Sunrise Silicon Valley, a Bay Area based nonprofit organization, hosted a webinar with local experts in the biodiversity field on Wednesday.
Aditi Anand, webinar host and hub coordinator at Sunrise Silicon Valley, said the organization’s goal is to mobilize youth in Silicon Valley to demand climate change action from the local to national legislative level.
The webinar featured three keynote speakers who presented their research on different topics based on biodiversity in the Bay Area.
Sticky monkey-flowers
The first keynote speaker, Tadashi Fukami, is a professor of biology and earth system science at Stanford University. He studies community ecology, a research topic that examines the interactions between different species and ecosystems.
“When we think about biodiversity it’s not, of course, just a list of species that are found in an ecosystem – it’s also about relationships [between] those species and that’s what we study,” Fukami said.
He said a lot of his field work is conducted at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, a field station that is a part of Stanford’s campus.
Fukami researches microbial communities in the nectar of sticky monkey-flowers, a plant that is native to California. His research found that there is a relationship between the microbes that live in the nectar of these flowers and how pollinators, mainly hummingbirds, interact with them.
“What we found is that when you have bacteria in nectar, then hummingbirds don't like going to nectar – maybe because it's just the nectar is too sour,” Fukami said. “Then plants are also in trouble because they need hummingbirds for pollination.”
Fukami’s research examined how much bacteria and yeast were observed inside the nectar of sticky monkey-flowers. The results found that flowers with an abundance of yeast had little to no bacteria and flowers with an abundance of bacteria had little to no yeast.
“For example, if you have yeast growing well in flower, then they might keep bacteria in check so that the bacteria wouldn't be growing and through that, indirectly, yeast might be helping to keep the plant pollinator mutualism intact,” Fukami said. “The point I wanted to make here is that by doing ecological research to tease apart different interactions that are going on, we can have a better understanding of how biodiversity is maintained – because we have mutualistic and antagonistic interactions and it's all connected.”
Algal Blooms
The second keynote speaker, Damon Tighe, is a curriculum training specialist at Bio-Rad Laboratories.
Bio-Rad Laboratories is a California based company that develops and manufactures products for life science research, according to the company's website.
Tighe said he is a naturalist who became interested in studying the biodiversity in Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. His research came from observations he made in Lake Merritt, the epicenter of a large algal bloom event that negatively affected wildlife in the entire San Francisco Bay.
Initial signs of the algal bloom event were in July 2022, when discoloration of the lake acted as a sign that something was wrong, according to a Sept. 2, 2022 Oaklandside article.
“I happened to be down there doing a collection of a fungal sample and came over the edge of the lake to just see that there was just this massive die off,” Tighe said. “So all of these organisms I've been used to seeing for years under the water were all of a sudden out of the water.”
He said over the next couple of weeks he observed and recognized a harmful algal event occurring across the entire San Francisco Bay.
Tighe said one organism impacted the most by the algal event were white sturgeons, the largest freshwater fish in North America.
“So this is a major impact on a very sensitive kind of group that probably is going to take a while to recover and the danger is that we have these events going forward,” he said. “We have, I think, a pretty strong possibility of not having sturgeon in our waterways going forward.”
Tighe said white sturgeon is one of many organisms impacted by the event.
In his research, Tighe found the reason for the water color change in parts of the East Bay was because of an organism called heterosigma akashiwo.
Tighe said heterosigma akashiwo is an algae in many port cities around the world and it’s mainly associated with large fish die offs.
“So with this information, I got a little bit more worried when I saw this entering Lake Merritt,” Tighe said. “A lot of these fish were literally suffocating – so they're up at the surface trying to get oxygen.”
California Native Garden Foundation
The final keynote speaker, Alrie Middlebrook, is the executive director and co-founder of the California Native Garden Foundation.
The California Native Garden Foundation is a nonprofit organization that aims to create carbon-neutral urban land and protect ecosystems services, according to the organization’s website.
Middlebrook is an advocate for certain initiatives that address climate change. The initiatives include a change in how cities use land by having more regenerative farms and native gardens; the opening of an “agrihood” in Santa Clara county that would have a self-sustaining garden, affordable housing for seniors and creating summer curriculum for San Jose Evergreen Community College based on forest ecology and conservation agriculture.
