City Nature Challenge 2018, Malibu Lagoon State Beach, California - April 2018

One April weekend I heard about this City Nature Challenge through Facebook (I think?) and I wasn't doing anything so I headed out to Malibu Lagoon on a whim.

According to the event invite "The City Nature Challenge is a competition between major cities to see who can make the most observations of nature, find the most species, and engage their residents in worldwide bioblitz.".

I've been to Malibu Lagoon probably more times than any other outdoor location - I've talked about it 9 times on my blog! - but I am still always finding something new. Here's where it is:




This day I found it EXTREMELY difficult to find parking but then I ended up finding a free spot north of the lagoon near the public library and it required me to walk through this lovely park that I'd never seen before - Legacy Park - and I even got to use the restrooms at the library!

Once I got to the lagoon there was a table set up for people to sign up officially and grab a bucket to collect trash as they went - all the buckets were already taken so I think it was a well-attended event. The way this works is that you take photos of the things you observe and post them to iNaturalist.org using the app or the website. I've been using iNat for years to track my observations and to get help with ID-ing things so it was easy for me to participate.

And then I just wandered around and took photos.

The big "new thing" this day was that there were so many Terns! I've seen a few here before, but this day there were a TON of them. It was very cool to see that many!

According to the signs that blocked off part of the beach, two endangered species, California Least Tern and Western Snowy Plover, nest here.

I didn't realize while I was there that there were 2-3 different types of Tern so I didn't pay close enough attention to the markers - mainly, the color of the bill. Looking back at my photos now and doing some more research online I see that most of the Terns I saw had red bills so they were Elegant or Caspian Terns, not California Least Terns, which have a dark yellow bill. I'll have to look more closely next time!

When doing research for this post I see that the Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society does monthly bird walks so I'm going to go on one of those soon and then I'll learn more.

The tide was not that low so I didn't find anything particularly notable in the tide pools, but I did find a black sea hare (the largest sea slug in the world) as big as my foot which is always impressive. I'd seen them before, but it had been years.

California Black Sea Hare (Aplysia vaccaria)

I know it looks like a pile of slime (and nothing for scale) but check out this video I just found which really shows you what they look like. The video was shot in Abalone Cove which is where I first went tide pooling and I really think it gives you a sense of the search and excitement you feel when you find something really cool! NOTE: I generally do not pick up the animals.




And here are some of the other photos I took.

Limpets

Barnacles and Limpet

Barnacles and Limpet

Giant Kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera)

Willet (Tringa semipalmata)

Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis)

Terns and American Coot

Sandcastle worm (Phragmatopoma californica)

If you look now at the project page for the City Nature Challenge Los Angeles you can see that throughout these 3 days 2,442 different species were observed by 856 different people with the Western Fence Lizard getting the most observations (384!). Looking at the Leaderboard for the challenge you can see that San Francisco won with 42,762 observations (of 3,197 different species)! This year I only contributed 9 observations as I was just getting my feet wet, but it was fun and worthwhile to participate in and I think I'll do it again next year.

For more of my photos from Malibu Lagoon State Beach, see the album here.