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. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...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. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
Pacific Northwest
April 7, 2014
Sunny spring day's quest to a freshwater wetland on the island...what's awakened this early in the season?
At the south end of the island, and part of Watmough Bay Preserve, this wetland is remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it has very few non-native species, plant or animal. Its setting is also quite dramatic, at the base of a 500 foot cliff, and separated from the ocean by a narrow sandy berm. Looking through the trees across the wetland to the cliff we see a sea of Cattails.
(more Watmough wetland below...)
A closer look shows us these are last year's Cattails (Typha latifolia). The fluff from the old seed stalks dries in the sun and catches on a spider's web. I saw a hummingbird buzz in to snatch some fluff, which makes great nesting material.
Inspired by bwren's recent discoveries at her wetland elsewhere in western Washington, I bushwacked through the vegetation to collect a sample of wetland water. Downed moss-covered trees, understory and alders greening up, and sedges border the cattail marsh. I saw some fresh Water Parsley and Duckweed floating on the surface.
My sample contained mostly detritus, bits of dead stuff. Not too surprising, considering the dark cold months since last fall. The spring blooms of phytoplankton have not started yet, and the spent aquatic plants and animals have been breaking down all winter into the mud. All this organic material is a great resource though, and most of the living activity I saw was grazing detritivores.
So what life did I discover in today's wetland water?
Copepods, microscopic arthropods, were plentiful. The larval form is on the left, an adult on the right. I'm very familiar with copepods, they being the most abundant zooplankton in marine plankton, but these had numerous orange globules inside them. Don't know what they are. Might be packets of oil, which many phytoplankton have to keep them buoyant and as a high-energy food source. Could the copepods be incorporating those for the same reason? I know it is harder to stay buoyant in fresh water than salt water.
There was a lot of pollen in the sample. On the left is Redcedar pollen, which is a potent allergen at this time of year. The object on the right is the size of a pollen grain, but I can't identify it. Anybody have any idea what it is (besides a microscopic soccer ball)?
Decomposers like bacteria are too small to be visible at my 100x magnification. However, fungal threads are big enough to see. Some are attached to a "soccer ball" which will become unrecognizable detritus in short order.
Most of the detritivores were zipping around, too fast to catch in a photo. Sometimes they'd stop to munch on a delectable chunk of something. This is another arthropod, an Ostracod:
Rotifers were fairly abundant. Rotifers are microscopic animals in their own phylum, generally invisible and unknown but of great importance, swimming around shredding and consuming dead things, and also a major food source for other animals. Lest you think your neighborhood is rotifer-free, here's a description of where they live:
Rotifers can be found in many freshwater environments and in moist soil, where they inhabit the thin films of water that are formed around soil particles. The habitat of rotifers may include still water environments, such as lake bottoms, as well as flowing water environments, such as rivers or streams. Rotifers are also commonly found on mosses and lichens growing on tree trunks and rocks, in rain gutters and puddles, in soil or leaf litter, on mushrooms growing near dead trees, in tanks of sewage treatment plants, and even on freshwater crustaceans and aquatic insect larvae.
The name "rotifer" is derived from the Latin word meaning "wheel-bearer"; this makes reference to the crown of cilia around the mouth of the rotifer. The rapid movement of the cilia in some species makes them appear to whirl like a wheel.
(source)
Using a cool ID resource bwren found, I've identified these tentatively as
Euchlanis (on the left) and
Monostyla (on right).
~
Taking a last look down into the cattail marsh before heading into the woods, I caught an accidental sighting of an aquatic predator in an open pool way out in the cattails. I couldn't get any closer than this.
But using the telephoto lens of my camera, I could see motion on the surface. Some of it was overlapping concentric ripples created by Water Striders zipping amongst the old stalks, fresh green cattail shoots and clumps of floating algae.
But that wasn't all stirring the surface! Chasing the water striders, and who knows what else, there were two larval Rough Skinned Newts (Taricha granulosa). Awesome! I've seen these orange-bellied amphibians often enough crossing roads and paths to and from their mating pools, but I have never seen the aquatic stage before. Even at this distance, you may be able to see their orange rimmed tails.
~
The wetland awakens. No unicellular photosynthesizing life yet that I could see, but emergent vegetation is greening up and some floating algae looks new. Plenty of insects, and their predators. I'll be heading back out there again in a few weeks to see how the aquatic populations are changing. Hopefully some phytoplankton will wake up now the days are getting longer.
For more background on the Watmough site - its geology, history, protection status, including a photo of an adult Rough Skinned Newt - see this diary.
What's up in nature in your neck of the woods?
And -
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