Live Oak - Santa Ynez

Gianna, Kai, and I drove up the road to Live Oak after class this last week. 

It was absolutely beautiful, so I wanted to share a few photos with the group!

Enjoy.

:)

Thanks again for the popsicles, Claudia! 

Campus flora 2014

We saw lots of interesting species on our campus walk.  One of these was the Bunya Bunya, Araucaria bidwillii, native to Queensland (NE), Australia.  Other common names include bunya pine (though it is not a "pine"), and false monkey puzzle tree (it belongs to the same genus and resembles the monkey puzzle tree.)  

 

A striking feature of this tree are the stems with very sharp, pointed, tough leaves. Could this morphology have helped protect from herbivory in the Mesozoic (age of reptiles) when this tree was widespread? 

We also noticed many insects on the bark of the tree.  As a couple of our insect-knowledgeable students pointed out, these were likely mealybug eaters, though they looked like mealybugs themselves (the insects, not the students...)  Read more about these and the Araucaria genus at waynesworld.palomar.edu. (source of the photo below).

We didn't see any but we talked about the cones of this species  The cones are huge - 20–35 cm in diameter (the size of footballs)!   They contain large, edible seeds.  Because of these large cones, it can be a hazard to be underneath when the cones drop.  Check out this article from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) "Living under Bunya Pines is not for the faint hearted".

What a day at Coal Oil Point! Whales and octopus and plovers, oh my!

from marinebio.net by Genny Anderson

Sparklin' day at Coal Oil Point last Thursday - starting with the two gray whales breaching just beyond the kelp forests off the point!   At this point the gray whales are migrating north, back to the Bering Sea where they spend the summer.  Check out SBCC prof Genny Anderson's site for information about the gray whales and their journey past our coast.






Thanks to Zeke for finding our first octopus!  Again, some great info about this and other "treasures" we spotted, like the sea hare, I recommend Genny's site.  This is the page to read about low intertidal organisms.

We saw some of the sandy beach denizens.... those beach hoppers under the drying kelp wrack are so crucial to maintaining the bird diversity we saw.  Here is a nice page by UCSB researcher, Jenny Dugan, about the role of beach wrack and comparisons of "groomed" vs ungroomed beaches.

And finally, if you'd like to read about the snowy plover program (and perhaps even volunteer to be a docent)  click here!

from http://coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org/SnowyPloverProgram.html

Chaparral at "Lizard's Mouth"

Beautiful afternoon at "Lizard's Mouth" in the Santa Ynez Mountains!  We came to this site to see chaparral - the natural community that dominates the slopes facing Santa Barbara.  We saw great examples of some of the plant species' adaptations to our Mediterranean climate, including manzanita, chamise, bush poppy, and chaparral yucca with their tough water-conserving leaves.  Also in bloom was snowdrop bush, which manages to survive much of the drought (perhaps due to deep tap roots) but drops it leaves (deciduous) by the fall, and only grows new ones when the rainy season begins.

Bush poppy

Chamise

California scrub oak

Snowdrop bush

Manzanita

Chaparral yucca

But really... we also came to enjoy the rock-hopping and great views.  Even though it was a bit overcast, so we couldn't get a great ocean view, it was still pretty spectacular.

Carpinteria Bluffs Reserve

Nice walk to Carpinteria Bluff Reserve this week!  There have been fewer harbor seal pups born this year according to the docents at the overlook, who said ~75 have been recorded as compared to the past few years when ~100 were born.  There were several at the site when we visited, though they are now getting fairly big!

Some previous posts from this site are here.

This year we continued our walk along the bluffs beyond the pier, heading west to Tar Pits Park.  There we could see one of the places along the beach where the asphaltum bubbles out forming a mound from the bluff onto the sand.   Looking west we could see a bit trickling out from the rocks down toward the beach, too.

Tar pits park - looking west

Tar "sliding" down the rocks

You may want to read more about Carpinteria's Tar Pits, which are pretty cool!  In our book (Lentz 2013) see pp 57-60.  There is also information about the site on these pages:
from carpinteria.com,   caopenspace.org,  and parks.ca.gov 

From the latter: 

“The Carpinteria Tar Pits once bubbled up near the state beach. Spanish explorers noted that the Chumash caulked their canoes and sealed their cookware with the asphaltum. Around 1915, crews mined the tar, which was used to pave the coast highway in Santa Barbara County. In order to dig the tar, workmen had to heat their shovels in a furnace; the smoking tar would slice like butter with the hot blade. Long ago, the tar pits trapped mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and other prehistoric animals.”