Fathers – Proteus

Common Murres in flight, some with fish. Image Credit: Julie Chase/ACCESS/NOAA/Point Blue

Common Murre are abundant here; many can be seen carrying fish on a return flight to the Farallon Islands, where hungry babies eagerly wait for their next meal. The islands — uninhabited by humans except for a small group of scientists — are nesting grounds for thirteen species of seabirds and six species of marine mammals that breed or haul out on the islands each year.

According to U.S. Fish & Wildlife service, the Farallons host the largest seabird nesting colony south of Alaska with numbers greater than 350,000 in the summer, including nesting Common Murres, Tufted Puffins, Pigeon Guillemots, and Western Gulls.

Just 27 miles west of San Francisco, these rocky islands weren’t always an ideal habitat for seabirds. During the California Gold Rush, a lack of agricultural infrastructure led hungry prospectors and entrepreneurial foragers to the Farallons for eggs, which pushed the Common Murre to the brink of extinction.

Over the years, a combination of exploitation from hunting and foraging to military uses left the island in a state of disarray. Feral cats and nonnative rabbits introduced by previous inhabitants obliterated many seabirds. Oil spills and pollution also took a toll on the habitat, which was established as a national wildlife refuge in 1909 by Theodore Roosevelt. Since the late 1960s, partnerships between U.S. Fish & Wildlife, NOAA, and Point Blue Conservation Science have helped to restore and maintain the Farallons for wildlife and research.

fig1 — Computer imagery shows the topography of the seafloor of Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and the steep drop-off of the continental slope west of the Farallon Islands. Image Credit: USGS/Woods Hole

We’re here on the second day of an Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies, or ACCESS, cruise. It is part of a long-term effort, now in its 15th year, to monitor and understand the oceanographic conditions, prey availability, and abundance and distribution of seabirds and whales in the region.

The data collected on these cruises, which take place three to five times per year, are used to help inform decision-making and research priorities in Northern and Central California National Marine Sanctuaries. ACCESS is a partnership between NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries and Point Blue Conservation Science.

Seabirds and marine mammals are drawn to the region by a process called upwelling. In the spring, strong winds move across the surface of the ocean circulating and drawing cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean areas that lie below the edge of the Continental Shelf and Slope. This process is part of what makes these waters, according to NASA, “some of the most biologically productive in the world.”

When these nutrients reach the sunlight at the surface, the perfect environment is created for marine plant life — from phytoplankton to kelp forests. The plants, in turn, feed the wildlife.

Krill thrive in these nutrient-rich waters. “Its size is tiny, but its significance is colossal,” Mary Jane Schramm writes. “Krill – a shrimp-like crustacean – forms the basis of the marine food web for whales, seabirds, fish, squid, seals, and sharks throughout the world’s oceans.”

As we zigzag along the coast via predetermined transect lines, this productivity is evident in both the variety and quantity of life seen here.

The expert wildlife observers are armed with details to make each sighting even more exciting. When prompted, Dru Devlin, research associate for Greater Farallones Association, offers up a litany of fascinating details about the Common Murres, which nest on steep, rocky cliffs.

P1120994-e1495499040662-1024x692 — Common Murres on Farallon Islands. Image Credit: Point Blue Conservation Science

The female lays one large blue egg, which she sits on for the duration without nourishment. When the egg finally hatches, she takes off to replenish her strength for whatever lies ahead and the father steps in to take care of the baby chick. (In Far from Land: The Mysterious Life of Seabirds, Michael Brooke points out that seabirds generally only produce one to two eggs per year, which he adds is smart evolutionary strategy, because otherwise the ocean would be full of birds with nothing to eat!)

Murre chicks leave the nest, before they’ve fledged, meaning they haven’t grown flight feathers. When the time comes, the father and chick leap off the steep cliff and into the water below where the little one floats for up to two months, waiting for its flight feathers to come in.

Yesterday, we heard a cacophony of bird calls throughout the day; Devlin explained that we were hearing the father birds calling out to their chicks as they returned from fishing for food. Devlin concludes her explanation by asking me to imagine what it must be like to look for your baby in the midst of rough seas and large swells and I find myself, once again, awestruck by the tenacity of seabirds.

Black-footed albatross in flight. Image Credit: Julie Chase/ACCESS/NOAA/Point Blue

Pacific White-Sided Dolphins. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman/ACCESS/NOAA/Point Blue

In a very short period of time, I’ve seen so much. As a city kid from Philadelphia, my encounters with animals outside of zoos were limited to squirrels and pigeons, so much of these sightings are pretty big firsts for me. While everyone was busy deploying equipment on a side deck after breakfast, I ducked around a corner for a quiet moment and found myself alone with a pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins, playfully lingering alongside our vessel.

Observing these creatures is a rare treat made even better when accompanied by a team of biologists and wildlife experts to explain what I see and fill me with a sense of wonder for new favorites like the uncommon Common Murres.

Spotted Wednesday, July 4:

Common Murres

Sooty Shearwaters

Sabine’s Gulls

Herring Gulls

Brown Pelicans

Cassin’s Auklets

Blue Whales

Humpback Whales

Unidentified Whales

California Sea Lions

Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest. Follower her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.

This article was updated on July 5.

History of Farallon Islands by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Farallon National Wildlife Refuge by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

California Coastal Current by NASA Earth Observatory

The Farallon Islands are Off Limits to Humans – but Not Wildlife by Bonnie Tsui

Common Murre Identification by Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Tiny Krill: Giants in the Marine Food Chain by Mary Jane Schramm for NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries

Left to right: Borman, Holcomb, Anders, and Lovell on the deck of the USS Yorktown. Image Credit: AP Photo/Bob Schultz.

USNS Comfort, a 1000 bed hospital ship, on the way to provide disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 2005. Image Credit: Henry J. Holcomb

Woodman leaving San Francisco Bay on the E/V Nautilus in 2017. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

The Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus is a 211 foot former East German “fishing boat” fully outfitted for scientific exploration. Image Credit: OET/Nautilus Live

As a kid, I sprawled out on the shag carpet in our family room reading Nancy Drew mysteries and watching Star Trek. My childish imaginings were punctuated by the steady rhythmic sound of an electric typewriter clicking and humming in the nearby study where my dad wrote at home. He is a newspaper man. Over the span of his 45 year career he covered everything from the local school board meetings to state capitals, from the Apollo 8 splashdown to the revitalization of the Naval shipyards in Philadelphia.

I spent my childhood loitering in bustling and grungy news rooms, coloring in the weekday comic strips and waiting for dad to finish this or that important thing. By the late 80s, he was on the foreign desk at the Philadelphia Inquirer where I “helped” edit a story about a young Mikhail Gorbachev leaping up a flight of stairs two at time — the blinking cursor of the Atex computer screen is forever burned in my memory.

Watching him finagle time in the locomotive car of freight trains, on Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters, on US Navy aircraft carriers and on a thousand-bed hospital ship taught meaningful lessons about writing, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Storytelling takes shape when you get out there: see the drama of boring everyday life unfold in front of you; smell the smoke and diesel fuel; get dirty.

I suppose it’s not surprising that I’ve spent the last few years cornering NOAA administrators and scientists at conventions and meetings, handing out my business card and asking for passage on any ship that would take me. I researched and applied for fellowships and writing residencies.

Finally, my efforts paid off. In 2017, I joined Oceanographer Robert Ballard’s Corps of Exploration on Board the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus as a science communication fellow. We spent two weeks exploring deep underwater canyons and the edge of the continental shelf in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary with the Nautilus’s beloved robotic duo, Argus and Hercules.

The sanctuary lies off the coast of California, northwest of San Francisco. The sanctuary territory was expanded in 2015 to 1286 square miles of largely unknown deep sea habitats. During over 90 hours of diving with the robots, we found deep sea sponge and coral communities, along with a host of life — octopuses, skates, and catsharks — clinging to and lingering about the rocky substrate at the bottom of the ocean. It was a breathtaking spectacle to witness scientists and sanctuary managers discover new species and gain a deeper understanding of this precious natural area. Their excitement was joyful and contagious.

This summer, I’m heading back to out to sea. Through the Proteus platform, we’ll experiment with a combination of essays, live field reports, graphics, photos, and whatever we can get our hands on to help transport you, our readers, to remote and wonderful places in our own ocean world.

In July, I’ll return to California on the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada for a seabird and marine mammal survey. The cruise is part of a collaboration between three National Marine Sanctuaries (Cordell Bank, Greater Farallones, and Monterey Bay) and Point Blue Conservation Science via the Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies (ACCESS) cruises. It will be the 15th year of data collection and observation, helping provide a baseline for understanding sanctuary waters and the impacts of humans and climate change on these regions.

In September, I rejoin the team on board the E/V Nautilus as a lead science communication fellow. This expedition is a joint mission with NASA to explore underwater volcanoes with robots at the Lōihi Seamount. By watching how ocean explorers work remotely from the safety of their vessels in dangerous and unfamiliar environments, NASA can be better prepared for future space missions.

We’ll also be covering George Divoky’s 44th field season in the Arctic where he studies a small colony of Black Guillemots. These seabirds spend most of the year out on the ice; they come to Cooper Island every summer to breed. While George set out to study guillemots in 1975, he also ended up conducting one of the longest running studies of sea ice and climate change along the way. This Plumb Line special series is titled Arctic Change.

With this, our first season at sea and all our future projects we’ll work together to build critical science literacy and to engage the public with the ocean–our planet’s life support system.

Spotted Wednesday, July 4:

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