Angela, CUR – Dottie the Koi

In 2011 my parents decided to convert their pool into a pond and started adding different species of fish, including Koi. Until recently I was taking care of the pond and its inhabitants, and noted the Koi reproducing these last two years. This spring, black racer snakes took a swim in the pool-pond and some sort of turtle made itself at home in it. We also end up with hundreds of tadpoles several times throughout the year.

During one of his visits, my dad built plant islands with Styrofoam bases; after heavy storms, bits of Styrofoam float on the surface. I have seen the older Koi (about 1 foot long and thicker than my wrist) accidentally sucking these pieces in but then spitting them right back out. Recently one of the Koi born this spring was sluggish, didn’t submerge more than two to three inches, seemed blind, and kept rapidly moving its mouth. I pulled it out, fed it by hand, and then placed it into a temporary habitat for observation, but it perished overnight. Based on my recent experience in the OCE1001 lab, I decided to check the stomach for Styrofoam.

First of all, I had to choose between a butter and a steak knife; turns out a steak knife is not the ideal tool since I did more sawing than cutting. During last week’s lab, Samm (one of the current students) mentioned reading about plastic microbeads getting caught in fishes’ gills, thus I checked the gills for Styrofoam particles but did not see any with my bare eye. Guess what, there wasn’t any Styrofoam in the stomach either because apparently, to my surprise, Koi do not have stomachs! In my confusion I thought maybe it died because its stomach shrunk or due to inbreeding it was born without this vital organ and finally succumbed to this defect. After some googling I learned carp (Koi is a type of carp) do not have stomachs but the food is digested directly in the intestine on its way out.

Mike Salisbury, UR - Sea Turtles and Beach Driving

Click here to view this week's article

This week’s article discusses human activity on the beach and its effects on sea turtles. The article

begins by listing a few ways humans impact sea turtles and their nests. Night-time human activity,

This is why it is important to remove beach furniture from the beach  

beach furniture and other recreational equipment (e.g., canoes, small boats and beach cycles, etc.) are the first few that are discussed. Eventually beach driving is brought up. Some of the negative repercussions of beach driving mentioned in the article are as follows: tire ruts extend the time it takes for hatchlings to reach the sea, sand compaction above nests lowers nest success, erosion, and night driving disturbs nesting females and disorients/crushes hatchlings. The article concludes with a few solutions and implies that beach driving negatively effects sea turtles.

After witnessing some very soft sand and deep ruts from tires in New Smyrna earlier this month; I agree that cars have no business on a nesting beach. Cue dramatic music, dun-dun-duuuun! I think we should be realistic about this issue though; putting an end to beach driving in Volusia County would be difficult. No driving on the beach during peak nesting months would be a good start. There has to be a compromise here, any ideas?

Getting past tire tracks/ruts is quite a feat for hatchlings 

As mentioned in this week’s article, there are a few things we can do in the meantime:

• Don't drive on sea turtle nesting beaches                                                                              
• Make sure to fill in any holes you dig while visiting the beach                                       
• Remove any beach chairs, beach umbrellas, boats, or other beach furniture each evening
• Avoid disturbing marked sea turtle nests, and take your trash with when you leave the beach

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Comments from last week:

Deb 'n Paul

Great post! I like that you provided the link to your article--good thinking! Also a question--who said that raking the beach makes life easier for baby sea turtles venturing out for their first time? I'm just thinking here but--I would think that in the natural world, baby sea turtles have to make due with all sorts of environments and I would also wonder if the sargassum offers them a sort of protection from predators (?)

I thought the same thing! Or at least it would fall in the same category as raking/smoothing the beach and not be allowed. On September 8^th I witnessed a Volusia County worker (dubbed Bob the Turtle Man) smoothing out the sand in front of a turtle nest using a similar setup to the one mentioned last week. I interviewed him after he smoothed the sand. Here is a quote from Bob I wrote in my field notebook, “It’s hatching season, smoothing out the sand makes things easier on these guys if they decide to hatch tonight.” Spoiled sea turtles I suppose, but they need all the help they can get.

This article mentions sargassum being used as protection from predators. It doesn't discuss sea turtles, but I would imagine it would be a great shelter for them.  I should mention Bob the Turtle Man was not removing any sargassum.

Other questions...is this soft sand problem seasonal? i.e., are tides/wave action generally higher in the winter than summer?

It seems like a year-round issue, I think it would be more common in the winter because there is more surf.  Although, a summer beach is generally broader than a winter beach, so the sand has more time to dry in the summer. Overall, it depends on the sea conditions at the time (tides, waves, etc.).   

After completing your first post--what do you think your interest is leading you on this topic?

I’m excited about this project! I have learned that beach driving is a broad and controversial topic. Living near a driving beach and witnessing the chaos really fuels my passion. I am considering the effects of beach driving on sea turtles, but this is a tentative idea.

Angela Boney

Did you use any kind of tools to measure the 20ft by 10ft and 1ft deep or did you estimate these numbers? If you estimated these measurements, what kind of tools would you need to get accurate numbers if you continue this research?

I did not use any tools for my measurements this time. In the future, I would use a good old-fashioned tape measure for accurate data. 

Samm, UR - Could We Be Hurting the Coral, Too?

After learning about the potential hazards with sunscreen use and the slowed growth of phytoplankton, I was surprised to learn that our sunscreen could also be damaging coral.

Coral Reef Safe Sunscreen

The first "article" I found on the subject wasn't even an article! I had stumbled onto a website for Coral Safe Sunscreen. Their website claimed that four commonly found sunscreen ingredients (Oxybenzone, Butylparaben, Octinoxate, and 4-methylbenzylidene camphor) were shown to cause coral bleaching. Their website also led me to two different articles on the subject, but I was a little skeptical. After all - despite the fact they had hyperlinked to several articles AND the scientific study the information came from - I knew that this company was still trying to "sell" me their products, and I did not want to be so gullible as to just believe what they were telling me.

Bleached coral

So, I clicked on the link for the scientific study on sunscreen causing coral bleaching by promoting viral infections. Their results stated that sunscreen (even in small amounts) could cause coral to completely bleach because the organic ultraviolet filters in sunscreens caused viral infections in symbiotic zooanthellae.

Looking at the PLOS ONE scientific study for sunscreen pollutants, I noted that they included both Oxybenzone and 4-methylbenzylidene camphor as UV filters.That is two studies now that have found these sunscreen ingredients to be harmful to sea life. If I definitely decide to pursue this topic for my IRP, I think I would like to see if sunscreen is causing similar issues in freshwater sources, like our springs.

Angela, CUR – No Guts No Glory

Over a decade ago, I dropped AP Biology during my senior year of high school because I found out we had to dissect a pig fetus. Additionally, due to the various parts of creatures dissected in Biology II, I’ve been avoiding that course. Using a long handled shovel, I have scooped out and buried deceased frogs and one Koi fish out of my parents’ pond, but otherwise I’m one of those cowards that buys neatly packaged fish and chicken at the grocery store. 

First Cut

Thanks to Dr. Woodall, as well as Claudia Dennis from NOAA, I had a chance to get out of my comfort zone and handle my first dead fish. Former OCE1001 Lab student, Cathy Black, lent a hand and taught me how to gut a fish. We then weighed the guts, and proceeded to rummage through the contents in search of plastic pieces.

 

The three Black Sea Bass, may they rest in peace, I believe were caught 20 miles off shore from St. Augustine. Based on the stomach contents they had feasted on silver-scaled fish, small crabs, and a particularly large mollusk, which Cathy identified as a Moon Snail using the Reel Florida iPhone app. Even though I was finger deep in fish guts in order to inspect the various items contained within, I did not find any plastic pieces. I wouldn’t call this a bust, however, because next time one of my parents’ Koi finds an untimely death guess what I’ll be doing. 

"Gary"

Brent, UR: Noise Pollution In the Ocean

     The article I have chosen this time is on noise pollution and the different types there are. the article explains that there are three types of man made noise pollution like ship noise, noise from oil drilling, and military sonar. however a couple of theses are broken down into subcategories. First off is ship noise. Ships are constantly moving with their engines running, however this sound can range between 20-300Hz which is the range many wales use for communication. I'm sure you can imagine that since the ships sound runs at the same hertz as whale communication that that would lead to accidental collisions between whales and ship propellers. That in fact is the leading death in wright whales around the world. Next is Drilling noise and it is broken into two categories: Exploration and Drilling noise. Exploration noise is the use of a  system called an air-gun array. This air-gun array sends incredibly loud sound directly into geological structures to detect for oil or natural gas trapped below the surface. Then there is drilling noise, which is exactly as you could imagine it sounding. the sound may not be as loud as the air-gun array however the sound lasts for a longer period of time. with both the air-gun array and the noise from the drilling platform this is enough to drive fish and mammals away from the habitat where they use to breed. Last is military sonar. The article states that back during the the cold war sonars weren't as bad since they focused on deep waters but now the sonar has a shallower and broader range. The noise from this up to date sonar is almost as powerful as the air-gun array. This is known to cause fish and whales to leave there preferred habitat and also causes mass amounts of whales to beach themselves to escape the noise. However with advances in technology and the study of marine noise fisheries are able to deploy underwater noise makers, or pingers, with their nets to warn whales to keep them from tangling in their nets.

http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/our-work/whales/understanding-sources-ocean-noise-pollution

Propeller marks in a whale

Air-gun Array