Salt Spring Island Archives
| Accession Number | |||
| Date | 2010 | ||
| Media | digital recording | Audio | mp3 √ |
| duration | 80 min. |
437_Morgan-Black_Clam-Gardens_Mar-2010.mp3
otter.ai
18.02.2024
no
Outline
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Everyone
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hates Dave Do you remember
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right marriage gonna miss
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something because things
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I wasn't
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around right good job
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right so the next
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step
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people
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insurance is because we do
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email
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standard
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right you see things interesting
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right
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number
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two she's visiting right right now he didn't figure everything out I think we'll begin it's going to be a very special talk and it's well attended I really appreciate you all coming out and whatever I'd like to begin with recognizing that we're on the ancestral territory of First Nations. And we appreciate that. We appreciate this building being here for Morgan to be able to talk with and speak about this amazing research that she doing. She's as you're Saman in the ads. She's from the University of Victoria, working on her PhD. And she's a truth, Vizier. And I won't say more, because she'll tell you all the stories, but she's been through. I just wanted to mention that one thing from the journal Nature club, is that in the end of April, beginning of May, we're going to be starting to have the Birding events. For those people who came out last year, it was special. And it's Peter McAllister is going to be taking people around Burgoyne day, from six to eight in the morning on a Thursday, and we'll be advertising that through the Joe nature class so that it was really lovely last year, especially if it didn't rain. Anyways, and then I have a few other things to say at the end and I'm going to talk about the chairs because they're very difficult to to put back together because everybody charges for stepping chairs. Okay, so Morgan. Morgan to act Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 6:17
Thank you, everyone for coming out on a such a beautiful spring night. I really appreciate coming indoors when it looks like this out there. Yes, my name is Morgan Black can't recognize me from the picture that is me up there. That's not me. That's a fluffy sculpin. We'll learn more about him in a minute. And thank you for the picture. This was sent to me by email yesterday, before yesterday of a local clam garden, how many people? I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get a lot of show of hands. How many people have heard of clambers? Excellent. That's just so cool to see. So I would definitely like to acknowledge the Coast Salish, whose territory we're all very grateful to be here. And I would say not. Not much more than a year ago, I would sit in a very similar room and I'd ask him, you heard of a climate garden, and I might get one or two hands up. So it's really really cool to see how much more of this the story is spreading no caveats. I am a fish biologist, fish, I study fish. I'm grateful to be studying them on clam gardens. So I'm here to tell a very small piece of this story. It's a much bigger story. I don't pretend to know it any better, certainly not better than the people who originally built clam gardens. And I'm always coming from the perspective of a fish biologist, fish ecologist. But it's impossible to work on these amazing sites and not consider this grant perspective. And it's quite an interdisciplinary type of work, which is also very exciting. So I'm going to tell my story. From a It's definitely my story from a fairly personal perspective, because I'm a scientist. But for most people, unless you're a scientist, science can be a little bit boring, a little bit dry. It's a lot of graphs and figures. And that gets dull very quickly. So I'm in sort of the nature of the climb garden story, I'm just going to tell my story a little bit and how I came to study climb gardens and why it's been such an interesting journey, and how it all kind of fits together. Now for me really, really well. Plus, it means I get to throw a lot more pretty pictures into a slide slideshow. So I mean, here, I grew up central bank for Island, qualicum beach, I had a great, great childhood because I lived in a pretty rural setting, and I could get on my horse and ride out into the back country. Children today don't often get the opportunity. And I was always looking for frogs. I was always rescuing tadpoles. And then when I turned 16, I started scuba diving, and then I was forever seeking out the next beautiful nude, right and that's, that was most of my life for many, many years. But it wasn't necessarily so I always knew I wanted to do something with nature. I but I did love animals. So I was going to be a veterinarian, but then I love the ocean. So then at a very young age, my dad and I decided I should be a well Richard veterinarian, whatever that looks like. But from from above the age of six, I told everybody I was gonna be a well veterinarian. I didn't quite make it there. But I'm quite happy with where I ended up. I did my undergraduate degree at Big Brown University, which was amazing, but it doesn't have a graduate program. So it kind of ended there was, you know, here's your training, you're now a biologist. You're going to go out into the world as a biologist, and you're going to do biology like things. And so I started to do that, but very quickly, it was well, this is where I spent most of my days I was a terrestrial wildlife biologist. So I diverted a little bit from the idea of Oceans and things. I And I wandered around in clear cuts looking for things that were no longer there because we cut the trees down. So I was actually, in this instance, I was looking for salamanders, a salamander, research salamander survey. And I was starting to feel like I was part of the problem because the company that cut these trees down was the company that was signing my paychecks. So I quickly became very disillusioned. I feel strongly that I like to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I thought, I guess maybe I wasn't supposed to be a biologist went on to do other things as life happens. I worked as a fisheries observer, which was kind of close to the ocean, but still very much industrial. I became a truck driver, because why not? I worked in Mills, I ran manage gas stations, I drove an ice cream truck, I was a personal trainer. I did all kinds of bizarre things, which, in hindsight, turned out to be really, really valuable. I also spent 20 odd years in the fire department. Grad School is a lot like firefighting. And the buildings on fire, everybody else is running, screaming out because they're sensible. grad school, it's, you're rushing into a terrifying situation, not entirely clear on the goals. But you know, it's urgent know what needs to be done now. And you got to figure out how to do it. But the other part is the community of it. So very diverse group of people with very different opinions. Could could accomplish some pretty remarkable things when we had a common goal. And that is definitely something that has served me well to this day and continues with the projects I'm involved in now. But I didn't know I wasn't doing what I loved her still hadn't found the thing that made my heart sing. And I had forgotten that little six year old girl that wanted to be a whale veterinarian. But then Facebook was terrible means this one would pop up right when I was in that sort of, I don't know what I want to be. Life doesn't make any sense. Right now this meme kept popping up. And I was like, Yeah, right. That sounds nice and lovely. But how do you find a job doing what you love? What a crazy concept. And you'd see this all the time, people would say I'm like, Well, that's good advice. But who is going to pay me to sit around and look entitled pools? That's all I want to do. I want to sit and look into tide pools and see what's going on and figure out what are all the species and why are they there and what makes them happy and what makes them sad. That's what I want to do. How is that possibly going to be a thing? Klinenberg 2015, I was hired on a project as a technician to work on this project of a colleague of mine, who's also a PhD student at UVic. He was just starting his field season, and he needed some help doing it. And we started visiting these beaches called climb gardens. Now, up until that point, I'd never heard of a climb garden. And I've spent much of my life on the water. My dad lived on a boat. I was on the coast all the time. And I never, I was sure I'm seeing these all the time. But I never recognized them for anything unique, which was common theme. And when I've been out many seasons now on these beaches, there'll be avid boaters everywhere, and they'll drive their little dinghy because they're gonna let their dog off or whatever, they'll drive their little dinghy out to talk to these people with weird hats and weird setups and wonder what's going on. They drive right up to this very distinct wall. We'll talk more about that. And I still have to turn around and say, hey, you know, you're standing on a claim guard. Oh, what do you mean, I just thought this was a pile of rock. So it's really quite remarkable that they have quite an interesting story that I sometimes share, but how we started to recognize them in the literature and in the scientific community as these unique features. But of course, there were many people that knew what they were and what they were for. We just weren't. They weren't. They weren't being called clan gardens. They weren't recognized that way. Also, the name of Clan garden is a bit of a misnomer. So it was that was sort of a translation issue a little bit so they're called clam gardens, but they are so much more and I'll talk a little bit more about that. How many people have been to the one here in Fulford harbour walked on it. Beautiful. Has anybody piled rocks on the wall? Not yet. Well, there are work bees. I'll send the email around next time. I'm, I'm Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable project in collaboration and very cool. So it's pretty neat to be have it right here. So Cloud Gardens, which you've all heard of which so I can make this part a little bit shorter than I normally do. There's different versions of when I say clam garden, it can mean a lot of things. What I'm referring to is when a wall is intentionally built in the low intertidal zone that can be done on an already productive clam Beach, where it was just a sandy or muddy beach where you would go clam digging. And the wall was built to kind of enhance that and I'll talk about how that works in a minute. Also, these were Built on essentially bedrock sort of outcrops where there was zero clam habitat to begin with. But by building this wall and then either intentionally or allowing sediment and gravel to backfill behind this wall, a clam garden or clam space for clams to live was created, which is pretty remarkable, pretty massive undertaking. And the dates there's a very recent paper out by Nicole Smith and data Lebowski that they had some dates that went to 3500 years old. And they still think that is very, very underestimate. And it's quite the underestimate. And the only reason for that is it's really hard to date a rock. So it's very hard to when you carbon date and carbon date, an organic compound like wood or charcoal. But rocks are a little bit trickier to date. So still trying to figure that out. But it is a very, extremely early form of agriculture, which is pretty fascinating from a biologist perspective. So as I mentioned, the build this this pile of rocks, in the low intertidal, and sediment is either added or intentionally backfield behind it.
Unknown Speaker 16:08
caveat to that, in speaking with knowledge holders here from HK, me and Hoquiam there, they were sometimes just built the wall and they weren't so interested in the clams as in the other things that would come and use that wall. So there's a lot a lot more to the story. And my intention is just to, empirically through Western science quantify what's going on, to kind of put these scientific numbers to what is already known. So I'm not not trying to learn anything that isn't already known. Just put some numbers to it, because especially policyholders like their numbers. Here, you can see this is just a Google Earth image, you can zoom in all over some of these places and see these rock walls in the low intertidal zone. And they range in size, definitely, I'll show you some examples of that. But also, there's a whole suite of testing practices that go along with this. And I'm, like I said, I'm a biologist, I'm no expert on ethno ecology, archaeology. But there's lots of words that go along with the different activities that would be done on these beaches, the moving of the rocks, the tilling of the soil, the the taking of the larger clams and leaving of the smaller as in which species were best different times of year, like so much knowledge that goes along with these. Thank you very much. So pretty interesting stuff. And for that reason, this, all of the research is sort of going on around clam gardens. It's really, really neat. And how interdisciplinary is this? This I find very cool. It's very easy. In academic institutions, everything gets very siloed. And you're not talking to the people across the way. But you can't help it with this. So I'm working with archaeologists and ethno ecologists and oceanographers, and different is different institutions, private, and universities, many different universities. So it's bringing together just a remarkable suite of people, which I find really, really amazing. And in the area where I started the work. archaeology has been going on the climb gardens there for probably 15 years. But the ecology, this sort of little pieces that I'm working on, it's only been going on since about 2010. And climate gardens have only been in the Western scientific literature since about 2000. So relatively novel, even though they've been around for 1000s of years, their new insights, everybody's all very excited, but they've been there for a long time. It's a it's like Stonehenge, it's a big pile of rocks. So again, yeah, we have archaeologists working and ethnographers and then our funny biologists, but all getting together learning different pieces of a puzzle. And it's been neat, especially with the restoration project, because that's been sort of the combination of a lot of knowledge has been lost because of awful things that happened. But the knowledge that has been retained is being sort of combined with, with some of this scientific research of building and measuring and put all those pieces together and start figuring out how to how to properly do them all again. They had instances where they they built the wall, and they were watching but they noticed that lots of the Red Rock crabs, the large ones anyways, were dying. That's weird. And then an elder came to the beach and said, No, we used to have canoe runs, but maybe they had another purpose too. So they took out a section of the wall so then the water can flow better. Right back crabs stop dying. So it's sort of this combination of putting all the pieces back together, which is pretty, pretty amazing. Now I as I said, I got to be a technician on the project initially. And so that part of the project was looking at all the things that don't move or don't move very fast. So things like that. particles and clams and worms. They call me Dr. Worm for a while, which was awful didn't call me because I don't like worms at all. I mean, I don't dislike them, but I don't want to study them. And so we were always up here on the beach in the mud, we'd spend the entire low tide and our hands knees digging in the mud, counting 1000s of articles measuring 1000s of clams, Delage, but at the end of the day, when the tide was just starting to come in, I would always put my hand up to be the first one to go grab the boat, because it meant I could stand on the rock wall as the tide came in. So the tide has been out all day long. And these are the lowest tides of the year. So all these rocks are exposed for you know, six, six hours if we were lucky. And when that water was starting to come in all of those animals that are all hanging out in these rocks, they, they come back to life, it just, it's like a, it's like a party, when you turn the lights off, like disco party, everything starts to happen. There's prawns and crabs, and fish, everything's just running around, because they finally have oxygen and water again, and there's food and it's all very exciting. And so I would just stand there and watch it come to life. This is just amazing. Like, just so cool. I didn't imagine that. Two months later, I'd be offered the opportunity to study and measure and count all of those credits that I've been so avidly watching. So definitely a little bit of a dream come true. But I remember thinking man, at that time, I really liked fish speaking mattifies fish, I'd really like to live on a clam garden. And so that's where that's where sort of the whole epic journey began, I started started putting boats and projects together and people and I was funded by the Haqqani Institute to carry on this work for a couple of years as a Master's student to begin with. And to start looking at, okay, yes, they're called clam gardens. But clearly, when you change a beach this much by adding this, you know, this big terrace to the intertidal, there's gonna it's going to affect other species, that would just make sense. So how is it affecting them and what has changed and start, start looking at some of the other components of the sea gardens essentially. So I began on Quadra Island, which is quite a hotspot for clam gardens. I'm gonna talk about why in a second. And then I added a bunch of sites up on Calvert island. So there's classrooms here, there's clam gardens here, there's also hack AI research institute. So it's really nice to have a place to come home to after a day in the field. So that definitely helped facilitate where I did this work, it also meant that I had boats and because all of these are remotely accessed, you can't drive to them by car. And then down here, the addition of the Gulf Islands, the the two restoration sites in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve was kind of an artifact of the work I'd already done because I am currently I think, the only person on the planet planet studying fish on clam gardens. And so when they needed fish research done down here, they've asked me to come out and start looking at what's going on here. So that's just in the works. There's a little bit these are a little bit different, compared to the ones I've worked on up here, mostly because it's the levels. But this is the northern part of Quadra Island. This is kennish Bay, and why at bay and there's just this little tiny canoe Portage that lots of people use right in the middle here. Why at bay especially was quite problematic, because there are so many clam gardens that I almost couldn't find beaches to compare them to. So my study designers, I'm going to compare beaches with walls to beaches without walls. Finding beaches that haven't been turned into clam gardens in this space, it was really, really hard to I think I used the only three that there were there was it was over 50 Clam gardens just in this little tiny region. And then Kashmir is very much the same, just almost entirely every little place that you could put a claim garden wall, there's cloudguard wall. And the other thing that has made this such a hotspot is there's been very little sea level change, relatively little sea level change in this region of the coast. So there are definitely likely way more clam gardens out here to problem is they're quite deep right now they're sitting at about zero tighter, deeper. Whereas these are all still sitting at quite an operational height where the top of the wall is at about one meter of tidal height. So they're still even if they're not actively tended. I know some people still visit them. They're still functioning essentially as a climber, and they're still at the right tile range for clams to be living there and, and using the space and then all the other species that go along with that.
Unknown Speaker 24:47
Now there's definitely challenges there was, of course challenges to any study. So I wanted to look at a beach that had a big pile of rocks in it and a beach that didn't have a big pile of rocks in it. But as a scientist when you're doing compare Seems like that you have to do things exactly the same wherever you go. Now normally on a beach like this, you'll take a beach scene and drag the big beach scene out on that nice soft beach and count everything that you collect in that net. But there's not, it's not possible to drag a beach scene across a rock wall like this, they just don't work. So I had just, I just had to start coming up with ideas, I kind of ended up throwing the kitchen sink at it pretty much any kind of fish fish catching device I could think of I put on these on these beaches, everything from middle traps to go pros, and then use fyke nets, which are pretty neat. Because it's essentially a portable fish we're which often fish wares were used in conjunction with clam gardens and sort of a suite. So you build your clam garden wall and then you carry on building your fish, we're well there'd be a whole suite of, of sort of marine resource use and extraction techniques, all is all working together. So this I packed around, I had two of them, I pack them around the the only way 100 pounds wet back them up and down the coast for two years that they should give me a PhD just for that 46 Different times I put that son of a gun out and madly raised the tides to clear the fish before everything was high and dry again. So I think there's an argument made for I'm already done. And I also use these mono tracks, which at first I thought this is a little bit hokey. Some of my coolest species came in these funny little traps. So if you're just interested in having a look to see what's out there, and the fish actually can get out. So this species that use these traps, they're used to being in holes and crevices and hidey holes, so they just use it like a house. So I put a little glow stick in there and a big rock tied to a buoy and throw it over wherever I wanted it to be. And it's called Queenswood just hanging out in there. And if I could pull it up fast enough, I could have a look to see what sculpt it was before I let him go again. So those worked remarkably well. But these are this fight that was actually worked remarkably well. Previous, the grad student previous to me, spent four months hand stitching two of these together. He should have got a PhD for that too. And so my supervisor, I didn't know how well they work at first she said I don't care, you're using them. Like he puts so many hours into these. They're being used again, gratefully, they ended up working really, really well. I also the Hakka Institute has got quite a quite an accomplished drone team. And they were bored one day because they finished all of their assignments. And I said, Hey, guys, I've got a fight net fishing around the corner, would you mind taking a picture for me, so they're big gratefully came up with this footage. But you can see this is one of the smallest clam gardens I work on. And so the wings of this trap are about 10 meters long just to kind of give you a relative perspective. And 15 meters across at the top here and you can see the dark wall. And this is one of those instances where there might have been a little bit of sediment here, but not that much. This wall is constructed all along this almost to your face because there's a little bit of sand here and then it drops off really deep into this channel right here. So this was a massive undertaking to build this really large wall to get a pretty small chunk of clam real estate. But it does speak to the value of this as a resource. There's more than that story. Finish this finish the tale. Drones are just so cool. I'm not a good drone pilot, I know how to crash them, and that's about it. But they're pretty useful when you actually can figure out how to fly them. So I'm gonna go to the end here to show you a little bit more of the scale. This is on Calvert Island, which is beautiful. Now, up here you can see this little boat that's about a Lea 60 meter yacht. Lots of yachts like to frequent frequent Quechua channel, but it's good for perspective because this is the smallest clam garden I work on out of the 18 sites I visit 20 sites have visited 22 sites, but this one up here is the largest so the clown garden starts right here and it runs to about here. I'd say it's three or four times longer than the one here in Fulford which the one here in Fulford is significant that's quite remarkable wall. And that wall is probably three or four meters wide and three or four meters tall, and the boulders range from this big to this big to car sized. I can't imagine how many man hours that took to build that wall. And from the archaeological evidence here, there wasn't actually a village site right here, this looked like more of like a commercial operation. So there is a mitten, just around the corner where the Haqqani Research Institute actually sits. But that's all it is. It is just a clam shell midden and nothing else. And it's also probably the hottest part and the southern facing sloping Beach, in in the region the big enough. So they think that's where they went to dry and smoke all of the harvest from this whole region on a commercial scale. So it would be done as a whole community to get clams for trading and for through the winter, but there was no village site here that that they could tell anyways, it was just where he went to harvest clubs. So quite a remarkable resource. And the scale is is pretty, pretty amazing. So when I saw this, this is one of my favorite climb guards, we call it Nexi. But it's, this is the one that made me think of Stonehenge because the size is just amazing. And there's so many cool fish, but we're getting to that part. So part of the challenge with when you do the numbers on paper, you think it's a good idea. When it comes to research, you want to have as many samples as possible. The bigger numbers, the better that makes your stats work better that all everything lines up so much more. So it's always about maxing out the number of samples you can get. So I had to fight nets. That meant I could be sampling to beaches at the same time sounded like a good idea in my head in advance. But that also meant that I had two beaches going at the same time, which meant that as the tide was receding, I'd put this fight net, my little net up on the beach, when the tide was out, then I believe the tide would come in and go out overnight. And as it was receding the next day, I'd come back to the beach and before I've receded completely it was essentially as the water got to the end of the trap that kind of closes the gates, so nothing can get in or out. I've got my little collection of fish, but I have two of those going at the same time on the same tide on different beaches. So it was always this mad panic. I'm smiling honest, I was always racing around just trying to get to the next trap and and then I have to count and measure and identify how many people have tried to identify sculpins as fast as you can because I've 20 minutes before my next trap is going to be dry. So probably needed therapy after this but it was very, very, very, very busy. Pretty good sample size but stressful for sure. And if things don't always go as planned, so perfect scenario, two traps, everything goes fine, but some days. This new is especially good. My husband's here in the room. We're both Transport Canada Certified vessel operators. He's actually a ship's captain. We were operating our little Bodie but it was a little bit serendipitous we got to the site we were camping at the site. We got there at midnight instead of five o'clock when we planned because of long weekend traffic. Yada yada Yeah, the highest tide of the year happened while we were sleeping between midnight and four in the morning. I got up before when route something doesn't look right down around the corner and my boat 16 feet in the air. The tide is very very far away down here. There is moss under my boat. Oh, I'm not kidding. Highest tide of the air 4.7 meters. My boat decided to float and sit on top of the little patch of moss. Yeah, so we didn't get to the beaches. I wanted to get to that day. Thankfully, there was a beach there's a site right here so we sampled that one instead. You just have to be flexible, but at the end have a good day. I'm always happening so happy so this five minutes like my Christmas present. So twice a day I got to open my Christmas present and yes, I'm kissing a fish. They're never knew what you're gonna find and all of it was amazing and wonderful to me. So you thought this was a talk about clam gardens was actually about fish because I'm a fish biologist. Anybody know what these are? Probably a sculpin. And we recognize this one down here. It is often called the bullhead. Specific the specific kind of bullheaded is is a red Irish Lord. This one here. It's another claim. Excellent. During the first first room, I've got an answer. I'm very excited. Let's go for two. How about this one over here?
Unknown Speaker 34:46
And the ideas that one's tougher. We can still be friends if you don't know that one. As a Pacific, it's a juvenile Pacific Cod so he'll be he'll be delicious. All right, you get credit Pretty excited about that. Yeah, he'll be delicious in a few years. And this one. That one's a tough one. That's a pygmy poacher that was when once I got to my minnow trap that I was so excited about. Yes, pygmy poacher. Anyways carrying on more beautiful fish, my traps. I had a baby read octopus this day, he was pretty fun. Lots of graceful crab, which look a lot like Dungeons is almost identical if you're not paying attention, which maybe wasn't the first season. Snake prickle back these beautiful perch are one of my favorite striped birds are gorgeous. And Cal perch. So I mean, this is what I got to see every day like talk about dreams come true really do come true. I was living the meme. And so getting to the sights. Now, if you're not into the science, bear with me, I don't have that many slides. If you're into the science, I'm sorry, it's not going to be enough slides for you. But I tried to keep the happy medium, it's like Elevator Music somewhere in the middle. So I'm really interested in the complexity that that wall adds to the beach. I'm interested in how this is affecting the different communities of mobile species, fish and mobile invertebrates like prawns and crap. And then is there a difference is when I look in different regions, and up and down the coast a little bit. So obviously, we have modified coastlines pretty significantly throughout the world. And there's surprisingly little research and how this actually has impacted the communities of marine organisms that live there. And about 50% of the world's population live within 60 kilometers of coastline. So there's, they're, they're pretty important to us, as well as many other species, they're kind of where nutrients and cold water and upwelling especially along our coast meet sunlight and nutrient, other nutrients. And so it all kind of comes together, plus the addition of structure. So when you add structure, it's kind of a place for everything to hang out to be safe, or hang on. So clam gardens are pretty interesting, because these have been, you know, modified coastlines that are 1000s of years old. So pretty interesting to, to understand or to start studying the very, very long term effects of changing a coastline. And are there better or less better ways to do such a thing. So I'm definitely interested in putting numbers to this complexity that that it adds, and of course, sites is all about the numbers. So I go out with things to measure numbers. So this is one method I use. It just looks like that kind of that toy, or you can put your hand or your face on all the pins on it, and it molds it, it's kind of a two dimensional version of that it basically contours the substrate underneath it, then I snap a quick photo of it. That's probably there's my husband's hand right there. So he's helping, helping, always helping. And then once I've snapped this photo, here's a clang guard. And you can see it's quite a bit more complex. And then later in the lab, I get students to undergrads to measure all of these differences. And I can derive numbers from that I can drive metrics. And so no surprise when we look at this is just an index of verbosity, which I was looking at the the variation of the different heights, I'm going to show you a series of slides, they're all going to be very similar in terms of how they're set up. So I'll just sort of point out a few things here. The green is always my clam gardens. The purple is always the reference site. So beaches that didn't have the the rock walls. And so pretty distinct difference here between all my clam garden sites and all my reference sites, when I'm just looking at sort of a number that measures the complexity. Not surprising because clam gardens have a pile of rocks on them. So I very much expected this result. If this didn't happen, I'd quit. But then it starts to get interesting when you start looking at the species. So now I'm going to move into what I've just some of my initial results. And what I found about the organisms, the mobile species, fish, prawns, clams, so if I combined all of my, all my critters, over all of my sites over all of my years, I get this figure. So this is three years of my life. Isn't it beautiful? i Come on through a big deal. So abundance is just the total number, total number of things I caught in that trap and no matter what they were, if they were more than a centimeter big, nope, half centimeter big. And they weren't plankton so I wasn't counting jellyfish because they just kind of ended up in the track trap accidentally. I was looking for things that moved up to onto the clam garden during the night and fed and then were consequently caught in my trap wings. The next morning when I came back So we're definitely looking at there's something going on. There's more critters on clam gardens when I look at things very, very broadly. There is definitely way more to this story as there always is. Nature is messy. And we are trying to put math very complex systems. And you can't measure everything. But this is the initial sort of very broad strokes, Trent. Lots of caveats, of course, in the science. This is the richness. So this is the number of different kinds of species. And again, we've got this pattern of I might look at all across all organisms across all my sites, there are more different kinds of species residing on clam garden systems versus very similar soft sediment habitat that don't have the rock walls. I'd be surprised if I didn't have this result because complexity usually equals more species. Lots of birders in the room, you crazy people that get up at 6am Don't that's why I love birding, but only the birds that are a week later. I like ducks, waterfowl, the songbirds, I've done a few of those surveys, you guys are amazing. Anyways, my point being most of the original complexity work was done on birds. Then when they first started putting together this more complex means more different species that was all done with with birds songbirds and forests and they measure how many branches were on a limb or how many different kinds of trees there were, for example, so early work about this relationship was on birds. And I'm finding this again, no surprise in this system, more complexity, more critters. I did mention that I put out GoPros which is a fun way to sample because you just get to put the camera on and walk away. But it will show you a couple of clips. You can just see the life happening here. So there's the rocks with all the things attached to it. And then because of that, there's look at all the oxygen just alive. So gotta pull Goby here we had our big red rock crab, which There's definitely lots of those when clam gardens when there's rocks was Red Rock cap, who knew? You can sit and watch it all day. It should be a screensaver. Right? It has been my screensaver for hours. Again, many undergrads have helped me with this data. Because I just like looking at it for fun a little bit. I don't want to actually sit and count all this stuff. Are you kidding me? Thank goodness for undergrads. Then I would like see count how many different species we get on this couple of moments? And if you know what it is shout it out. And if you don't, I won't be mad. It's a fish. Yes. It's a striped perch or pardon me a pile parts that was a pile part. Oh, and then this is a different kind of perch. These are shiners which I quite like because they're live bears. So you get the babies later in the season. They don't lay eggs they just give birth to live babies.
Unknown Speaker 43:13
What What are we watching inside the
Unknown Speaker 43:15
wall. This is sitting on the wall looking out into deeper ocean. So just kind of at the top of the wall looking out there's a there's a striped perch that's three so far, including one very large school of shiners. Stripe picture one of my favorite they're so beautiful. Tropical Lake, then this little guy up here. And this one here are different. Again, those are juvenile copper rockfish and our little black guy Gobi popped his head up there again, because obviously this is his turf. Pretty amazing. That was only like a minute and a half a clip. So much going on there. Again, so grateful for undergrads to count all i They dutifully counted all of those many schools and sometimes they come by by the 1000s of clips of seals swimming by pretty pretty cool stuff. There, there's our drill that's just for the theater for the day. Now we're gonna get back to our science. So I said there was more to this story. And I'm digging deeper into this story. There's definitely a lot going on, which involves some fairly involved analysis that I'm working on at the moment. But one thing that's really interesting to me so in this figure, this is that same abundance pattern that we were looking at so the total number of critters, this panel is fish. This panel here is invertebrates so crabs and prawns, shrimp, and then I've I went and did my surveys in the spring and then I also went back in the summer about two months apart where my surveys and the thing that was really interesting to me is there wasn't much difference in the spring and there's few reasons for that, depending on the site that I surveyed, but in the summer, I get this huge pulse of fish. And there's, in general, there tended to be more invertebrates more prawns, more crab, different species. And that's more of the story. But this I was really interested especially since I'm a fish biologist, and I'm always rooting for the fish. I'm in corner fish. This, this pulse is really quite interesting. I'm quite fascinated by why you get this, I've thought to myself, maybe that's juveniles, which means there's the possibility that this is providing really valuable juvenile fish habitat, which is always a good thing, we could use more of that. So pretty exciting. Off the hop. This is the richness slide broken down again. So the number of different species broken down by spring and summer and so fish on this side and invertebrates on the side. And just in general, across the board, there tends to be more the error bars or standard error for those of you that are wondering what the heck their bars are representing those are standard error, but we have kind of more going on a little bit in the summer, especially with the invertebrates so maybe there's kind of a pulse of productivity that then the vertebrates are taking advantage of. So coming to forage the prawns, shrimp and the crabs are coming to find things to eat, whether it be fish eggs or or bacteria growing, algae growing, some something's going on in summertime. And I didn't go in the fall in the winter, because it's really not nice out there. And also, I have a little tiny Skiff with 200 pounds of wet net in it, you don't want to be out in big seas, we tried it was a very scary day. Now this figure a little bit different again, what we're looking at is individual bodyweight. So the first year, I saw I'm gonna go back a couple slides, just to mess with you a bit. When I first saw this pattern when I pulled my data up at the end of my first field season 2016 I thought that's really interesting. I wonder if that's juvenile fish. Of course, my committee member like any good committee member goes, you should measure them. Great, great idea. So I have two nets out fishing, I have 20 minutes to get through a net and I have to individually weigh and measure hundreds of baby fish piece of cake. I got this no bra. So I did 2017 I individually weighed and measured 1000s of baby fish and crabs and prawns I had to resort to only putting out one net at a time otherwise, I would have definitely lost my mind. But the interesting thing is here in this figure we've got the red is clam gardens. And you can see on the your left hand side of the scale there is the smaller individuals. And in the summertime on clam gardens, I'm definitely getting a pulse of juvenile fish. For little fish, maybe they're just little species. But the species are pretty consistent from from spring to summer. So I would say it's juveniles. I don't have a biomass slide up here. But the biomass actually stays about the same between spring and summer, which means there are a lot of juveniles. So yes, they're smaller, but there are so many of them, the biomass, the total weight of the critters that I'm catching, it's about the same. So pretty interesting. And after three years, that's all I know. We're that's the end of the story. There's quite a bit more coming. But of course, there's much digging through the details, and I'm working on it in a quick summary, many caveats is that there does tend to be higher abundance, and richness, there's definitely some variability between different regions, and through time, and there does seem to be this Pulse of Small fish on clam gardens. So they are I think, providing habitat as would be expected when you pile a bunch of rocks, and then seaweed grows on it. And you get all this beautiful fish habitat like I was seeing when I was standing on those walls, looking down into the water, saying I'd like to be here if I was a fish, apparently the fish agree, which is great. So are we doing for time pretty great. So there's lots of potential things that can come out of what I'm doing here. And I hope to speak to all of them over the course of the next next couple of years. I'm about halfway through my PhD. That's a very loose half, give or take two or three years. I'm halfway through my PhD. So I'm going to be at this for a while figuring out lots of different things still. The habitat complexity that I talked about, so it was great that I was able to quickly go around on the beaches and put those those pins down and get a good measurement and actually is one of the better field methods we have for measuring how rough the surfaces are. How complex is it is, but we have a lot of amazing technology now including drones. And so, most of these beaches, I was able to go back with this amazing drone hack a team, they flew over all my sites at extremely low tide, and took a bazillion pictures that are then stitched together into three dimensional models of those beaches. And then from you know, I don't have to do it yet I'm working on it. That's why my PhD is multiple years long. Then from that three dimensional model, I can pick and choose different numbers that are kind of relative index of how complex that beaches are, how different the beaches are from one another and then use that to see which one is best predicting whether or not I get more species or higher abundance. Whether or not I'm getting more of the juveniles. So what feature is it that is most important, I'm pretty sure I'm going to figure out what nations figured out 1000s of years ago that if you pile a whole bunch of rocks and lots of things will come. But I'm putting the numbers to it that can then be used in other circumstances. It's also an opportunity, I'm hoping to innovate modern practices. So I grew up my dad is working in aquaculture, I was pretty familiar with oyster fisheries and clam digging, all that kind of stuff growing up. But there's definitely, I would say, potential. There's room for improvement in how how conventional and modern methods are
Unknown Speaker 51:31
being practiced. And so maybe we can learn a little bit from some of these techniques. It's it's sort of a multi trophic aquaculture structure that's going on here. And definitely insight into what happens with coastal habitat modifications, like I mentioned, we've altered a lot of our habitat. When you go to these sites, that great big beach that I showed you the really, really long clam garden. Behind that is a is a massive estuary and root garden. And in many instances, that would be the case there'd be a clam garden. And then there'd be an estuary root garden. And from if you had inland from where that big climb garden was, there was a whole series of little beaches at different title heights that have been kind of modified in different ways with different sized rocks. And then behind that there'd be estuarine root guards, and then behind that there'd be other edible plants. So I think, I think these were already acting a little bit as protective devices for the weather to help support some of the other activities that were done in the near nearshore environment. So I think he can speak to I was looking at one paper that had gone out and tested a bunch of different designs for modern shoreline armoring. So when I say shoreline armoring, that's when we put up a seawall or you know, a breakwater or the big rip rap. To to, especially with climate change and greater weather events, everybody's wanting to protect their coastlines more and more and more. But of course, we want to do that in an environmentally sound way to try and be as ecologically sensitive as we can be. This paper tested a bunch of different designs. So there was, you know, your standard rock wall, there was your great big rip rap, there was different terraces and things and won't be hold the design that was favored, although they didn't know what they built for just like a clam garden. It was, it was a rock wall of rocks about this big in the low intertidal zone that was about one meter high at its tallest with some soft sediment behind it is and this one works the best. No kidding. No kidding. Good. You figured that out. But it is interesting so that obviously that individual had never heard of a clam guard, there was no mention of it. But they had gone out and built a bunch of different potential structures, and the one that worked the best in terms of providing protection against wave energy, but also allowed a lot of species to live there. Looks like a culling guard. So definitely some possibility there for learning from these ancient and very cool practices. The other thing that's really remarkable about this project, and I'm super grateful to be a part of it, and always do my best to make sure everybody's aware that I am one tiny, tiny piece in it not as a great project, but a whole great body of knowledge that's growing really, really rapidly. So the climate Garden Network, you can go a little dumb if you haven't already. There's all kinds of cool projects going on in all the recent archaeology interesting things. Obviously, you guys are aware of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve and worked with Hakka Institute and the Central Coast. So many different nations and institutions and universities. It's it's, I can't think of another instance that has a list like this and people that are happily working together. Obviously everything's not perfect, perfect all the time. But it definitely is amazing that so many collaborators are working, working so well together to learn about something pretty amazing.
Unknown Speaker 54:51
It also has been what has come out of this is opportunity because I was working on clapboards. Yes, I'm a fish biologist. I'm going to ecologist I'm really interested in how when you pile rocks on a beach, where fish calm, definitely the science, but it's impossible, as I mentioned, to work on clam gardens and not start to learn and absorb and be immersed in the culture that is Kleinwort and, and it's given me the opportunity to work more and more with communities. I've been out with his homies quite a bit to their their islands near discovery Island, looking at some of their modified beaches, and some of their sites are dating back their actual Western science evidence of, you know, 8000 years, which is just amazing to be part of this community and working with youth to be able to go out on a beach with what is essentially a fish Weir, which would have been a traditional fence fishing method. Yes, I've made it out of PVC pipe. But the methodology is basically the same with a bunch of youth, and collect a bunch of fish and just look at them and appreciate them and understand them and learn about them. And they'll laugh at me because I have so many different names for bull heads. They're all called Bullheads. Apparently, I should just call them all bull that we have bull heads and be done with it, which is fine. It is challenging, because of the different, not agendas, but maybe different timelines. So working in institutions, and I especially was aware of this coming in as a master student, you know, I mean, as master student, here's your funding, you got two years go be done. You've got two years. That's, that is not enough time to develop a relationship, figure out what everybody wants to know the common questions, and orchestrate a research project that works for everyone. And that is a real challenge, maybe on a PhD scale, but even still, and there is no room in the standard institutional framework to allow for this work to be done the way I feel it should be done. And so I've had to be really, really and I know there are other researchers that have done the same where you've had to be really, really creative about how you set up your timeline and what you make space for. And I have multiple side projects, way too many side projects, because each one is providing me with an opportunity to give back reciprocity, spending time with different nations helping different projects that they're interested in. And then in the hopes, sometime in my PhD framework, some of that will come together for my final thesis chapter where I will speak to what I've learned working with nations, and how traditional knowledge has really played a role in how I've come to understand the system so far. And but I do hope that in moving forward, especially science, especially social sciences and other other disciplines, I'd say are doing a better job maybe I don't know the answer to that very well. But science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for sure, at least, need to start making some time and space for the building of the relationships with the nation's finding out what communities want to know, as opposed to just coming in and saying I'm gonna go learn what I want to learn so, but it has been quite remarkable. There are things I would have done differently knowing what I know now. And I hope I will be putting that in writing before I'm definitely PhD for sure. It does take an army to do this kind of work. I have an amazing team that I work with in our lab and with the Hakka Institute. This is on West beach upon Calvert have some of you in the room into Calvert did you make it over to West Beach, quite beautiful over there. So at the end of every, that's just orange juice honest. Then the very Eighth Day days up there, you've been working really hard raising the tides. So always nice to celebrate a little bit together as a team. And so with that, I'd like to acknowledge a lot of individuals, many, many volunteers, I actually have to add more to this list. My supervisors and committee are amazing to work with. And many funders. And there's more on that list now too. I think I've got most of them. And my husband, it's our anniversary on Monday. With that I have time for questions. Please feel free to visit my website seagoing.ca. Right now I'm writing a blog about how you can learn to survive grad school from a Roomba. You'll be surprised they are. They're surprisingly insightful, those little robot vacuums. But yes, questions at the back.
Unknown Speaker 59:34
When the tides coming in and out what prevents them from being eroded over time.
Unknown Speaker 59:39
They are eroded over time. But part of the tending is rebuilding them constantly. So how many people have farmed and picked rocks from a from a the rocks keep coming back right? Doesn't matter how many times you pick up there's more rocks next year. How does that happen? Same thing happens in these systems and And there's theories that it's even just the activity of the clams and the worms themselves. Actually, you're allowed the holders to percolate that cup. So those are the ones that appear in the clamp that proper clam garden better than move to the wall to build it up again. But yeah, they definitely, they're pretty. They're pretty significantly build. They're pretty, real, pretty robust. They look like a giant Toblerone running down the beach, so quite a pyramid shape. So they can handle quite a beating, I'd say but they do definitely get eroded. But that activity also adds sediment behind the wall, again, which add nutrients. And there's, I wasn't able to find a way to properly quantified I do have some data on temperature and salinity and things that I'm looking at. I planted sensors just behind that wall, because that wall itself is slowing the water. And that that exchange of water down quite a bit. So I think on and elders and knowledge holders have spoke to this as well. When I've asked questions about it, that it keeps the water warmer longer. And it keeps it attracts nutrients. And it traps larva. So when the clams are coming to settle from being out in the open ocean, they come in to settle that slower water allows everything does settle out a little bit better. So it's more than just the wall in the dirt. It's how it changes the flow of the water definitely has a significant effect
Unknown Speaker 1:01:19
on my questions about that. So the numbers you showed that was inside the wall right? Before the video was outside, but your numbers are inside a wall? So is this a new community? That is sort of establishing itself there? Or is this was a physical trapping of the individuals because it can't go out with the ongoing title? Or
Unknown Speaker 1:01:42
maybe it doesn't? Maybe it doesn't matter?
Unknown Speaker 1:01:44
Good, good question that because in setting mobile species, these are the ones that I'm working on are capable of coming up onto the beach and then vacating the beach and I think they're doing so each tide. And so my design was hoping to catch everything that was making use of the clam garden as a feeding area. So the original hypothesis was one researcher out of SFU demonstrated that there was more clam biomass so that that, in biologist terms is higher productivity, so there's more productivity. So then the question being are more animals coming to the beach, because it is more productive is was sort of the hypothesis. So my thinking being that if they are coming, because clam gardens are productive, they come up onto the clam garden when the tide comes in to feed on whatever is available to them there, and then trap them as they left. After speaking with different members of community that said, Well, we built the walls for other reasons. I don't necessarily think it's always the productivity, I think it's also the fact that it's providing habitat, which is why I got very serious about quantifying the complexity, all those rocks and how that's providing places for organisms to hide. So especially if you're a juvenile fish, yes, it's great to have things to eat. But you eat plankton for the most part, which means there's often food around the trick is staying hidden and not getting, getting eaten in the in the activity of going and finding something to eat. So I I may never be able to tell the two apart. There's always those sentences at the end of scientific papers that say, I don't really know the answer to this. This is what I'm, I think it is. caveat, caveat. caveat. So I may not be able to tell the difference between productivity and complexity I'm hoping to. So I'm not sure I'm entirely answered your question, but because the species I'm looking at are so mobile, I think there's no there was no, no, they come and go because they are not there when I'm standing on the beach. And except for that little octopus here. I didn't catch him in my trap. He was trucking around next to my trap while I was setting it up like he owned the place. Tide has gone little tiny red. Dr. Boyce is looking for crabs like this wandering around on the beach looking for grants. Wow, you're pretty bold. Yeah, pretty amazing.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:02
So further into space is found on the reference sites that were not found.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:09
Yes, I'd say there's pretty distinct differences across the board. So the next one of the next components of the analysis that I'm working on, is not just how many PCs but which PCs, and then the degree of similarity between the sites because I just from observation of being out there, reference sites had Dungeness crab clam gardens had red rock clap red rock crab, they were clearly fulfilling the same ecological role. They were both large crabs tearing things apart, but I rarely caught Dungeness crab on clam gardens. And I rarely caught red rock crab on reference reference sites. And there were other instances of you know, different fish species different patterns, you know, stay current sculpins and flat fish on reference sites no surprise. And or they might be a surprise to you if you don't know about the species. But and then lots of fun what we would call cryptic species, the long gunnels and be like fishes in sculpins. And things like that would be hanging out on the on the clam gardens. But, but then they also have pretty high incidence of juvenile fish like the rock fish that I showed you on Cloud gardens. So yeah, different species, for sure. And that's more of the story to come. So stay tuned, it'll only take me three to seven years.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:24
So your data for those, those comparisons between the reference site and your study sites, they're based on using the same instrument to to collect the most in both situations, do you collect at the same table height? Yes, I can. Okay, and do you look at it, what I would call vegetation cover up in the cover of algae? And?
Unknown Speaker 1:05:51
Yeah, so the algae is an interesting question, because obviously, the site's changed dramatically when you flood them with water. And when I'm taking my complexity measurements, it's just of the rocks. So we're still trying to figure out a good way to get at what does it look like three dimensionally when it's underwater, because that's definitely a different part of the story. We don't know how to do that. Yet. You can't use that same millions of pictures strategy, because everything has to be motionless when you take those pictures. Otherwise, it just creates one big work. So we can't take pictures of all the algae. So I do have plots that I made of, to find out which algae species were there, for example, we did have all the data of the other kinds of organisms, the other fieldwork, I was doing the clams, the, the barnacles, all those other things. So those are, they're different because of the rocks and things that attached to rocks. On this on the soft sediment part, they're really, really similar, the reference site versus the clam gardens, so they're as close college is really messy. And that's a horrible excuse, but they're as close to similar as they can be in terms of just presence and absence of a wall. But I do know, there was also an excellent argument to be made, I should be studying beaches that have cobble versus cobble that's put in a nice, neat wall. And I know that a lot of the work is being done out here too. But that can also create a different kind of confusion or noise in different. Yeah, we still don't know the answer to the perfect reference site. We're just trying to measure as many things as possible, and hopefully be able that we have a big enough sample size we can start looking at. Well,
Unknown Speaker 1:07:28
one of the reasons why that's because if you say you have kind of a different group of species on the, on the reference sites versus and I wondered if you looked at the feeding ecology of those two sets a group of fishes and thank you compare them, maybe they're eating different things?
Unknown Speaker 1:07:46
Yes, well, I'm hoping to find a minion, a master's students, and funding for a master's student to look at what would be called functional ecology, which instead of looking at the differences in species, you look at the different roles that are playing, and see if it's a bunch of species with similar roles. There are definitely similarities between the species I'm finding that there are some unique and significant differences between the different beach types, which I'm not surprised by, but it would be really, functional ecology is a whole nother package of things in itself. So not something I have the time to undertake. Even if I do take six more years sorry, honey, if I take six more years, but it would be really interesting to look at it from just a functional ecology perspective to see if there's different roles being played on these different beach types definitely.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:37
Follow up on that. So some niches presumably are not suitable for building a clan garden, you'd have to track the stones in from a long ways. So you probably start with a different beach a priority before you decide to build because some are not suitable.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:57
In theory in the recent paper that came up with the dating Dana the pomskies and Nicole Smith paper that just came out last month. They also speak to the fact that there are three different documented three different kinds of clam gardens in that there are clam gardens that don't have walls. Those are just good healthy clam beaches that are the right slope and the right title height. Then there are clam gardens where it was a pretty good beach but maybe it was a little bit too steep or not or it could be made bigger so then the wall was built to change the slope of the beach to make it a little bit less steep. Put more of the beach at the right title height for clams because they like about one to two meters of title height those are the most delicious species are in one to two meters of title height or instances where there was no sediment there whatsoever. Rock Wall was built and sediment was filled or allowed to fill behind it so there instances where I scratched my head as to why why would you build it here there's you had you had to pack a lot of rocks. This would have been a lot of canoe loads of rocks. To get to build this beach, and yet it was still done. So there's so much more to that story that I don't ever expect to understand completely. But they definitely were important because of the amount of work that went into it. And like I mentioned those two bays, every single beach that even anything that wasn't like this was a clam garden. It's pretty amazing. Yes,
Unknown Speaker 1:10:22
some of the walls that I see have these gaps periodically, along the wall. Now, if there were no gaps, I presume They're manmade, is it's there were no gaps, large fish that came in at high tide to forage would be trapped. But because of these gaps, they all get out. What's the story behind those gaps?
Unknown Speaker 1:10:53
Canoe runs. So I've been told in multiple instances, that those were built to allow the canoes to run safely up onto the beach on the soft sediment part as opposed to going over the rocks. And so it's also an instance of like, when did the learning occur, and how intentional was that initially, so they were maybe built initially because they needed a safe landing for the canoes, but then quickly realized that it also ensures that they're not trapping things when it's not time to collect dinner. But on the same regard, fish weirs were well used and along, and they were intentionally built with a gap to allow the fish to escape that, that baskets or other collecting mechanisms were used to catch fish as well. So maybe they already knew that they that that needed to be in place, but I was told many different times that they were canoe canoe runs through the walls, but likely serve many purposes. And it makes sense like they found here when they built the wall and the red rocks, crabs, the water was getting too hot and too low oxygen behind the wall. during low tide, it basically was a tidal pool that was just not suitable for a great big red rock crab. So that that channel allowed the red rock crab to escape as well. So maybe that was the reason also. Questions
Unknown Speaker 1:12:11
I've heard. I know what the plans are here on Saltspring full purvey wonder what restful Island? I understand. And what about other areas of San Juan are turned on a vendor? How prevalent
Unknown Speaker 1:12:25
are they? Um, that's a lengthy answer to that. There's lots of potential pieces to that story. I do know that. For some some of the communities valued clams and others considered them poor people's food. So it wasn't the other sources of protein were sought is opposed to building clam gardens. So there are definitely regions where the clam gardens are ubiquitous because they were an important winter food, they're important trading item. And if I you know if I overstep here, I'm not an expert at any of this. But this is just what I've heard in different discussions with archaeologists and ethno ecologists, but also the the story of sea level, is, I think there are probably lots of different walls in different areas that nobody has seen, or that have been completely buried for a long time, because they're sitting, you know, maybe below zero tide they had they're not getting exposed anymore, and they're covered with sediments completely. That's likely part of the story as well. So there's probably a lot more climb gardens that we know about. We don't know about 1000s of them. But there are likely more that are buried. But then also, they weren't necessarily always we also, they're also still trying to figure out how was the technology shared up and down the coast? And, you know, did ever were they all used all over the place? I don't know the answers to many of these things. These are. I'm a fish biologist. These are things I've just heard. that do make sense. That would make sense to me. Different there'd be lots of different things driving whether or not to build a clam garden. You wouldn't necessarily go to the trouble that build a massive wall if you had beautiful clam beaches already. And there are definitely instances I know I grew up clam digging and lots of beautiful clam beaches, he would have never needed to build a wall. They were perfect as they were. But but if you go to areas like the northern part of Quadra Island, the beaches are a little bit too steep. There's occasionally ones that are sloppy at sort of the mouth where the river comes in. But they're a little bit too anoxic because of the combination of you know, woody debris coming out from the forest. And so just off to the side, if we could just make the speech a little bit bigger and better. There'd be more marine flow and it'd be better for clams. So lots of different reasons why claim gardens might have been built. That I can that I sit and ponder when I have nothing better to do which is often
Unknown Speaker 1:14:59
claimed I'm not being maintained.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:03
I have no idea. I do know that there's, other than the restoration sites, I don't know of any that are actively being tended. But that could definitely just be an artifact of I don't deserve to know that information. Or maybe they're just being farmed minimally. I do know that there's people just digging on them. Sort of small scale commercially, in some region, some of the some of the clam gardens on Quadra Island there are by both indigenous and non Indigenous people. So I don't know of any that are actively being tended in the traditional way. Other than the amazing restoration sites here.
Unknown Speaker 1:15:43
Just wondering if they were being accurate retaining intended, whether that would make a difference to your results?
Unknown Speaker 1:15:51
Yes, I would say they're very much likely do. And Chief Chief Adam, Dick was out on on a couple of different gardens. And he said these are these are not healthy, these are not okay, these are not well, because of the removing of the algae and the tilling of the soil and the removing of the rocks. That likely oxygenated the soil made it healthier habitat for the clams, so things they've likely did do better. And some of the gardens that we dig down into when we're excavating there's definitely sort of a layer of like a dead layer. It's black kids toxic. I would say that was maybe an instance where they had been actively tended. And then it stopped because everybody was removed from the land. And so there's that and then above that is just sort of nature doing its best or carrying on carrying on but there's often this layer that seems like the right timeline of things stopping. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:55
What was the purpose of excavating? In the kleinburg? area? You did show a couple of slides at first question exhibition.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:03
Yeah, that was that was under the original start off is the archaeology permit. And then they were interested in how productive they were? For the clams themselves. So we were digging quadrat plots to figure out the density of the clams in which species? Yeah, not for fish. I liked fish. I didn't like digging in the mud. So I moved on to other species. Anyway, questions, that'll be that. Thank you much.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:28
Thank you so much. That was thrilled if you.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:38
have any more questions you can come
Unknown Speaker 1:17:39
up? I will stick around. If you're not a public question. Asker you could just come talk to me. I'm friendly. I don't like just wanted
Unknown Speaker 1:17:45
to tell you two more things in April, on the 11th of April. Sara Cox is a writer now. And she did a book on the Peace River down and sightsee, and she'll be speaking here in the library, seven o'clock on a Thursday, the 11th of April. And then most people would know Lowe camp, he's going to come and speak about his adventures on the tackle Shimi. River, and the outset, and that was last year. And also he joined up with a National Geographic film, people group and walked on. What's it called Nikka. Island, and walk the shores and did a film obviously, but he's not going to bring the film. You have
Unknown Speaker 1:18:46
announced that on April 6, we'll be meeting here at 10am on Saturday for forest march to press for. So we don't see so many pictures like the one near the start of your presentation. I'm trying to so brandy pan will be speaking Joel will be speaking. And there'll be some photographs and a little marched down to Centennial Park. There's a little bit of information in the paper already, but we'd love to see everyone
Unknown Speaker 1:19:12
in that camp. And lastly, the chairs here are very different. You have to pile them on to metal stack one at a time. So don't bother putting them together three at a time here and three that you cannot do that. And everybody rushes to help. And if you just maybe take your chair and put it on the end up having to take off. So thank you for coming
Unknown Speaker 1:19:43
on the 21st and ask your questions. 20s During the evidence from the people you were talking to that they were harvesting things other than
Unknown Speaker 1:19:55
claps merchants cockles, fishing for kelp really using all of it lots of different species a whole suite so many other things yes definitely so
