Tautog!

Just south of Bullocks Point in East Providence, we trawled aboard Alletta Morris for a few minutes and all of a sudden the boat had stopped moving forward. We have a small camp this week with the Paul Cuffee School, so Captain Amy, Jean, Katie and I had to do a little extra pulling to get the net onboard. It was difficult to pull, as it seemed we had gotten our net caught on a large bottom dwelling object, but all of a sudden it was set loose. Whatever had stopped us had been removed, but the net was still heavy.

We got it up a little further so we could see the trawl net, and noticed that there was some large flapping going on in the belly of the net. We pulled the net out of the water, and the flapping moved to the cod-end. There were a couple of large fish.

“Tautog!”

We don’t often get tautog this large in our net, so I was excited. I get excited whenever we catch any “real” fish, and there were two! We untied the daisy chain and freed the fish into our water basins.

I had the campers look up the fish in a field guide, and once they identified them correctly, I had them observe the fish closely. They were clearly different in color pattern and in forehead shape. I taught them that the males have a larger forehead bump, whereas the females have a much smoother snout to dorsal transition. The coloration around the mouth is also very interesting; they are nicknamed "white chins". Both fish were right around 20”, though the male had more girth and weight to him.

It was the first time many of the students – and some of the staff – had seen tautog this large!

For more information on tautog, visit http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dmf/recreationalfishing/tautog.htm
Or http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/suffolk/Fisheries/species/tautog.pdf
Or http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.php?id=458

Plankton are NOT actually evil!

This time of year, the density of plankton in the upper Bay is really starting to pick up. Earlier in the spring, it is often tough to find both types (plants and animals, known as phytoplankton and zooplankton), but now that it's officially summer, both types abound.

We are currently running a joint camp with the Edgewood Sailing School, so students learn how to sail in the morning, then come to STB to learn marine science in the afternoon. On our way back from picking up campers at Edgewood aboard Save the Bay's vessel Swift, Captain Amy and I talked a little bit about plankton, and several of the campers said "Plankton is evil!" The only association the kids had with plankton was from the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, where a creature named Plankton hatches evil plans. At least they had heard of it somewhere.

So we decided to catch some, to show them what plankton really is.

We explained that the word plankton comes from the Greek "planktos," meaning a drifter, or wanderer. A good definition for plankton is that they drift with the currents. Most are microscopic, but they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes -- jellyfish, for example, can grow HUGE in some parts of the world. Some types of plankton can swim to some extent, but they aren't able to swim against a current, so they go where the current takes them.

Tom and Andrea set out the plankton net to tow at the surface for the little organisms. The surface is a good place to catch plankton because the phytoplankton need sunlight in order to photosynthesize, and the zooplankton, which are slightly larger, enjoy eating the phytoplankton. Our net had mesh the right size to target the zooplankton, because they are more active and more fun to look at. Once we got back inside, we started to explore our catch with the microscopes.

And, to the campers' delight, the first thing we saw was a copepod -- the very type of plankton that the little critter on SpongeBob most resembles!



(Picture was taken of projection from our micropscope image)

For more information on plankton, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankton
For information on copepods, visit http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/zoomorphology/Biologyintro.html
To book a program with Save to Bay to find your own plankton, visit http://www.savebay.org/education_overview.asp

The Otter Trawl

An otter trawl is one of the best ways to get an up-close look at the diversity of creatures that live in Narragansett Bay. Today, 20 seventh graders from Thompson Middle School in Newport came out on the Bay aboard Save The Bay’s vessel Alletta Morris, and helped Captain Eric and the crew — me and Bekah — to haul the trawl net aboard near Potter’s Cove, off Jamestown.



The students were hooting and hollering as they pulled the lines in, hand over hand. But Bekah, Eric and I were exchanging worried glances because the net didn’t feel quite right — it was resisting our pull, more than usual.

“You’re almost there, guys, just a little further!” Bekah said.

As the otter boards broke the surface, Captain Eric said, “Stop! Drop the line!” He grabbed one otter board and I grabbed the other. We knew Potter’s Cove usually provides a good catch, so we hoped for a full cod-end. When we got the net on board, we found a big round bulge, and the explanation for all that weight. “A tire!” Captain Eric said.

Despite the tire, we still managed to get a decent catch for such a chilly spring. Narragansett Bay is several degrees colder right now than it was at this time last year. After untying the fishermen’s knot at the cod-end, we opened the bag up wide, and wriggled the tire out to find a 12” winter flounder very happy to flop into the water benches we had filled up with Bay water. Also sharing the cod-end of the net were dozens of sea stars, a few spider crabs, a squid that was a little over a foot long, a few hermit crabs, and a channeled whelk.



Our crew cleared the net, got the lines out of the way, and invited the very excited students to the benches in the back of the boat to examine their catch. After hearing about how sea stars have an eye on the tip of each of their legs, and that it isn’t good for fish to be touched too much because of their protective slime coating, a few of the students noticed that tire. They started to examine it, and found that it had been in the Bay long enough that animals had started to use it as part of their habitat. It had a few barnacles and some algae attached along the outside, but the real treasures were found in the darkness of the inner rim. For me, the two most exciting finds were a small purple sea urchin, and a couple of chitons that had attached themselves onto the tire.

Students helped us to remove any animals that we could from off the tire and to return them to their natural habitat. It is amazing how even the smallest animals that depend on the Bay can adapt and adjust their lives to the stress that humans force them to face on a daily basis. Talk about habitat diversity!

For more info:
Click here for more info about bottom trawling.
Click here for info about Save The Bay education tours aboard Aletta Morris.