Weekend Field Trip

This past weekend our class went on a field trip to the Olympic National Park. We stayed at NatureBridge on Lake Crescent and explored the forest there. We also took a drive to explore the tide pools on Sunday as well. It was a beautiful place and we unexpectedly had very nice (sprinkling a little) weather that made the trip even better. My favorite part was the short hike to Marymere Falls. Any chance I can get to see a waterfall I will take.














Before we went on the trip Bob Paine visited our class and gave a talk on predation, disturbance, competition, and facilitation. We witnessed a lot of these things on our field trip in both the forest and in the tide pools.
In the Olympic National Forest:
Competition

• Western Hemlocks will wait for years for Douglas Firs to fall down in order to take over



Really Big Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

• In a large old growth forest filled with a variety of plants and animals, there will always be a competition for resources between different species and between organisms of the same species.

• These mushrooms and moss are competing for the space available on this fallen log

Facilitation

• Dragon Skin Lichen- Fungi and algae together
• Fix nitrogen and then fall from the trees and decompose and become part of the soil

• Bacteria in the roots of trees fix nitrogen in exchange for nutrients- Can link many trees together



Moss Covering the bark of a Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum)

• Moss lives on the bark of trees
• Good and bad for the tree

Disturbances

• Logging
• Logging left stumps behind
• Logging roads destroy a section of forest
• The Beginning of succession has begun on the logging road we found. Ferns, grasses, and other small shrubs have begun to grow on it





This tree fell across Barnes Creek and the root mass was quickly
utilized by Elder Berry, Bleeding Heart, and Salmonberry.

• Trees falling down can take other trees with them and destroy some shrubs underneath them, but once they are on the forest floor they are utilized as nurse logs and many species of plants thrive off of them

• Fires are a natural occurrence in forests. Some trees are built to withstand them, but fires can clear a pretty substantial space in forests 

  

  This tree's inside dead wood was burnt by a fire and even though the
  tree is hollow at the bottom, this tree is still surviving

• Dead wood that falls into streams and rivers can disrupt the flow of the river. However, it was discovered that dead wood falling into the rivers was an important event and they need to be left in there

Logs at the base of Marymere falls on
Barnes Creek

 
 

Predation

• There is a food web in all ecosystems. I'm not sure what the food web is in this forest, but we were told to beware of hungry mountain lions, so I think we know what the top of the food web is.

• This deer eats lots of grass and is eaten by mountain lions and other things that are further up on the food chain

The next day we went to the tide pools. It was incredible the amount of diversity that was present in these micro ecosystems. Climbing on all the rocks to make it to best tide pools and to make it to the big star fish at the edge of the rocks was tough, I even fell once. Discovering all the small creatures hidden under rocks and hiding beneath the seaweed was worth it. We even got to see a dead octopus that had washed up on the rocks.

Predation

• There is predation all over the place in the tide pools: animals eat seaweed, other animals eat those animals, even bigger animals eat those animals and so on
• We witnessed a Hermit Crab eating a snail out of its shell



This shell had holes pecked
into the top and bottom of it

• Empty shells were everywhere, having been mollusks that were eaten by the Seagulls and other predators when the tide was going down

• Other types of crabs are also big predators in the tide pools like this little guy, but birds also prey on these crabs

Competition

• In the tide pools, there is competition for space that will be in the less harsh conditions when the tide goes down. Minimizing exposure to the sun and the wind is ideal for most creatures and also a space in the pools left behind by the tides going down is a hot commodity
• Space on the rocks are heavily competed for. Muscles and different kind of barnacles are edge to edge trying to claim their space

  

  Muscles Packed tightly together

Facilitation

• Seaweed will attach to whatever surface it can find a secure home on, including muscle shells. I am sure this is much to the muscles chagrin, but I don't think it has much of a choice.  

Disturbances

• I saw the scarring of the barnacles that were taken off the rocks by some way or another
• There were empty patches of rock that some sort of disturbance (waves, animal, etc.) created

A line of Barnacles has been created by a repeat
disturbance on the surface of the rock



 

• This is a valley where a variety of creatures (barnacles, giant star fish, giant green sea anemones, and many types of seaweed) have chosen in order to get away from the harsh elements during low tide exposure... to get a spot in here would be a very big competition as well
  
   

Other cool things:

We found a leopard nudibranch
and identified it

It may be hard to see, but this
is a tidepool sculpin at the bottom
of this picture. It was amazing to
see a fish living is such a small
amount of water.





We found a (sadly) dead octopus