Looking north from a bridge at Crane's beach, the collection site in the foreground.

Green alga on a rock.

Rocks on the point at Nahant.

Looking at scuba divers off Nahant.

Looking back at Boston from Nahant.

The crew at Coast Guard Beach on Nahant.

Going out to get Pilayella off the beach.

Small amounts of the alga in the water, with a quarter for scale.

One of the things about collecting littoral marine algae is one can do it the hard way or the easy way. For shore algae that live in the intertidal zone, it's easier to arrive and sample at low tide. Then you can walk to where the algae are and pick them out, rather than having to deal with two to four feet of water. On this Saturday in November on the north shore of Massachusetts Bay that was 10 AM. This meant launching the University of Massachusetts Algal Collection Expedition at 7 AM from Amherst. The first stop was at Crane's Beach in Ipswich where a tiny green alga Pseudendoclonium submarinum lives on the rocks of a small tidal creek that flows into the Castle Neck River and the North Atlantic. After that, it was a quick drive down to a rocky point just northeast of Boston, the town of Nahant. Here we collected another alga, Pilayella littoralis, lives in a unique population that is huge, producing a sulfurous odor that has plagued the town for years. The algae came back to Amherst, where among other things we'll try to figure out what microbes, particularly pathogens, are associated with them.

Northwest from collection site at Crane's Beach.

The expedition head and crew at the collection site at Crane's.