Video
Kenai Fjords Fieldwork
Transcript
This is the rocky site of the nearshore benthic program. What we're doing is monitoring primarily how algal communities change over space and time. And we're also monitoring the different invertebrate species that play a critical functional role in the ecosystem, such as predatory snails that might consume mussels, or chitons that might graze down the algae, or limpets that provide an important resource for black oystercatchers and other nearshore inhabitants. So what we do at each of these sites, is that we have two transects that are laid out along contours, which have two very different biobands. And what a bioband is, is a different algal community—whether it is more like a brown, barnacle, and mussel band you see across the shoreline, or one that's more like red algaes and green algaes. The transects that we sample at each and every site are permanently established. They came out here in Kenai Fjords and Katmai—the parks were set up in 2006—so we've got almost 10 years of data now. And they are bolted with eye-bolts bolted into the rock using anchors and the transect is laid out the same way every year. And at each one, we have what are called quadrats, which are little square sampling units that we place down, and we go point by point looking at all the algae that is encountered when we put this little knitting needle down. It's kind of funny to use a knitting needle, but it allows us to sample these environments in an unbiased way. You drop the knitting needle at the cross-hairs within our quadrat, and whatever is touching that needle, we call out... Tokidadendron (Toe - kee - dah - den - drun), rock, Fucus (Few - kus), Cryptosiphonia (Krip - toe - si - phone - ee - ah), Mastocarpus (Mast - oh - kar - pus), Acrosiphonia (Ak - row - si - phone - ee – ah), rock.
I'm looking for mussels. You can see they are really well-camouflauged on this beach. Sort of hidden in here. So I'm looking up the beach until I don't find anymore mussels. I have to have more than a meter gap without any mussels. And it doesn't have to be exactly on my transect line. I'm sort of looking up this swath. So then once I don't see any more mussels, I'll go back to the last mussel I did see, and that will be the top of this sampling transect. And one of the things this beach has, it has an awful lot of these mussel shells—you can see these little holes in them. I don't know the best way to show that. And that's from snails, and they come and they drill this little hole, and then poke through and it detaches the mussel. And then they can open that shell and eat out the mussel. So a lot of these shells in place have been eaten out by snails or oystercatchers.
We're sampling soft sediment for intertidal clams. We're sampling at the zero tidal elevation. And so we dig these quarter-square meter quads about 10 to 15 centimeters deep, and we're looking for clams basically. And we'll take them back to the big boat, measure them and ID them, and it gives us a sense of species composition and size distribution of what's available, basically, as prey items for some of the top level carnivores in the system like sea otters and sea ducks. And we do this at 5 different sites along the whole park coastline. So since we're random-sampling, we don't actually get to target where the best clams may be. So we're not as good at finding clams as some of the other critters, but this certainly gives us a sense of what's here.
Description
Kenai Fjords Fieldwork
Duration
4 minutes, 3 seconds
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