July 28, 2006
All Things Great and Small
Submitted by Exploration Leader Peter Rumm. Peter has traveled far and wide with Cruise West, including Alaska, Mexico's Sea of Cortes, Columbia & Snake Rivers and California Wine Country.
While we cruise through the Inside Passage and elsewhere in the Pacific, we impress our guests by spotting some fantastic wildlife. Six hundred pound brown bears, black bears, moose, wolves, coyotes, killer whales, Dalls porpoise and humpback whales just to name a few. In the mean time we are constantly surrounded by awe inspiring scenery. This combination has made cruising in Alaska and the Inside Passage one of the most popular cruising destinations in the world.
While we are out in the field with our guests, it gives us great pleasure to also refocus our guest’s attention on the smallest of creatures, some are reviled, like the banana slug that’s eats fecal matter off the forest floor along with other plant life. They are hermaphroditic, with their sexual organs located on their neck, which means they mate both ways simultaneously. It gives a whole new meaning to term “necking.”
Other creatures such as nudibranchs, look like small seafaring slugs, but are found in the intertidal zone and deeper water, they have no relationship to slugs found on land. They conjure up visions of a Las Vegas show girl’s head dress in miniature, only about an inch across, they eat sea anemones. By digesting the algae living within the sea anemones they take on its brilliant color. More fascinating is the fact that they eat the sea anemones stinging cells and then incorporate them into their own physiology for defense. It would be like your dog eating a porcupine and then coming home with quills erupting from it skin and using them as a defense.
Sometimes the most commonly viewed wildlife paradoxically goes completely unnoticed, such as barnacles. We see billions of them on the rocks and even their larval forms floating in the water. Before a barnacle attaches itself to a rock it has no shell. Instead they look like tiny floating boogers (sorry there’s no better way to describe them) about the size of a finger nail, with a small feathery foot reaching out, it pulsates, propelling its self along, perhaps looking for a rock to settle on. And yet when we scoop one of these little creatures from the water, it is with amazement that guests look at them and realize they have never given any thought to something perhaps they have stepped upon thousands of times during their life. Never giving any thought to that creatures life cycle with all its complexities and oddities. You think the banana slug is odd, imagine trying to mate when your glued upside down on a rock for eternity
While walking with our guests in the muskegs (wetlands) we have the opportunity to point all types of plants that totally take people by surprise. Such as blooming cotton grass with huge tufts of cotton emanating from their tips and blowing in the wind. Bog orchids have tiny white flowers lined neatly in a vertical row waiting to be found and admired. And finally there are the carnivorous plants, the sundew and butterwort that secret digestive enzymes that capture small insects and glisten in the sun like morning dew.
As we take our guests ashore in our inflatable boats, or visit a small town with no roads and only boardwalks we have the opportunity to visit some unique ecosystems. Sure everyone is eager to see a bear, or an eagle swoop down and grab some unsuspecting rodent. However, until then we have so much more we want to show you both great and small!
Posted by Peter on July 28, 2006 8:51 PM
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