About a year and a half ago I wrote about salmonids and beavers in the Lake Tahoe-Taylor Creek region, specifically about the non-native kokanee salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) that were introduced into the region in the 1930s and 1940s as a game fish. Since then the kokanee has displaced the only salmonid native to the Tahoe…
General natural history
A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 4
Library of Congress I was completely unprepared for how astoundingly beautiful the Library of Congress is. From the outside it looks like another of the many federal buildings constructed in the Classical style. The interior, though, was spectacular. The ceiling of the Great Hall is magnificent–take a look at this stained glass! We joined a…
Getting skunked by birds
This week I took my Ecology students to the Younger Lagoon Reserve (YLR) on the UC Santa Cruz Coastal Science Campus. The YLR is one of 39 natural reserves in all of the major ecosystems throughout the state of California. The UCSC campus administers five of the reserves: Younger Lagoon, the Campus Reserve, Fort Ord Natural…
Charismatic megafauna
I like to venture out of my comfort zone every once in a while, as that’s the only way to keep learning. Even though my particular area of interest is the marine invertebrates, there are a lot of other aspects of marine biology that are almost as interesting. And if I’m going to call myself…
Disappearing puff balls
The other day I was walking along Pescadero Beach about an hour north of where I live. My husband and I had gone on a short afternoon hike in Pescadero Marsh and decided to return to the car via the beach. It was a windy afternoon, making photography difficult, but I did enjoy the chance to…
Creepy crawlies
There are certain creatures that, for whatever reason, give me the creeps. I imagine everyone has them. Some people have arachnophobia, I have caterpillarphobia. While fear of some animals makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense—spiders and snakes, for example, can have deadly bites—my own personal phobia can be traced back to a traumatic childhood…
The tiniest advantage
Although the world’s oceans cover approximately 70% of the Earth’s surface, most humans interact with only the narrow strip that runs up onto the land. This bit of real estate experiences terrestrial conditions on a once- or twice-daily basis. None of these abiotic factors, including drying air, the heat of the sun, and UV radiation,…
My favorite larva — the actinotroch!
Five days ago I collected the phoronid worms that I wrote about earlier this week, and today I’m really glad I did. I noticed when I first looked at them under the scope that several of them were brooding eggs among the tentacles of the lophophore. My attempts to photograph this phenomenon were not entirely…
A different take on ‘vermiform’
If I asked you to draw a worm and designate the front and back ends, you’d most likely come up with something that looks like this: And you would be entirely correct. A worm, or any creature described as ‘vermiform’ for that matter, has an elongated, wormlike body. Some worms have actual heads with eyes…
The fluidity of sex
We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either Female or Male. And while we, as a species, generally do things this way, in the larger animal kingdom sexual function doesn’t always follow these rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having…