 I have also been a way of facilitating the UC Berkeley researchers in getting to know the local people, both the European American settlers and the tribal members. So that's been extremely rewarding and besides friendships with many of you here, that was certainly one of the reasons I wanted to join ARF and thank you very much because of deep interest and wanting to learn more about our coastal tribes. I wanted to tell you, in case you're not aware of it, that UC has 40 natural areas of significant size protected for natural history research and Berkeley manages five of these, including the Angelo Reserve, which will be the center for the story I'll tell you today, but Berkeley manages five and we have these thanks to the fact that one of the founding professors was in the capstone year of his PhD on fringe-tone lizards when he came and found they'd built a, sorry, running, they'd built a motel over his study population. So to put it in shorthand, he didn't get, thank you so much, Meg, he didn't get mad, he got even, thank you, could you give that to Meg, and he got all of his rancher friends to donate lands to UC for natural reserves with the idea being that you can study nature there, but you can't leave a heavy footprint the way the agriculture or forestry reserves might. Certainly they're very suitable for archaeological research and human cultural research. Bill's already expanded us into geology, geomorphology, and hydrology. I'll go through this quickly, but I thought you guys might be interested in the human history of the reserve that I'm talking about, which is in the headwaters of the South Fork of the Eel River. It's about an 8,000 acre reserve now, and it was originally saved by Heath and Marjorie Angelo, who had funds from San Francisco businesses, went and bought land, bought up more land as farmers started going broke in the early 1900s, but soon they had more land than they could afford to pay the taxes on. So Marjorie had heard of the Nature Conservancy. Angelo was the first gift to the Nature Conservancy west of the Mississippi. Here's their homestead, and their grandson Peter Steele is the only paid employee now, the steward of Angelo Reserve. He's been amazing. When it came under UC management, we were able to do a lot of crazy looking experiments there that would never stand up under national parks or Nature Conservancy lands. You know the degree to which archaeologists would like to do manipulative experiments, but if they don't leave a long-term legacy on the land, you're welcome to use these reserves for that. Under Bill's leadership, we got involved a lot more with hydrology and earth sizes. Sorry, I always get asthma when I run through an airport too. Not real asthma, it just feels like it. So we also got some gifts. There's a decent little lab there where you could do wet lab stuff. There are classrooms that are comfortable for 30 to even 50 students if you open the bar doors. So just realize these are UC Berkeley UC facilities. If you want to go to a workshop or to check it out for a research visit, Bill and his colleagues have informed us a lot about what water and trees are doing on the critical zone, which I think he was lecturing to you about. And I wanted to show you the operation that he went through to get a slant-drilled Vedos zone monitoring system to watch rock moisture and critical zone moisture under the earth with a slant-drilled well that lets you look at the evolution of water, gases, microbes without disrupting a water column in a well. And they get the ridiculous number of signals back a minute from wired up networks. So that's what we have going in terms of hydrology and geomorphology, and it's greatly informed ecology. This is the way we envision the ecology tying into the critical zone that water is crucial, of course, to river ecology, to the coastal oceans, to vegetation. And the critical zone determines the storage of the water and therefore how long we have surface water or runoff after it stopped raining. And Bill and his colleagues are really interested in the parts that the trees are extracting, the part that is left to runoff. And when they were just starting their operation, I met Ron Reed and Bill Tripp and some other Karuk members through the friendships with Tom Carlson, who's an ethnobotanist in our department. They visited Angelo. They're looking at Bill's brain surgery. And Ron has commented that, well, if you let us manage the forest the way our grandparents did, we'd have more cold runoff laid into the spring for the fish. And so this is an interesting hypothesis that I think Bill and his colleagues are testing with technology, and they tested with long knowledge. So I wanted to comment that we think of this northern northwestern part of California, especially southern California, and think of us as being relatively water rich. That's true. Well, we get these beautiful atmospheric rivers that Les Roundtree depicted in this fabulous nature article, which I use every time I teach, even by a one. With these atmospheric rivers slamming into the north coast, we have gotten epic floods in this region that have wiped out towns and bridges. But as you all also know, we had four and a half years of severe drought there also. And as the ridge held its place, the Eel River, which drains almost 10,000 square kilometers, went dry, totally dry near the mouth for the first time in recorded written history. People said, well, if it had to happen, it's good it happened in September because the fish had already gotten out. And then we didn't have the big fish getting stuck in a warming puddle upstream if the river was that dry. But there are also consequences for the rest of the food web, including the primary producers. Most of the watershed is nourished by thin skins of algae on rocks or more copious growths of algae that grow on macroalgae. And those species change depending on hydrology. You can have very, very, very good, highly nutritious diatoms dominating in a year. But you can also get overgrowth of toxic cyanobacteria, which are getting notorious now for killing dogs, neurotoxic cyanobacteria in our system. I'll tell you more about this, just reminding all of us, which we don't need. I'm sure that it's a Mediterranean system with summer droughts, winter floods. And so you can really have combinations of winter and summer hydrology that affect what the algae in the food web are going to do. And therefore, whether they'll support salmon or cyanobacteria, the toxic ones. Dry winter, I'm calling just a winter that doesn't move the bed. Low flow winter. This is maybe a total of 300 cubic meters a second. This is only 10 here for scale. Wet winters normally move the bed once or more. That makes a big difference for how much algae you get. A wet summer, well, we're modest in our goals. A wet summer just has high enough base flow that the main stem sunny pools stay gently flushed and they generally stay cooler than about 25 degrees C. Dry summer gets much more stressful than that with things warming and stagnating. And that's what causes most of the trouble. About 25 years of work went into this little diagram and I won't bore you with it, but you can read about it if you're interested. If you have a scouring flood, you wipe out big predator resistant grazers. That gives the algae a window of time in which they bloom like crazy. And then over the summer, faster growing edible soft insects come in, good fish food, mayflies, midges. And they feed the higher traffic levels, the predators, including salmon. So a scouring flood gives you a salmon-supporting state. A lack of flood scour over the winter produces a summer in which these big armored grazers get all the algae and less goes to salmon. We also see this downstream from dams if we've taken away natural flood scour. After a flood scour, you get a barren bed of first before things recover, then the algae recovers first. It becomes green and many meters long. It then starts senescing and warming a little bit in the summer, turning yellow and then reddish color. And let me tell you what those colors mean. They mean something really important for ecological nutrition. The growths of green algae start out clean and green. But I like to say that this macroalgae, Kledoffer is the name, begins its life with green hair. Then she turns into a blonde when she's middle age. Then she becomes a redhead in her older age. So early summer, mid summer, late summer, what's going on? What's going on is that is a rough-skinned green alga host that gets epiphytized just as strangler figs epiphytize trees. Diatoms epiphytize these algae. This is about the diameter of a human hair, this green Kledoffer strand that you see in the scanning EM. And it's covered with diatoms, initially just a mono layer of diatoms that either glue themselves on or attach with gelatin stalks. So that's when it looks blonde. It has just a thin layer of carotenoids and looks yellow. When it starts getting this rusty red color, there's been a transition to very deep layers, five to ten cells deep of a special diatom that the more we learn about it, the more awesome it seems to be. This diatoms epithemia. It comes on mid to late summer when the flows have slowed down, when the river is more nitrogen limited than it was previously. And epithemia has two tricks. One is they're very mobile. They can cruise around so they can pile up on each other's shoulders and take their turn in the sunlight or getting some fresh water. The other is that they host an endosymbiotic cyanobacteria. So live epithemia, you can make out the endosymbiotic cyanobacteria that live within the host diatoms here, but they're easier to see here because the diatoms did. It's just showing us its glass frustral or a shell and the blue-green symbiotes, the cyanobacteria, are on their way out too because they require the diatom. They don't have either photosystem. They can't fix their own carbon, but they can fix atmospheric nitrogen. And with that atmospheric nitrogen, they make all the amino acids required for protein. So the epithemia turns out to be just a superfood. There's a lot of it. It encrusts the coast and it makes the diatom itself makes pufas. If you had a handful of these diatoms, you'd say, my hand smells fishy, but my algal grew, who you will meet in a few slides. Rex Lau says, no, fish smell diatomy because the polyunsaturated fatty acids that make us healthy when we eat salmon came from their algal food base through their prey. Carotenoids are the vitamins that are plant sunglasses really and accessory photosynthetic pigments and then all these amino acids. This was just found out fairly recently by a Japanese team who sequenced epithemia and found it can't do anything except for some reason make all the amino acids from the protein from the nitrogen that it fixes. And this is great for the diatom, but it's even greater for the grazers. So epithemia is preferred, voraciously consumed, and supports really fast growth for all of the algavores, all the grazers in this food web, the snails, the tadpoles, and these insect larvae midges. So if you ask the midge what it's been eating or if it can't answer, you can look at its poop, you can see empty epithemia frustrals are almost entirely its diet. You could also make that inference if you just looked at the little retreats that they weave, they settle into the rusty algae and they clean up the neighborhood turning it green around where they're reaching out and grazing. So these things are built of epithemia and if you enclose rusty algae you get about 25 times per area more bug meat emerging from the river with the epithemia under these emerges traps than you get with green or yellow algae. So epithemia is a super food. What happens downstream? The angelo and you guys if you use these reserves should think of them as stepping stones to a region, not just protected places but stepping stones to a region for research and we and other angelo researchers have gone all the way down to the mouth looking at the rivers and fortunately or unfortunately there are many places all the way down where you can still wade across the eel river because the land juice and the super floods knocked a lot of sediments into that river made it much wider and shallower. So we can do these transects to keep track of algae and find that the algae downstream is similar to the algae upstream maybe a little bit accelerated seasonally where it's warmer but what happens when you take this river algae and introduce it into the estuary or the coastal ocean and that was the interest of Charlene Ingher completed her dissertation a few years ago she did these what we call cafeteria experiments. The eel being a short steep river is kind of gravelly through a lot of its estuary more than flatter rivers would be. The gravels are full of little amphipods and isopods little crustacea not insects anymore but in the saltwater crustacea that are feeding the shorebirds and also feeding importantly salmon that are gaining their last growth and length before they head out to the ocean where they'll be facing gauntlets of predators as well as a lot more food. So Charlene transplanted river algae and compared how much these little grazers liked it versus the soft green marine algae like sea lettuce and hetero morpher. The estuarine ecologists who didn't look upstream thought that was the base of their food web along with marine diatoms but if you ask the amphipods they find the seaweeds really boring compared to the delicious river imported experimentally imported algae. So put these little split pipette choices before them with sea lettuce another marine seaweed or epiphytized cladophara and it disappears within minutes which makes it a hidden carbon source for the estuary. So how do you find out how much river algae is entering the estuary if it disappears right away? Oh you put these sains across the river and Charlene found one miracle cross section right below the fern bridge for those of you who know that's just where the river is about to turn brackish at the highest extent of salt water intrusion. So we did that and even at low flow you could get almost all the way across but couldn't quite hold the nets down in some of the fast areas so heroic Berkeley undergraduates stepped on them and got pushed back and back and back as they held the cross section maybe five ten meters sometimes but they maintained the cross section for their ten minutes and we got the data and for two years Charlene was able to show that most of the organic matter coming out of that river going to the coastal ocean is algal. Algae detach in mid-summer and start moving and it's only this year in November when we had the first bank full scouring flood that much of the terrestrial matter moves out. Terrestrial matter is considered the major terrestrial export from rivers in terms of carbon budgets and that may be true because the stuff moves out in a pulse and then it gets buried because it moves out too fast for consumers to eat it in the river or in the estuary but so in terms of carbon sequestration that matters but in terms of trophic subsidies from the river to the estuary we're excited that this algae was under appreciated and maybe pretty important. Okay so that's what happens with the wet winter you get wet winter you get an adequate flow in the summer and you get salmon state with yummy stuff going up through a food web and supporting salmon and remember if you don't have that scour in a dry winter you and but say it's sufficient flow so the native species are still okay you get dichosmica state and you can still produce some salmon but not as much. Here's the problem it's either kind of winter but it's worse if it's wet followed by an extremely dry summer and then you go from salmon supporting state to cyanobacteria state here's what happens first the good rusty algae gets blackened and I'll show you what that means but these this is the dying diatom this is the bad guy okay so here's the problem how would you get such a dry summer if you had decent winter flows and the reason we can see that now is extraction of water by marijuana in July when the plants need six gallons a minute per plant and the river needs the water the most so July August extraction is the problem those of you who have followed this probably know the work of Scott Bauer who's a department of fishing wildlife wild agent who's jumping out of helicopters with the wardens the wardens just take the plants he measures how many plants per greenhouse and how many plants per outdoor grow and can do the calculations to estimate that the density of grows can dry up entire fairly large watersheds in summer that was the case in 2015 before legalization and those of you probably know also that the legalization road is very bumpy and right in the middle of a lot of bumps and potholes in in that path too but it's important so the other thing that the illegal growers were doing is building these poorly engineered holding ponds and roads and all of the recovery that the river had started to make from the brutal logging of the 50s through the 70s was undone in certain regions by the erosion from their land juice okay here's here's the story back to the algae this is the worst possible case we had a winter december big scouring flood so no grazers then it was sunny and 70 practically the whole summer until we got a tiny little spate in june and during this long growth window cladoffer got huge not grazed plenty of sunshine to grow in and then this little spate because it was so long it was enough to tug it loose but it wasn't enough to export it to the ocean so you got these masses giant masses of stagnating algal mats that got very hot the temperature in the mat is getting up towards 40 and the temperature just a few centimeters below in the water is cooled and moderated by the water heat capacity so it stays reasonable but this is a temperature that kills diatoms so i hope you have now empathy for a diatom that should if it's happy it's orange if it's unhappy it's lost those orange pigments and now it's bleeding it's chlorophyll out into the matrix so all of that material phosphorus and nitrogen that makes the pigments the death of the diatoms fueling algae in the mat that can tolerate the heat and unfortunately for our futures on earth cyanose like it hot so this is a little yarn ball of anabena it's a potentially neurotoxic cyanobacteria it's this is the same little yarn ball it's curling up in the mat probably to protect itself from sun and um uv but as soon as it soaks up the dead diatom nutrients and other nutrients it will unfurl and colonize the residual rusty colored good algae and blacken them so if you look underwater this region here is a stretch of river that's hot and stagnant and the front of cyanobacterially overgrown algae stops here and here's good algae just in the foreground so this is what it looks like underwater you have these former I'll show you a closer picture of this but it basically my student who specialized in studying this stuff Keith Baume Gregson called them spires I think he was thinking of Mordor or something and here's what the alga looks like in a micrograph so here's a picture that really shows what it does you see the rusty red algae then you see a few specks of blue green or dark green material growing on it they coalesce as they grow vegetatively smother the host alga and have their way with it then the host alga starts rotting this is the good stuff and the cyanobacteria so happy digesting the nutrients and using this as a support to get to the sun that it produces a lot of photosynthetic bubbles which eventually boy it off the host and it then floats and can collect in backwaters where dogs encounter it they jump the wrong backwater they lick their fur and they die in convulsions sometimes within 20 or 30 minutes so over a dozen dog deaths have been reported and probably there are a lot more in the eel and then there are also some in the brushhead river which have gotten more news in the Bay Area here's Keith the graduate student who got his phd studying cyanose he teamed with Raphael Kudala at Santa Cruz to measure the neurotoxin and the liver toxins that were circulating in the eel and found that unlike southern california and central california and the clamoth neurotoxin seemed prevalent here more more concentrated than the hepatotoxins or the microcystins that they're having trouble with up in the clamoth river although they haven't really measured there for neurotoxin so they need to find out everything they've got with a little bit more monitoring Keith reached out to citizens like Pat Higgins who runs a citizens recovery project first addressed it bringing salmon back but then addressed it warning people about cyanobacteria and figuring out what we could do about them and so Pat's been a wonderful friend and partner in watershed monitoring and surveillance and there's a reason to be concerned about whether these toxins get to the ocean here's the coast of california obviously and here's the mouth of the eel river i'm not saying all of this this dark red is high concentrations of chlorophyll and what you see off the eel rivals what you see off of san francisco bay not necessarily just because of the algae because there's marine upwelling delivering nitrogen but sometimes you see these blooms when the upwelling is not happening so we're interested in what the rivers are exporting to the coastal ocean are they going to be delivering yummy stuff nutritious algae or are they going to be delivering potentially toxic algae and it's a concern especially with liver toxins which are the cyanotoxins that damage livers are a little bit more chemically stable and people working in rafael kudos lab melissa miller among others have found over 20 dead sea otters off the monterey river coast that died of hepatotoxins those micro systems had to be produced in the agriculturally contaminated rivers that flow into monterey bay and then out to the coast so there is a potential promise and a potential threat of river subsidies to coastal ocean food webs and after some decades of nerdy algal studies and food web studies the neighbors suddenly got very interested in our research and we were incredibly lucky before that had happened just for fun we'd started having algal forays where you go gather algae from various habitats then bring the gang back and look at it under microscopes and and that those are led by two very dear friends of mine rex lau and paula fury you'll see close-ups of them later here's keith with his algae and we've done this every odd year um since uh 2011 actually the group's gotten bigger angelo's classroom hosts people who've come in and never looked down a microscope before and they're diffident and shy at first and then three hours later under rex's tutelage you can't get them to break for beer they're competing with each other oh that's just nostoc but did you see what i've got you know it's just so fun to see them open their eyes and then just get delighted at the beauty and the diversity and the fascination and the mystery of what goes on at 200 or 400 x under the scope so that's a huge gift that rex is given to you know basically north america but including our groups and a lot of the tribal members have come and taken these courses several years in a row so we um learn from them walking through the woods a lot and they learn from rex and paula and i have other people coming in talking about ecology and this is how playful rex is he makes flags that have algae on them so everything's algae but it was um here's that's this is rex and here's paula his phd student who post-doc with me and is teaching at a university in minneapolis and is also great taxonomous great photographer micro photographer and inspired teacher about algae so in 2017 the urock tribal members who had come a couple of times said look we'll we'll sponsor you and so when they came to angela we had to make them pay for their dinners you know 70 a piece for a weekend and then we cook but and but um they just hosted us provided the food it was incredibly fun we went um to their to a lodge that they rented in the lower klamath and um collected algae from their tributaries including the blue creek tributary that they really prize and the various places on the river we went down with murl on the flat boat collected algae all around the estuary i was thinking the eels about 10 000 square kilometers the klamath's about 70 000 kilometers square kilometers how do you study the klamath but it turns out that these flat boats really get around so you it is actually feasible to do a lot of ecology if you are collaborating with this tribal environmental program the white white tip guys and um it was just a wonderful experience many many long conversations over campfires with incredible stories so including marijuana encounters so here's another picture of that group but i'll just um end and we'll have a little time for questions believe it or not um by saying we need eyes on the eel but they really need eyes on the klamath because in 2022 the dams are coming out it was initially scheduled for 2020 those four dams that they the three three main tribes of kadruk the hoopa and the urat kept flying back and forth to dc and they finally um prevailed in getting the dams removed and getting federal funds to cover the liability of pacific core for the um whatever might happen after the dams come out so these dams are coming out um it's lucky that it was set back a couple of years because we need to have better documentation the the urat tribe environmental program the kadruk other folks are taking data and taking very good data especially on fish invertebrates nobody's really tracking the algae yet so they're interested though because algae are directly a health problem not just for salmon supporting food webs but for the mussels as you probably know from from ron reed and kary norgaard's studies of food security of the kadruk you can't eat mussels if it's filtered this stuff so these dams come out it's going to be amazing and the eel estuary is actually not that different than the klamath estuary they're both relatively simple estuaries what will connecting the river do to the river food webs and also do what the rivers deliver so it takes a huge amount of personpower to do that the tribes are in a great position but they certainly could use boots on the ground type help so if any of you or your students might be interested in getting involved in this there's a need and i'll just end on this slide we have some idea now of what the climate regimes that have been in the range that we've studied since 1988 can do dry winters wet winters wet summers and and with drought extremely dry summers and i like to think of these as nested webs with this kludafra has a little community ecosystem of algae that are fixing carbon fixing nitrogen um methylating mercury in some cases they're doing a lot of biochemical mischief and magic at this level in a little community how much of that there is depends on how much green stuff there is that depends on hydrology also the food web who's grazing it who's protecting it from being grazed the food web depends in part on time but also space whether it's setting up in sunny areas or dark tributaries and all of this talks to each other across all of these scales in a fascinating way to determine what the relationship of the river to the ocean is and the relationship of both the ocean and the river to people is something i'm incredibly and increasingly interested in and so welcome your guidance and interaction and in continuing to understand that so thanks very much and sorry to be late decoded all of this and gotten down uh as you walk around with the tribes are any of them have they got any of the knowledge just even observational they obviously know how all the species identification and so forth but have people made observations over the years as to why it looks like a good year for salmon or not a good year for you know i should ask that see see how much they can predict right i think they've been so distressed at the unexpected blows to the gut right and just a few fish coming back right some years that it seems like some of them the ones i've few i've talked to i think it might be a new regime and very distressing but um it would be really interesting if there's traditional knowledge that you knew something about spotting floods for example i can ask you know our kind of friends about that right they're a touch of the ground to make this clearly that's the kind of on the face that many people have relied on for you know millennia right uh was the observational and so i mean you've got some really clear cut um variables and variations could feed into an observational system that they could predict and sort of help in the decision making yes on a part of uh dairy foods thanks very um allergy question and even if you reach a green algae you're welcome in the rice valley is because it is nitrogen which helps the rice grow right also far with students case too yes they do yeah i think rice is common to have the rice for the lice by side of bacteria that fix nitrogen and then harvesting fish and these side of bacteria are not always toxic in fact even manabena isn't always toxic there's there are genes that have to be present and so you can genotype the algae was bother and find out if a gene's present and then if the gene's present it's not always expressed so um Keith is studying algae all over the watershed i i have a slide of this but he's studying to see which populations actually have these genes and where might they be expressed the um system you're talking about i've heard about too that um that when a side of bacteria fixes nitrogen it's ammonia that can be used for growth it could also be synthesized into toxins but it can also be synthesized into amino acids the question is why is that with even though making itself so nutritious for consumers not probably such a natural selection in that case let's do a little bit more about diatoms um your presentation it sounds like diatoms are good things in the water and they reflect good water or healthy water well flowing water and what little i know about diatoms is that they actually there's different diatoms that grow in different environments you can have brackish water diatoms and pick something so the slower sort of bad water influence does that not have its own diatoms or they just not as doing such good work as the diatoms that you were talking about now when you take a class of algae and try to generalize your risk diatoms in general are pretty nutritious except for pseudonitia which is what clothes down our grandfather's tree that's a green diatom that's toxic so um the diatoms that we start being prevalent in stagnant warm water first of all they don't i think in general that we need to do more research to figure out how general it is diatoms prefer lower temperatures than in some of these ions can take the higher temperatures greens are kind of intermediate but um we need to actually look diatom by diatom i think everything you might be warm or the diatoms that you see that were stagnant the ones that would be there will be very mobile and they crawl up through the silts and make films on top so if you see fine beach sand or fine organic layers of how kind of rusty red or yellow covers those are mobile diatoms they're shaped like little canoes and actually cruise like little canoes and can move centimeters which is very vital for them to get keep it to the light so what does that mean i mean it taxa by tax on by tax on reflects different micro it does hydrologic conditions so in the in the more stagnant problematic dead poisonous dogs water there are there diatoms there or it's just too hot for any diatom to live in is that what i'm here you're saying yeah i would have before i confidently said that they have to go look for diatoms but when we've looked in those mats for example they're mostly dead okay yeah but i'll say that on diatoms i don't trust me beat holland for environmental indicators as you may know and for milio environmental creation because they'll pull it from anywhere and they're working on i'm just finished over right now with the diatoms especially this so once you look at diatoms you tend to fall in love so do you have any thoughts or predictions on how the the food lab may change with the dam challenging question like meds they on the food web that the oregon state university folks and the tribes have been really concerned about it's what happens behind the dam a lot of put off our accumulation and then that hyper eutrophication which is defined as you can't wash your hands and the picture you just saw so that comes out and the hyper the blooms even of the neutral structural put off from a fostered to the facet words that post two infections pathogens parasites the salmon there's another little cycle spinning harms the salmon when the dance come out we're hoping to lose those disease organisms and the problem with the clam if it's those of you who know it is it is kind of an upside down river the climate flake is naturally eutrophic you know with agriculture hyper eutrophic and so without those dams in place it's it's going to be warm and a little bit nutrient rich and you won't be able people are concerned that you'll be able to use the stored deep release water to cool the river in summer i'm not sure how skilled we really are at managing engineering nature like that anyway and i think the added habitat and more natural flow regime in the lab with these huge artifacts that are reservoir effects hopefully you'll be that beneficial