Almost a week ago, my sculpin eggs were doing great. The embryos had eyes and beating hearts and were actively squirming around inside their eggs. A few of them had died but overall they seemed to be developing well. I had high hopes that they would continue to do so, and began to think of what…
General natural history
Have a heart
Back in mid-December I collected a couple of small intertidal fishes and brought them back to the lab for observation and identification. Then the female laid a batch of eggs, which I’ve been watching ever since. Today the eggs are 15 days old. They are developing pretty quickly, I think, at ambient seawater temperatures of 12-13.5°C….
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…
Seashore to forest
I am fortunate to live in a place of great natural beauty. While the Pacific Ocean dominates much of the landscape, we are also partially surrounded by mountains. I grew up in the flatness of the San Joaquin Valley, a couple hours’ drive from both the sea and the Sierra Nevada but not near enough for either…
Green Friday
In recent years the day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday, a day when retailers across the nation offer fantastic sales in order to separate Americans from their hard-earned cash. I hate shopping even under the best of circumstances, and you couldn’t pay me enough to step foot in a shopping mall on…
Why does the ocean stink?
Several people in the past few days have asked me why the ocean stinks. The answer is simple. The red tide that I documented a month ago is back, and worse than ever. The culprit is the same, but now it is present in even higher numbers. I can’t show you how it smells, but…
Fall colors
People who live in other parts of the world often say that California doesn’t have real seasons. I would argue that we do indeed have seasons, they’re just . . . subtle. Certainly here on the coast the Pacific Ocean moderates weather so that we don’t have to deal with temperature extremes. However, in the…
Balancing act
When the concept of conservation biology was first introduced in the 1970s, it applied to the species that were disappearing due to deforestation in the tropics. Biologists began to realize that species were going extinct as a direct result of human activity. As conservation science evolved over the decades it has become a multidisciplinary melding of population biology and…
It’s the little stuff
At the marine lab we have many seawater tanks and tables in various shapes sizes. For my purposes the most useful are the tables. The tables are shallow, about 20 cm deep, but what’s nice about them is that water depth can be managed by varying the height of the stand pipe in the drain. I…
The burning season
Mediterranean climates, such as the one that much of California experiences, are characterized by two distinct seasons: a mild, moderately wet season and a warm/hot dry season. In most of the state the majority of precipitation falls between Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, with very little in the other months. At this time of year the dry season…