A few days ago I was in the intertidal with my friend Brenna. This most recent low tide series followed on the heels of some magnificently large swells and it was iffy whether or not we’d be able to get out to where we wanted to do some collecting. Our first day we went up…
Month: January 2017
Simply green
A few days ago I told my friend Brenna that I’d hunt around in the marine lab for a bit of a green alga that she wants to press. I had a pretty good idea of where to look, only the animals I’d seen it on had been removed from the exhibit hall. I asked…
Hope for the future
It has been almost three and a half years since I first documented seastar wasting syndrome (SSWS) in the lab. Since then many stars have died, in the field and in the lab, and more recently some species seem to be making a comeback in the intertidal. This circumstantial evidence may not be reason enough to conclude that…
The hybrids are winning!
Although at this stage it’s a close race. Two and a half weeks ago I spawned sea urchins in the lab, setting up several purple urchin crosses with the hope of re-doing the feeding experiment that I lost this past summer when I was on the DL (that’s Disabled List, for those of you who don’t…
You can’t push a string
Northern California is currently being pummeled by a meteorological phenomenon called an atmospheric river. The storms produced by these “rivers” tend to be warm and can be very wet, such as the Pineapple Express storms that carry atmospheric moisture from Hawai’i to California. The weather station on the roof of our house has recorded 4.26 inches of rain…