Wayne Lanier, PhD, will be giving “Field Lectures” in Salt Marsh Microbial Ecology this summer at both Environmental Education Centers of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Please see SUMMER ACTIVITIES – pages 10-13, of Tideline Newsletter for the Summer 2009 schedule.

Not all salt marsh pond mats are formed and dominated by Cyanobacteria [see following post]. In some San Francisco Bay salt marsh ponds, the mat on the bottom of the pond is formed by species of the colonial diatom Melosira. The pond site I have designated as New Site 1 [NS-1] has a Melosira mat.

A Cyanobacterial mat is a layer of Cyanobacteria resting on the mud at the bottom of a salt marsh pond. Cyanobacteria that form mats range from individual Cyanobacterial cells forming a soft, gelatinous mat to long filaments that can form very tough, thick hard mats. The photograph below shows an area 4.3-cm X 7.9-cm of […]

These Notes were started after the May 26th hike to Drawbridge with Cris and Maria, during which we visited both the Pond A21 Site, near Drawbridge, and the Weep Site. Changes at both sites were so puzzling, however, that posting was delayed. First, until after two subsequent trips to the Weep Site, on Wednesday, 4th […]

In a spirit of play, rather than objective science, I created a 1,000x videomicrograph of salt marsh Cyanobacteria, and set their dance to music. Click on the dark triangle in the middle of the picture below [your system will need the sound turned on and the free-ware version of QuickTime Player].

This is the other side of Cris’s previous post. My job on that outing, and on a subsequent outing, was to measure the elevation of the Heron’s Head Park salt marsh ponds and of the tides that wash those ponds. Here is the most recent version of our instrument:

The Drawbridge Weep consists of various apparently unconnected narrow stream-like ponds along a channel bounded by the Drawbridge trail on the west and the railroad tracks on the east. The north end of this channel begins below the bridge over Coyote Creek and extends south to Alviso. We have called it the “Weep” because the […]

It was a bright and sunny day out on the Lake and we had just nailed our big clue:

On February 19th, 2007, Susan Swartzenberg, Tim Waters, Cris Benton, and I made a field trip to Lake Merced in San Francisco. Click on the blue underlined [or red] names for earlier reports of this field trip, and for web information about Lake Merced.

This is a report on the field and laboratory microscopy from our hike along the Weep near Drawbridge, with KQED Quest Interactive Producer Craig Rosa and Writer Anita Llewellyn. The Weep is a perfect example of the paradigm behind “Hidden Ecologies” – that apparently nondescript, often unnoticed environments contain beauty and mystery. Most hikers and […]