Having obtained decent-ish amounts of gametes from sea urchins, the next step is to get eggs and sperm together. The first thing I did was examine the spawned eggs to make sure they were round and all the same size. Lumpy eggs or a variety of sizes of eggs indicates that they are probably not…
Marine biology
You are what you eat, part the fourth
The juvenile sea urchins I’ve been raising this year are now nine months old. Back in June I put them on three different macroalgal diets and have been measuring their test diameters monthly. I do the measuring in the first week of every month, and today was the day for November. Over the past few weeks I…
Happiness is . . .
. . . taking a small group of highly motivated students into the field! My invertebrate zoology class this semester has only 10 students, which allows me a lot more freedom to improvise on the fly and actually participate in the course instead of having to stand back and supervise 30 of them at the…
A pilgrimage, of sorts
If I were the type of person to make and keep a bucket list, today I would have been able to cross off one item. For some reason until today I’d never managed to get to Ed Ricketts’ Great Tidepool, even though I’d been several times to Point Pinos which is right around the corner….
The busy-ness of life
In a desperate attempt to escape from the heat yesterday afternoon I went down to the marine lab and vowed to find something to do that would keep me there for a while even though I had only a few minor chores to take care of. Fortunately there was a lot going on in the ocean. The tide…
Thar she blows!
Let’s just get this out of the way: I live in a paradise of natural beauty. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I get to call this gorgeous place my home. However did I get so lucky? Case in point. For the last week or so a juvenile humpback whale has been hanging out in…
Happy as a . . .
. . . clam, right? Yes, except in this case the bivalve is not a clam, but a scallop. I was out at the harbor with Brenna again this morning, looking for molluscs for tomorrow’s molluscan diversity lab. Brenna was hunting for slugs, of course, and had drawn up a rope that had been hanging…
Off with the old, into the new
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, where I spend some time hanging out several days a week, has a spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) on exhibit. While the lobster doesn’t have an official name, for obvious reasons the aquarists call it Fluffy. We don’t know if Fluffy is male or female, but for convenience sake we’ve been referring…
Spying on filter-feeders
Late yesterday afternoon I met my friend Brenna at the harbor to go on a slug hunt. Brenna is working on the taxonomy of a group of nudibranchs for her dissertation, and we’ve gone collecting out in the intertidal together a few times. I knew I’d need some harbor therapy after teaching a microscope class in…
Hanging on
Day 3 of wasting in Leptasterias The saga continues. When I checked on my ailing stars yesterday I saw, as expected, that most of what I had called Leptasterias #1 (the pink star that had ripped itself into pieces the day before) had disintegrated into small piles of mush. There was no sign of life…