This week my female Kellet’s whelk (Kelletia kelletii) started laying eggs. She’s been doing this every summer for the past several years. She lives with one other whelk, presumably the father of her brood, as the eggs are both fertilized and viable even though I’ve never seen the snails copulating. That’s right, copulating. Whelks are…
Author: Allison J. Gong
Dudes, dudettes, and dudelets
We are fortunate to have a lot of wildlife in our backyard, which is actually a canyon. On any given day we can look out and see finches and hummingbirds squabbling over their respective feeders, jays trying to steal whatever they can, and hawks either swooping through the brush or soaring overhead. The soundtrack of…
A tale of two anemones
Over the Memorial Day weekend I took my students out on the early morning low tides at Natural Bridges State Beach. While they were ooh-ing and ahh-ing and filling out their assignment worksheet, I was playing around with my new camera, taking pictures in the water. Because I am not a photographer and sea anemones…
More sex and real estate
The birds do it, the bees do it, and now the frogs are doing it. There’s a small clump of trees between two of the houses across the street, and I think that’s where a male Pacific chorus frog has staked his claim. Every evening for the past few weeks I’ve heard him singing away….
Sex and real estate
We are still about a few days away from the vernal equinox, but it is impossible to mistake the signs of spring: Trees are blooming (gesundheit!), bees are buzzing, and birds are singing. In our canyon, the California quail have disbanded their large winter covey and are foraging in male-female pairs. In the past few…
Albatrosses
Sometimes even a naturalist gets to go on vacation, and I was fortunate enough to get to spend a week in Kaua’i. My favorite spot on the island was the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore of the island, where I got to see albatrosses, frigatebirds, and boobies in flight, as well as…
Caught in the act
I was making my usual feeding and checking rounds at the marine lab last Wednesday, when I saw this: This crab is a kelp crab, Pugettia producta. It is one of the common crab species on the California coast; you can find them in the low intertidal clinging to algae. Many of them are this…
Zombeeees!
Just in time for Hallowe’en! I have photographic evidence that some of our bees have been taken over by parasitic phorid flies. These flies are a group of diverse animals, including wasps and nematode worms, described as “parasitoids.” These are not your average parasites, which generally do not cause lethal damage to their host, although as…
Immaculate conception
I’ve shown you how sea urchin eggs are fertilized in the lab, and you’ve watched the fertilization membrane develop in real-time. One day a few years ago, my colleague, Betsy, and I set up shop to spawn urchins. We do this just about every year because it is super fun and we both enjoy watching…
Let there be life!
One of the all-around coolest things I do with my students is spawn sea urchins to show them fertilization. We can actually watch fertilization occur under the microscope. And since the early stages of development are the same in sea urchins and humans the students get to see how their own lives started–not in dishes…