Well.

Hello.

You caught me taking in all the beautiful sights, sounds and smells of this rocky coastline.

You know, I'm always amazed when I come to the coast.

How our rocky shore provides homes for so many different forms of life.

I have always felt that New England is one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

We're blessed with mountains, diverse woodlands, and this unique and inspiring shoreline.

Many of us take advantage of this natural world around us, but it seems there's never enough time to just sit back and relax and enjoy its beauty.

Well, today that's about to change.

(Music Playing) Today we're at Odiorne Point State Park, one of the most spectacular settings along New Hampshire's 18 mile sea coast.

We're joined today by the president of the New Hampshire Seacoast Science Center, Wendy Lowe.

Well, Willem welcome back.

Thank you, ma'am.

Pleasure to see you again.

You're well?

I am very well, thank you.

How can I not be?

That's true.

You must have one of the greatest jobs in New Hampshire.

Well, I think I do.

As a matter of fact, because first of all, I have to come here every day to go to work.

So that's very painful.

but but not only do I just get to be here, but one of the things that we do at the seacoast science center, we help our mission, really, is to create connections to nature through personal experience for people.

So we want them to get outside, go out into these tide pools and start to explore nature and all the wonderful marine creatures that you can find right out there.

Do you send docents with them?

Yes we do.

We have we have volunteer interpreters and we have staff naturalist.

So we have a crew of about 20 and 120 volunteers.

Oh, that’s great.

They haven't picked this place clean yet.

Oh, no.

And in fact, if you see those, the, yellow ropes around there, we're working on an experiment just to test that, to find out what the impact of having so many people come to the shore.

So we have areas where we those are exclusive zones, and we ask people not to go there.

And then over time, we'll see if there's an impact of having all these, people coming down here and poking around.

That's right.

So we have, you know, kids come and school groups and families in this room.

Yes.

In fact, most people say, oh, you know, it's just a place for children.

And while we are very family friendly and we have a lot of programs for, for school groups, for vacation things for whole families, our ages range from 18 months to 87 years.

And if you like nature and you want to get out and and learn a little bit more about it, you can do it outside or inside with our exhibits and programs.

So in a few years, I could try for that record.

You could try?

Yes.

It's good to have something to look forward to.

Yes.

That's right.

Something?

Yes.

Well, we.

What we should do, I suppose, is take a look at some of these tide pools.

I think so.

All right.

Okay.

Let's go.

As Gibbons used to say the table is set.

The table is set.

Let's go.

(Music Playing) The common periwinkle is called the common periwinkle because it really is the one you see most often in the intertidal.

They are everywhere.

They have the ability to withstand.

We call it long periods of inundation or being underwater.

So you'll find them just at the edge of the lowest end of the intertidal.

You'll see them cruising around mudflats at low tide.

they have the ability to hold moisture in their body cavity so that their gills are constantly underwater.

The gills stay wet.

Whether the animals are underwater or not.

(Music Playing) Most people think about barnacles.

I think ouch they're really sharp when you step on them.

Or what are they doing on the bottom of my boat?

The interesting thing about is that they're actually crustaceans.

People think because of the look of the of the carapace that it's a shell, but it's not.

They are crustaceans.

They actually live on their heads.

And if you look at a barnacle and it's open, you see this fan going.

Those are its feet.

So essentially barnacles are animals, we say that, sits on its head and kicks food into its mouth.

(Music Playing) The Japanese shore crab is one of our more interesting invasive species.

The animals have been introduced into our system through ballast water.

And ships, are traveling from the Pacific and into the Atlantic.

They take ballast water in the Pacific.

And with that ballast water are the larvae of a lot of different invertebrates, including this particular crab.

One of the field marks for the, Japanese shore crab is that, like, its claws are really fat They look like sumo wrestlers.

And the rest of it bodies.

It's bodies very, very flat.

So it almost looks like stepped on body.

But but the claws are intact.

When crustaceans mate, you think about it, you have two animals, male and female, with very hard exoskeletons.

So the challenge is, how do you introduce genetic material from the male into the female when you're essentially covered in a hard, crusty shell?

That's what happens is that when the female is ready to molt, she gives off a hormone that the male picks up and goes aha.

She's getting ready to molt and so very often him carrying a female around when she's ready to molt before she actually has is the male's way of saying, this is mine, and I'm going to mate with her as soon as she.

So soon as that, she comes out of her, old hard shell and she's all soft shell.

That's when, the male can actually insert the spermatophores into her.

Into the female can carry around for quite some time.

The female carries the fertilized eggs under her tail.

And when the eggs are ready to hatch.

She stands up on her back, walking legs and fans releasing larvae with her other legs so that she's actually sort of fanning them out from her tail and releasing them into a water column.

Brittle stars are a kind of echinoderm just like a regular sea star, but their body is very, very different.

They have very long, very thin arms.

They're called brittle because if you touch them, they just will release an arm right away.

As if as if the arm were very brittle in a snap.

But it's one of their defensive mechanisms.

And as long as the central disk of the body is intact, then it can be regenerated.

(Music Playing) And the Henricia leviuscula, blood star and this guy really likes to eat sponges.

You can always tell where the, blood star has been, because it takes the tissue out of the sponge and leaves the sponge, exoskeleton behind.

So there's colored tissue where the sponge is alive, and there's a trail of no carbon where the sea star has been eaten.

Strongylocentrotus droebachiensisis the green sea urchin.

And that is the longest scientific name of all the invertebrates.

By the way.

But the wonderful thing about this guy is how something that looks like a pincushion can actually be kind of expressive.

The spines are used for defense for the most part.

Nobody really wants to know about the pincushion.

And those long tube feet are used for locomotion, but they're also used for other sensory reasons of testing the environment.

And very often the tube feet will take pieces of stone or shell or algae and put it up on top of itself.

And there are a lot of theories about why the animal does it.

Some people say it's to protect it from a lot of sun.

Some people say it's for camouflage.

Some people say it's to protect it from sediment because the tube feet are a, hydraulic system.

And the intake for that system is at the top of the animal.

(Music Playing) Popularly known as seaweeds are scientifically, they're called algae.

And, they are not plants per se.

Even though they photosynthesize, algae have very little cellular differentiation.

If you take one of these, on an alga and you snap it, it's thousand to see that it's pretty much just the same kind of cellular material all the way across it.

Although they do photosynthesize, unlike plants, they don't take nutrients up through their, they don't have a root system.

They hold fast that attach to the rocks, but there's no nutrient exchange as there is from roots.

And also research studies looking at, even at the DNA level that, plants are very different from algae, so if you want to impress your friends, when you see 99% of what you see, that look like plants in the, in the, marine world are going to be algae, except, of course, for eelgrass.

and eelgrass is a grass.

It has a root system.

It does take up nutrients from, the bottom.

Extensive eelgrass beds are very often used by ecologists as indicators of, the health of that particular ecosystem, because the eelgrass does photosynthesize and it's very sensitive to, light.

If there's too much sediment in the, in the water, then the eelgrass is not able to photosynthesize.

(Music Playing) Green fleece or dead man's fingers.

This is an alga that has been moving north as the temperature of our local waters.

increases a little, but it's, it is becoming more tolerant of this.

more often we say, well, who cares?

oyster fishers, care a good deal because this, alga, when it attaches to oysters, it has the ability to prevent the oyster from opening enough so that it can't feed.

And when it can't feed, it dies.

Kelp have, a really interesting function in the subtitle.

They provide a lot of habitat and surface area for other organisms.

Their large blade, actually, that moves through the water so that, enabling the alga photosynthesize also, provides a lot of, of, of cover, for other organisms because in a lot of ways it creates another sort of layer of, substrate, if you will, because anytime you're an organism, it's up in the water column, you're venerable to predation.

And if you can hide down in among the moving kelp, it's harder for a visual predator to find it.

(Music Playing) Flounders are pretty cool because they can actually change their spot, pattern, and coloration to blend in with their own, their surroundings.

it's just a, you know, one of two.

One good example of camouflage in some of the animals that that are in the Gulf of Maine.

Flounders, for the most part, has been spent a lot of time on the bottom so that they're lying on their side, but yet both their eyes are on one side of their head.

when it's younger, when they're juveniles, they actually swim upright.

More like a normal fish, having eyes on both sides of their head.

But as they become adults, they have some more authentic life style living on the bottom.

And, that I'm to one side to the other.

And it looks a little strange, but it is swimming on its side like that.

(Music Playing) Striped bass.

A lot of times, you can actually find them in, estuarine waters where you have both salt and salt and freshwater mixing so you can find them in a variety of habitats.

usually they show up, early in the summer and hang out around here.

Summertime and late into late and, fall, primarily.

You don't find them in the winter because they tend to, to migrate.

They, they're really common, in the summertime, they're they're feeding on all the small fish that you see swimming around.

They're a great sport fish.

A lot of people love to, to catch them and eat them as well.

(Music Playing) striped bass are actually in the fish.

they actually spawn.

Bring their eggs.

deposit their eggs in fresh water.

They head upstream, into a lot of the estuaries and brackish water, along the coastline to to lay their eggs and then, spend the most, most of their lives in saltwater.

as soon as they become adults, head out to head out to sea.

(Music Playing) The drought force on the southern side of Odiham Point State Park.

About 10,000 years ago, there was a glacier over the state of New Hampshire that was over a mile thick.

And the weight of that ice actually depressed the crust of the Earth.

So it was lower.

And what happened is as the ice melted, the weight was reduced so that the crust rebounded.

And then, of course, sea level was fluctuating as you had all this inertia of, freshwater in this system.

So there was a time when you could walk from Ordiorne point all the way out to the Isles of Shoals.

It was dry land.

And when the sea level rose again, that that filled in as being so that the Isle of Shoals became islands.

What you're seeing here actually are the, stumps of trees that drowned when the sea level rose again.

And so these, root systems are 3500 years old, 3600 years old.

And the reason that this, plant tissue has remained is because it is pickled after spending millennia submerged in seawater, it is pickled.

And you, very low tide days, you can come out and walk through the, the drowned forest, and you will see the remnants of the root systems of these trees.

The North American lobster, Homarus americanus is probably the most iconic animal for the Gulf of Maine.

And New England.

and that's because, of course, everybody likes to eat them.

It takes about seven years for a lobster to get up to the size of, of about a pound and a quarter.

So I always gives me pause when I'm about to eat one.

It would seven years to this, animal to get to be about this size.

And they are, pretty common.

And what's fascinating is the amount of behavioral research that's being done at Woods Hole and at the University of New Hampshire with these adult people usually don't think about lobsters as being very smart physiologically.

They have a they don't really have a brain per se.

They have sort of a neural ganglion with all their nerves kind of come together.

And yet they have some very interesting social behavior that's just now becoming, we're learning that they can migrate very, very long distances.

We are beginning to understand that they have a hierarchical system, socially that the, they'll be sort of an alpha male in an area and he'll beat up everybody male, female.

It doesn't really matter.

He just doesn't want them in the area.

They're principally nocturnal, but sometimes we will see them moving around during the daytime and they eat everything.

They are the supremely efficient scavengers.

(Music Playing) The two principal claws of the lobster serve very different purposes.

If you look closely, you'll see they're so different.

the one with the very fine teeth is used as cutting, and the chunkier, clunkier one is used for crushing.

They just use these for petting during the mating ritual and also for cutting and crushing.

The actual eating is done with other specialized mouthparts, on the animal's body.

(Music Playing) The seacoast never ceases to impress me.

It's fun to just sit and watch.

But right now it's time to say goodbye.

Our thanks to Wendy Lowell and Steve Angstrom of the Seacoast Science Center for joining us on this Rocky Coastline program.

I hope you enjoyed our adventure, too.

I know I sure did.

I'm Willem Lange and I hope to see you again on windows to the wild.

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