Turtle Tracks in Surfside !

(This one’s for you, Matt. You’re absolutely right, most of my recent posts could be classified as ‘rants’… life in the gulf isn’t the paradise it was back when I bought this little ‘retirement’ home. But we still celebrate small triumphs, and this week I was elated to discover turtle tracks, a  large Loggerhead Sea Turtle who braved the oil spill to return to Fort Morgan and lay her eggs in the sand. Sophie and I were first to find the tracks, but, to be  honest, I don’t think the Bon Secour crew could have missed that trail. Nevertheless, we waited patiently until they appeared and I could point out the tracks…)

file photo of loggerhead turtle (Credit: Janice Blumentha from biology-blog.com)

A Loggerhead sea turtle came onshore in the night, through the much photographed oil slicks, and laid her eggs below the pink house in Surfside. 

The biologist and two volunteers  from Bon Secour measured and photographed the tracks, confirming

Turtle tracks in Surfside

 the turtle was most likely a Loggerhead because of the diagonal imprints.

Her nest was carefully excavated (to be sure it wasn’t a ‘false crawl’ (is that like ‘Braxton-Hicks contractions for turtles??) and then staked to protect the fragile eggs from inadvertant trespassing.  They told me the number of nests was down from the past two years, but about equal to the count three years ago. That was very good news.

Bon Secour biologist and volunteers measure & photograph

I smile as I walk past the staked nest site now, we have amazing  gifts from the sea every day…

we just need to look past the tar balls to find them.

Carefully excavating to confirm the nest

(from PlanetJose on YouTube, music: Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell)
    

  

God help us …

  

Gifts from the Gulf

As the oil drifts slowly,  inevitably, to landfall on my beloved peninsula I have spent more time walking the beach.  There are many, many of us walking in the surf, searching for the dolphins, rays & silly jumping mullet that make our daily walks a daily treasure. And there have been a few intrepid fishermen braving the waves and federal ban for one last catch.    

It’s a very sad and frustrating time.    

But I have experienced some gifts from the gulf this week that remind me why I moved here…. delightful and unexpected.    

As the storms cleared this week, and the oil had not moved any closer to shore, we walked down the beach and found some unusual purple shells. They were fragile, and mostly crushed by the waves, but I did find two intact (and smelly) remnants.  After some research on Google I found they were probably janthina, a remarkable creature from the gulf.    

Janthina in soap

 

 They are hitchhikers from the dangerous galaxy of jellyfish!    

 From SeaPics.com…    

<<The violet snail is a marine gastropod that spends its whole life drifting on the ocean surface in warm seas, floating on a bubble raft of its own making. It feeds on jellyfish, such as the By-the-wind-sailor, Velalla velalla, or the Portuguese man-o-war, Physalia physalis. It starts life as a male and becomes female over time.    

The violet snail, Janthina janthina, also known as the purple bubble raft snail, is holopelagic, meaning it spends its entire life cycle on the open sea. It secrets mucus from its foot which binds bubbles together in a raft, on which it floats freely on the ocean, in equatorial and temperate waters. Its shell is 3-4 cm in size, light and fragile, and is a dark purple at the widest part, fading to a light purple at the narrow top. Its body ranges from dark purple to black.>>     

From JulianRocks.net

 

I was sad to find they were already decaying and could not be tossed back to the waves to find a new host.    

Photo of live Janthina on a jellyfish from http://www.manandmollusc.net

 

And today I came across some turtle tracks.    

Sophie and I have watched the crew from the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge mark a turtle nest before, but I’ve never had the privilege of being the first one to call in about new tracks in the sand. Maybe they were running a little late because of the unexpected visit from Secretary Salazar yesterday?    

Megan, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, follows the turtle tracks

 

They sent a nice young lady named Megan so I took her to the the driveway of the GRITS (Girls Raised In The South) house and we followed the tracks back to the beach. They wandered aimlessly in front of 5 or 6 houses on the beach before we reached the point where the turtle came up from the ocean.    

Megan was mystified, she’s from Colorado and has only been here a few months. She was, she said, more accustomed to tracking bears!   

She said the size indicated perhaps a juvenile and the coma-shape of the prints showed it was moving away from the ocean, to the GRITS house, and then across the road, where we lost the trail.   

Megan measures the turtle tracks

 

She got a call from Jackie, the biologist at the Bon Secour office, and she described the tracks. Jackie evidently told her this was probably not a sea turtle and, as Megan hurried back to her truck she suggested I ‘google’ marine tortoise to find more information about our little visitor.    

I did, and I also looked at the Bon Secour species list and I didn’t find any tortoise or terrapin that came out of the gulf to wander the sand and then flee across the road (as she/he passed over the dune between beach houses there was no tail track, so maybe she was sprinting?)    

http://www.fws.gov/bonsecour/reptiles.html    

Could this have been one of the Diamondback Terrapins currently being rescued by UAB?     

<<…only 50 mature females are wild in Alabama. “These species is just teetering on the edge of survival,” said Dr. Thane Wibbels, a UAB biologist. The terrapin aren’t endangered but considered a species of highest conservation concern.>> from the ABC news story.    

http://www.abc3340.com/news/stories/0410/730987.html    

If so, I’m glad she made her trip to the beach before BP’s oil gets here…

Licania michauxii

The Resourceful Subterranean Shrub

I was asked, about 50 years ago, to write a paragraph on the subject, “If I were a tree, which tree would I be”.  I don’t remember whether I chose the dogwood at the corner of the house, or the oak that shaded our backyard (it’s likely that choice was influenced by whomever helped me with my homework that night).

But if asked today today, I would choose to be the ingenious little licania michauxii growing along the road on the Fort Morgan peninsula. This clever little plant has adapted beautifully to the inhospitable climate of this place I call paradise!

I think I thought they were baby scrub oaks because of their leathery oblong leaves, and because they were growing beside the oaks in my yard, until they bloomed this spring.  Then this summer I noticed an olive-like fruit hanging from each small plant.

I watched as they slowly ripened to a plum-color, and then to pink, and finally a waxy white. 

Ripening olives in Jordan

I wasn’t able to identify this little plant from my lists of native plants, so I called the biologist at Bon Secour and learned they were licania michauxii and the fruits are called  ‘gopher apples’. 

According to Sharon LaPlante of the Florida Native Plant Society, it was named for a French spy!  “The name, Michauxii, honors Andre Michaux a French botanist who originally described the plant in the late 1700’s.  Michauxii was originally to take part in the renowned Lewis & Clark expedition, but was exposed as a French spy shortly before the expedition took place and was replaced by an American.”  

 

Sadly, I have never seen a gopher tortoise on the peninsula so the bumper crop of apples here goes uneaten.  In her article, Sharon LaPlant says, “The fruit is sought after by many animals including the gopher tortoise.  Humans also consume the fruit, but they are usually difficult to find because the tortoises, raccoons, opossums, foxes and other animals eat them quickly.  Some people find them unpalatable and relate the smell to the aroma of a new plastic shower curtain.”

 

The raccoons and foxes here aren’t eating them either, so I took a bite of one yesterday and found her description of  ‘plastic shower curtain’ to be absolutely accurate!

Gopher Apple

     But the genius of this little plant is that most of it is hidden underground…. we can see only the tips of each shrub above the sand dune. Thus it is protected from the wildfires and hurricanes that devastate the flora and fauna on this peninsula periodically.

According to Floridata, “Often found growing with turkey oak and longleaf pine, a stand of gopher apple looks like a patch of oak seedlings until you see the flowers or the fruits…. The leaves rise only about a foot  or so above ground, but a single clonal plant can easily spread its subterranean stems and branches over more than 100 square feet .”

 

So this clever little plant has it all…. a little foreign intrigue,  the preferred fruit for the king of tortoises, and a wily plan to survive the ravages of Mother Nature. 

 

 If I were a tree I would be the Licania michauxii…