Spooky Dives at Ano Nuevo
A story from John Pearse, PhD.
Elephant seals at Ano Nuevo
John, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, was studying the impacts of sea otters on the local ecosystem, so he and a student went looking for abalones off Año Nuevo, favorite haul out for northern elephant seals. What they found on a dive there, which gave them pause, was a headless seal. Only a shark could be responsible. Were they at risk? What should they do?
JOHN PEARSE is Professor Emeritus in Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also Research Professor in the Physical and Biological Sciences-Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department of the Institute of Marine Sciences.
John taught at UCSC for 22 years before retiring. Though retired for the last 22 years, John continues to stay active in the field of marine biology.
He was born in Boise, Idaho where his father was stationed as an experimental agronomist with the United States Forest Service. John’s family moved from there to Utah where they stayed for five years. Their next move was to Washington, DC where his father was stationed for another five years. During that period, John spent a lot of time at the Washington Museum, the Botanical Gardens, and out and about in the field. He notes with a smile that he was a naturalist from the very beginning.
The family’s next move was to Tuscon, Arizona where John spent his formative years. During that period, he worked at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. As a high school kid, John was hired to build the trails and take care of the animals before the museum opened. He always thought he was going to be a desert biologist.
But after their time in Tuscon, his father worked for the State Department with his first assignment in Egypt. John attended the American University in Cairo for a year in 1954-55. During this period, John spent time at sea, and his father had a station on the coast of the Mediterranean, where John spent a good part of the summer snorkeling and discovering marine biology.
But the American University did not offer courses in biology. John’s father came from Chicago, got his masters degree there, but then left Chicago as soon as he could. He hoped that as an alumnus of the University in Chicago, John might be able to get a Fellowship, and he could stay with his uncle who lived there. John followed in his father’s footsteps attending the University of Chicago for his last three years of undergraduate work, where he got his Bachelor’s degree.
Even though most of the students at the school were in pre-med – only three graduated in zoology – the University wanted John to stay for graduate work. But he wanted to go into marine biology.
John applied to several schools and ended up at Stanford, where he was able to take classes at their Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. He took a seminar class in reproduction of marine invertebrates. Fascinated by the questions surrounding invertebrate reproduction, where temperature rules the timing of reproduction, John took the opportunity to study in Antarctica, where Stanford had a contract. John did his thesis there on the reproductive cycles of sea stars and he’s worked with echinoderms ever since.
His academic career took many turns following the travels of his early years. He taught at the American University in Cairo for two years, working on reproductive cycles of animals in the Red Sea. The Six-Day War sent him packing. He considers that to have been one of the luckiest things to happen to him.
John’s first wife was from Southern CA, so they went to live there, but the American University paid him for a year as they wanted him back as soon as it was safe. John had a friend at the California Institute of Technology lab, and was invited to work there for the year. Things still weren’t settled in the Middle East at the end of that year, and John was offered a position by another friend to work on sea urchins.
The next turn came when he got an offer from Todd Newberry (they were grad students together) who was teaching invertebrate biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Newberry wanted a break and asked John to teach his class. Richard Peterson, one of the other founding faculty members in biology at UCSC, had started to work out at Año Nuevo, as a behavioral pinniped biologist. Following Peterson’s death, John got his position. He then taught at UCSC for 22 years.
You can watch John’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/7BRL1VIEL5s
SPOOKY DIVES AT AÑO NUEVO
I’ll start talking about a really hairy diving story that I have, stupid actually for me. This was in the 70s and we were working on sea otters. Sea otters had just come back to establish themselves in the Bay, and they were just moving their way up to the Santa Cruz coast.
We were trying to establish what do they really do to sea urchins and abalones, and we wanted to find a place with otters and where abalones had not been collected very much. We started working in Santa Cruz, and right off the coast of Santa Cruz there’s a Lighthouse Point. At that time, the kelp forest was very narrow right along the coast, and on the outside was covered with urchins. We anticipated otters coming up there and taking out the urchins, so we did a transect there. But we were talking to people, and they said, “Oh, you should have been here ten years ago. There were abalones all over. That was mainly abalones there. People were collecting them, and they collected them all out. That’s why you don’t see abalones anymore.”
And so we wanted to find a place where there were abalones, and they were at Año Nuevo[1]. So I got two of my graduate students, and three of us we went up to Año Nuevo, all ready to go diving. By that time, there were also quite a few elephant seals there, harbor seals and Steller sea lions. They were all on the island.
It was also known that there were a lot of sharks there, but we were going diving. We didn’t have to worry about sharks. And so, we went in. And as we went in, we went in to some underwater channels. It was really interesting diving. The sea was very surgey. The visibility was maybe three feet at the most, two or three feet, so you couldn’t see very much. But we went down, almost held hands as we went down.
Then we ran into a seal without a head. That made us just a little bit nervous. But we were able to actually go down, and we did so repeatedly. We found that the bottom was just coated with abalones. Everywhere. And the urchins were all along the sides. It was really just quite spectacular.
So we collected a bunch of abalones. We measured them. We put them all back. And by the third dive, one of my students, Val Gerard, who was a very strong minded woman said, “I’M THROUGH WITH THIS PLACE!! I’M NEVER GOING BACK HERE!!” So she was really off with that. But it was one of the scariest places, when we started to think about it, and it was just nuts to do what we did there.
However, I didn’t learn, and I had another student who really wanted to go and see this system, so I took her out, and just the two of us went out. We went down one of the channels and got down about twenty feet. There was a lot of kelp slopping back and forth, and as we’re going through the kelp, you put your hand down there and there was a dead sea lion – buried and all, and it didn’t have a head.
We were out quite a ways by that time. And we were staying really close to the bottom. I didn’t want to get up on the surface, but that dead sea lion set us off. And we didn’t realize how much it set us off until we got quite a ways out and were breathing pretty heavily, and suddenly we were out of air! We had no choice but to come to the surface. That was really a spooky thing. We hit the surface, and the island was way off. You know, we didn’t realize how far out we were, and we had to swim back on the surface where the sharks were.
So as we came in, we could either go all the way around the island to a beach where we could get out, or there were some rocks right there, but with some Steller sea lions on them. The surge was pretty high. So we came up to the edge of that rock and waited for the surge. It was going back and forth, back and forth. And my student was right behind me. “I’ll go first and you can come right behind me.” And the surge came up high, and I just jumped and got up on the rock. I didn’t think, as soon as I hit that rock, all those Steller sea lions were off that rock, diving right down on top of her. (Laughter)
Anyway, she finally got out. We both got out. But it was a memorable dive, which we never did again, even though I would like to. We used those data for a paper we did. That was one place which had lots of big abalones that we could compare with Hopkins[2], where the abalones were all small in cracks and crevices.
I’ve often thought we should go back and see what it’s like now, but I don’t think it’s responsible. That was when I was skilled, young and stupid, not that I’ve gotten that much smarter. I really shouldn’t have taken students out there at all.
Elephant seals
Thank you for sharing your story with us John!
