The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Snails, fish, insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds and/or flowers. All are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located.
June 2013
Aleck Bay,
Salish Sea,
Pacific Northwest
The good news: This opaque colorful stuff is NOT a toxic chemical spill.
The bad news? ...well, there really isn't any.
So what was this weird orange liquid washing up at the end of Aleck Bay a few days ago?
Follow me below the orange thingy for the story.
I visit this beach often. It may be the same location each time, but there's always something new to discover. It's a few minutes walk from my house and very quiet, with no roads nearby and just a few houses occasionally occupied. The quiet is misleading though...there's a lot going on when you pay attention.
Some orange California poppies were starting to bloom on the steep bank above the beach, I knew, and I wanted to see them. California poppies are non-native, but many of us have a great fondness for their cheerful delicate blooms, and over the years seed has been distributed in many dry spots on the island. Looking for orange, I saw them, and another splash of bright orange in the distance. Wow.
Closeup, it was opaque, but the liquid washed up and down as freely as water. It did not smell at all.
I collected a small sample of it in a bottle, and looked at the "Tang" under the microscope. Without even concentrating the sample, I could see a dense mass of large clear single-celled creatures, each with a clump of orange inside, and a "tail".
This is
Noctiluca scintillans, a dinoflagellate member of the phytoplankton. Dinoflagellates generally have two flagella (they look like tails), hence the name. Unlike the diatoms of the phytoplankton I showed you before, which photosynthesize like plants do, making their own food, some dinoflagellates are carnivorous.
Noctiluca is one of those. Mostly they feed on diatoms, trapping them on a sticky tentacle, engulfing them, and packaging them as food in a storage structure (a vacuole).
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A proliferation of microscopic creatures like this is called an
aquatic bloom, explosive sudden growth caused by ample nutrients and sunlight. Sometimes blooms are indicators of pollution runoff, when fertilizers or sewage enters the water providing an excessive nutrient supply. There are a few notorious dinoflagellate species that produce nerve toxins poisonous to fish and to people, and these cause Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). But don't use a visually "red tide" to identify a HAB because only sometimes are they red, and some harmless blooms are red, like this one, sometimes called a "tomato soup bloom".
We have some excess nutrient runoff in parts of the island, from lawns and failing septic systems, but not in this relatively remote bay. It's a natural event in the spring and summer, when the accumulated nutrients from dead seaweed and such over the winter become available and taken up suddenly by photosynthesizers in the long hours of sunlight. Noctiluca's population parallels that of its prey species.
Interestingly, besides the diatoms inside the Noctiluca, I also saw lots of pine pollen, the blue Micky Mouse shaped structures in this photo. Lots of pollen about lately. Makes a great food source, in the ocean too, apparently. Noctiluca blooms vary in color, depending on their food source, all shades of red/orange, and even green. Perhaps the abundant pine pollen made this bloom more yellowy-orange than reddish (the blue color in the photo is an artifact of the light microscope; pine pollen is yellowish in real life).
Noctiluca's claim to fame, if that bright orange isn't flamboyant enough, is its bioluminescence in the dark (
Nocti = night,
luca = lantern). We went out that night hoping to see lights in the water. Alas, it was gone. The only lights were reflections of the moon on the surface.
I imported a photo of some
Noctiluca bioluminescence, or Sea Sparkle, from Wikimedia so you can kind of see what it looks like. Here's a
video of someone dragging a line from a boat at night in Puget Sound, south of here. It is very cool to see in real life if you ever get the chance.
The next day, I went out there to see if there were any signs of the bloom. The water was clear. I even collected some seawater to see what populations were present. A whole new set of phytoplankton was present, some diatom species of
Navicula, in this photo swimming around the bristles of a copepod.
I did see a few
Noctiluca cells in very poor shape. Eerily, some
Navicula had been engulfed but not packaged, and were swimming around inside, searching for a way out, poking against the cell membrane. Eventually the dead cells would break apart, freeing the trapped diatoms, and become nutrients for some future generation of phytoplankton.
Looking at the water the next day, you'd never know what drama had played out there at the microscopic level.
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Observations of nature, big or small? I'd like to hear what you're seeing in your backyard, at astronomical midsummer.
11:29 AM PT: Thanks for the Rescue to Community Spotlight!
And just a reminder to readers about Green Diary Rescue, where you'll find many diaries about nature and environmental issues that have been published at DK during the week. I always find several really good articles I missed, you might too.
"Green Diary Rescue" is Back!
After a hiatus of over 1 1/2 years, Meteor Blades has revived his excellent series. As MB explained, this weekly diary is a "round-up with excerpts and links... of the hard work so many Kossacks put into bringing matters of environmental concern to the community... I'll be starting out with some commentary of my own on an issue related to the environment, a word I take in its broadest meaning."
"Green Diary Rescue" will be posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.