Late yesterday afternoon I met my friend Brenna at the harbor to go on a slug hunt. Brenna is working on the taxonomy of a group of nudibranchs for her dissertation, and we’ve gone collecting out in the intertidal together a few times. I knew I’d need some harbor therapy after teaching a microscope class in…
Month: August 2015
Hanging on
Day 3 of wasting in Leptasterias The saga continues. When I checked on my ailing stars yesterday I saw, as expected, that most of what I had called Leptasterias #1 (the pink star that had ripped itself into pieces the day before) had disintegrated into small piles of mush. There was no sign of life…
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Sometimes the only word that will do is a bad word. I generally try not to use a lot of bad language because on the occasions when I do swear I want my f-bombs to really mean something. Late this afternoon I was on my way out of the lab when I made a quick…
A plug, and a caveat
Early next week (31 August – 2 September), PBS and the BBC are going to present a huge “live” media event. I say “live” because although the event will be aired in the evenings, all the preview footage I’ve seen has been shot in during daylight hours. Anyway, you can read all about it in…
Chasing the bloom
Having read multiple news accounts of domoic acid (DA) events up and down the Pacific coast of the U.S., I decided to do my own informal survey of the culprit that makes DA. Domoic acid is a naturally occurring toxin that is produced by some (but not all) species of the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia during a plankton bloom….
Fair is foul, and foul(ing) is fair
Next week classes for the Fall semester begin, and this will be my fourth term teaching a marine invertebrate zoology class at this particular institution. I have built this class on a foundation of comparative anatomy and functional morphology; lab activities include dissections (to observe how bodies are put together) and diversity labs (to examine the morphological…
Falling in love
Today Scott and I gathered all of our tiny Pisaster stars and assigned them to food treatments. We’re not doing a feeding experiment per se but have the goal of getting these juveniles to grow, and to do that we need to figure out what they eat when they’re this small. Nobody knows, or at least…
The Enemy of the State
I came of age, in an academic sense, working as a technician in a lab where the research focused on colonial hydroids. The other tech in the lab, Brenda, and I would get sent out to collect hydroids, then spend another day or so picking the predatory nudibranchs off the colonies. The PI of the…
A marine biologist goes to the mountains
This past weekend I attended a family reunion at South Lake Tahoe. It had been several years since the previous reunion for this side of the family, and it was wonderful seeing almost all of my cousins and their various offspring, plus aunts and uncles, in a glorious setting. All good things must come to…
You are what you eat, part the second
Two months ago now I gave my juvenile sea urchins a job. It’s the kind of job they’re perfectly suited for: eating algae. I measured them all and randomly divvied them up into three food treatments. One group remains on the pink coralline alga they’d all been eating once they graduated from a diet of scum,…