The temperate rocky intertidal is about as colorful a natural place as I’ve seen. Much of the color comes from algae, and in the spring and early summer the eye can be overwhelmed by the emerald greenness of the overall landscape due to Phyllospadix (surf grass, a true flowering plant) and Ulva (sea lettuce, an alga)….
Author: Allison J. Gong
Sex on the Beach
Every winter northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) return to their breeding rookeries in central and northern California. These animals spend the majority of their time foraging at sea, but as with all pinnipeds they must return to land to birth their pups. The breeding site in central California is Piedras Blancas, a few miles north…
Finally! A cause for sea star wasting syndrome
At last, a publication on the causative agent for sea star wasting syndrome! Several co-authors have written a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which the culprit was identified as a densovirus. The Smithsonian wrote up a nice article summarizing the findings here. While it remains…
Cups vs. gourds
A couple of months ago I posted about the vernal equinox and the arrival of spring as heralded by the return of the swallows to the marine lab. This spring I’ve been keeping an eye on the mud nests that have been going up under the eaves of one of the buildings. It seemed to…
Monsters in the making
Yesterday I collected three very small Pycnopodia helianthoides stars. When I brought them back to the marine lab I decided to photograph them because with stars this small I could easily distinguish between the original five arms and the new ones: These guys began their post-larval life with the typical five arms you’d expect from…
Fouling communities
On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the coast of Japan. About 14 hours later, at 11:15 a.m. local time a tsunami came through the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor. It sank dozens of boats and significantly damaged several of the docks. People were ordered to evacuate the area before the expected…
Going, going, gone!
Our Purple beehive, which swarmed on Wednesday (today is Friday), threw another swarm this afternoon. It remains to be seen if we can recapture them. So far we haven’t been able to see exactly where they’ve settled. Fingers crossed.
Swarmy weather
For the past week we’ve had rain, sometimes brief downpours and at other times more gentle rain, and the rainy days would be interspersed with sunshine. We were warned by one of our beekeeping mentors that this was “swarmy” weather: The bees are locked up inside the hive when it rains, and swarm on the…
True signs of spring
The astronomical onset of spring is the vernal equinox, which this year occurred on Thursday 20 March 2014. The date is determined by the movements of the Earth and the sun, and occurs regardless of weather conditions anywhere on the planet. Some people look to plants for an indication of spring: the first day that…
More fun in the intertidal
This past Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon I took my marine biology students to the rocky intertidal at Natural Bridges State Beach. We completely lucked out with the weather; the storm system that brought some of the rain that we desperately need had cleared out, leaving calm, clear seas and little wind. Perfect weather for taking students…