life, (who knew that nudibranches acquired their stinging defenses from the plankton they ate?) and managed to have a genuinely fun time as we did so. We learned how to keep our planet healthy and functioning and how we, along with our classmates, literally have the earth’s future in the palms of our hands. But most importantly, we discovered the ocean and a few of its many secret wonders. Catalina should definitely continue to be an eighth grade tradition.