This spring and summer the local beaches have at times been covered by what appear to be small, desiccated, blue or white potato chips. They would typically be seen in windrows at and just below the high-tide line, or blown into piles. The most recently washed up ones are a dark blue-violet color, while the…
Author: Allison J. Gong
Slow and steady (I think)
Today the Pisaster larvae that Scott and I are following are a week old. Happy birthday, little dudes! Yesterday we did the twice-weekly water change and looked at them. They’re getting big fast since we started feeding them on Saturday when their mouths finally broke through. At this stage they are sort of jellybean-shaped and extremely flexible–they don’t…
Early morning low tides are the best
This morning I went on a solo trip to one of my favorite intertidal sites up the coast a bit. I’ve been busy with stuff at the marine lab and my house is a construction zone this summer so it was really nice being alone in nature for a couple of hours before most people…
A glass half full
It’s becoming quite clear that I don’t have to worry about having too many sea star larvae to deal with. While the embryos from my F1 x M1 (Purple x Purple) cross had hatched this morning, nothing from the F2 x M1 (Orange x Purple) cross looked promising. I’m about ready to write off these…
Questions and answers
I’ve been fielding questions about my recent sea star spawning work from people I’ve shared this blog with, which is a lot of fun! To streamline things and make the info available to anybody who might be following, I decided to put together a very brief FAQ-like post to address the most recent questions. Question: Can you…
Strangeness abounds
Wow, they weren’t kidding about “early developmental asynchrony” in sea stars! This morning I looked at the embryos that I had started almost 24 hours earlier, and noticed two things right off the bat: Thing #1: Within the F1 x M1 (Purple female x Purple male) mating , developmental rates among full siblings were all over…
From zero to cleavage in. . . nine hours
A recent college graduate and fellow marine lab denizen (Scott) and I are collaborating on a project to quantify growth rates in juvenile Pisaster orchraceus stars. This is one of the intertidal species whose populations in the field and in the lab were decimated by the most recent outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS)….
Crystals in the sky
Early this afternoon the clouds at the marine lab were very interesting, so I took some photos: These thin wisps are a subset of cirrus cloud called cirrus uncini clouds, commonly referred to as mares’ tails and characterized by the hooked formation (‘uncinus’ is Latin for ‘hook’). They occur high in the atmosphere, at altitudes around 5500…
Sea urchins have no manners
On Monday of this week (today is Thursday) I was transferring my baby urchins into clean bowls as I always do on Mondays, and for some crazy reason decided that I needed to measure all 300+ of them. I don’t remember how the details of how this decision came about, but it probably went something like…
And we have fledged!
Yesterday afternoon when I got home I checked out the red-tailed hawk nest across the canyon and didn’t see anybody home. Then I started scanning the trees on both sides of the canyon to see if the parents were around. While I was looking the dad flew in with prey and perched on the top…