I hadn’t been over there for several years, and it was time to refresh some old memories of forest walks and boat or kayak trips in that area. A nice ferry ride to Gustavus was greeted by the usual crowd of pigeon guillemots that nest under the dock.
I was joined by a Gustavian friend, and we took a short walk in the forest near the lodge, which was notable chiefly for the discovery of two strange slime molds. Slime molds are weird organisms. Scientists can’t decide how to classify them; are they plants or fungi or animals or something else? So they are sometimes just kept in a catch-all category called “protists,” which have nuclei in their cells (like the other organisms), but otherwise are very diverse and puzzling.
One of the ones we found was making and dispersing spores (if that’s the right term)…if we gently disturbed the small cylindrical structures, a cloud of miniscule, dust-like particles floated away. We had previously seen slime molds as flat, moist organisms growing on old logs, but we had not seen the reproductive structures. So curiosity now led us to look up something about them. We found an online source of images that displayed a most remarkable array of forms, including variously-colored spheres and boxes borne on stalks as well as the small cylinders we found. I wonder what scientists make of all that diversity.
A slime mold released clouds of tiny spores from the little yellow cylinders. (Photo by KM Hocker)
The next day, we set off in the regular dayboat that takes visitors sightseeing up the big fjord. There were puffins carrying two or three fish in the bill, common murres in nesting niches, cormorants standing like statues on rocky ledges, gulls with fat, fuzzy chicks, marbled murrelets, and more. Hundreds of sea otters were scattered over the waters, not rafted up. Humpback whales cruised up and down the bay, sea lions jumped occasionally, and seals rested on the calved ice from Johns Hopkins glacier. Kittiwakes lined the glacier terminus, probably waiting for more calving to stir up prey. All of that was enjoyable, for sure.
But the best observations happened near Tidal Inlet. A brown bear was well out in open water, swimming for shore, as if it had crossed the whole fjord. It’s not common to see them out in open water, rather than paddling around a point or across a little inlet; which leads to a question about how often they cross the big water. When this bear reached the beach, it shook water out of its fur and ambled over the rocks, up and over a little ridge where it seemed to snack on berries from some low shrubs, and back down to the rocky beach. There we left it to its explorations.
Not long after that, we saw a little cavalcade of three wolves trotting over the rocks on the beach. The lead wolf was unusually pale — not white but yellowish, and I called it “blonde.” The next one was a bit burlier and mostly blackish. The third wolf was brownish and lagged behind the others. When Blondie and Blackie stopped and looked back, number three stopped too and did not try to catch up with them. That happened a couple of times, leaving us in a puzzlement about the social arrangement of the group. Was number three following in hopes of joining or was it in process of being pushed out? We were not to know, of course. But the color variation was certainly remarkable!
After the cruise, while waiting for the time to board the plane back to Juneau, we walked around the big gravel-pit pond near the airport (locally known as Lake Gustavus). The gravel road around the lake is thoughtfully closed to motor traffic at this time of year (late July) because late summer is when the toad tadpoles start to emerge onto land and transform into adults for their terrestrial life. We found quite a few recently emerged toadlets, some of which still had remnants of their tadpole tails. A good ending to a great visit!
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology. “On The Trails” appears every Wednesday in the Juneau Empire.
