not latch onto the tough granite of the Hopkins intertidal area. But they
can wedge themselves into serpulorbusreef and become established
that way.
Researchers in the 1960s who came to Hopkins looking for tube
snails to study were disappointed, and had to head south for their
work. When Baxter arrived in 1974, he saw a few serpulorbusin the
rocky intertidal area outside the station’s offices. “I guess you could
find one every 10 feet,” he recalls. When his research took him up to
Half Moon Bay and Pescadero, about 40 miles to the north, he did not
see any serpulorbus at all.
That started to change within a few years of Baxter’s arrival.
“Sometime in the early 1980s, the numbers began to pick up,”
Baxter says. “By the mid to late 1980s they were very abundant.” The
tube snails completely covered the rocks behind the Monterey Marina’s
breakwater, just as they had in southern California 40 years before.
The new abundance of serpulorbus was not the only change Baxter
had noticed in his decades at the station. Earlier researchers had docu-
mented the seaweed cover on the rocks; by the late 1980s much of that
was completely gone or had shifted substantially, taking over what had
been habitat for barnacles and other critters. Baxter also saw that one
predatory snail in the whelk family, ocinebra, seemed to have increased;
it was another species he knew from his southern California days.
While casual observations make interesting stories, they are not
the same as rigorous science. They are, Baxter says, “anecdotes that
you can’t do much with.” To turn his eyeballed observations into
respectable research would take a concerted effort to actually measure
any changes, compare them with other kinds of data about the physi-
cal environment, and then try to determine the factors that might have
pushed the change forward.
Baxter had a couple of starting points. He had found a small hand-
ful of older studies documenting all the plants and animals along spe-
cific sections of the rocky tide pools just downhill from the Hopkins
station’s lawn. The station had been collecting data including air and
water temperature for decades; some statistics even went back as far as
- And the intertidal area between Hopkins and the open waters of
Monterey Bay was California’s first marine reserve, protected from
114 Orna Izakson