Much ado is being made of the fact that Africanized honey bees have recently been found in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the articles I’ve read on the subject have disseminated information that is good, but can be confusing to the average person who isn’t a beekeeper. Most people who don’t understand bees…
Month: September 2015
Cuteness warning: High alert!
This morning I was doing some routine cleaning of animal-containing dishes at the marine lab when I noticed a little blob of snot on the outside of the bowl I was working on. Normally I just wipe off blobs like that, but something about this one caught my attention in a different way and I…
The busy-ness of life
In a desperate attempt to escape from the heat yesterday afternoon I went down to the marine lab and vowed to find something to do that would keep me there for a while even though I had only a few minor chores to take care of. Fortunately there was a lot going on in the ocean. The tide…
Thar she blows!
Let’s just get this out of the way: I live in a paradise of natural beauty. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I get to call this gorgeous place my home. However did I get so lucky? Case in point. For the last week or so a juvenile humpback whale has been hanging out in…
Happy as a . . .
. . . clam, right? Yes, except in this case the bivalve is not a clam, but a scallop. I was out at the harbor with Brenna again this morning, looking for molluscs for tomorrow’s molluscan diversity lab. Brenna was hunting for slugs, of course, and had drawn up a rope that had been hanging…
Off with the old, into the new
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, where I spend some time hanging out several days a week, has a spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) on exhibit. While the lobster doesn’t have an official name, for obvious reasons the aquarists call it Fluffy. We don’t know if Fluffy is male or female, but for convenience sake we’ve been referring…
A series of unfortunate events
Now is not a good time to be a sea star in my care. Although to be honest, I doubt these animals would be better off in anybody else’s care, either. And what’s going on today isn’t so much a series of unfortunate events as a trio of additional episodes in the two-year serial catastrophe that we…
You are what you eat, part the third
To recap: Way back in January I spawned some sea urchins. The resulting progeny are now almost 7.5 months old, counting from the day that they were zygotes. Once they metamorphosed and became established as post-larval urchins in June, I divided them into three feeding treatments: the kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, the green alga Ulva sp.,…