That cute little Melibe I found last week is still alive, and still super cute. It lost one of the two large cerata on its back the second day I had it, and I wasn’t sure it would be able to survive long without it, but it has hung in there and started growing a replacement….
Marine invertebrates
Cuteness warning: High alert!
This morning I was doing some routine cleaning of animal-containing dishes at the marine lab when I noticed a little blob of snot on the outside of the bowl I was working on. Normally I just wipe off blobs like that, but something about this one caught my attention in a different way and I…
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…
A series of unfortunate events
Now is not a good time to be a sea star in my care. Although to be honest, I doubt these animals would be better off in anybody else’s care, either. And what’s going on today isn’t so much a series of unfortunate events as a trio of additional episodes in the two-year serial catastrophe that we…
You are what you eat, part the third
To recap: Way back in January I spawned some sea urchins. The resulting progeny are now almost 7.5 months old, counting from the day that they were zygotes. Once they metamorphosed and became established as post-larval urchins in June, I divided them into three feeding treatments: the kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, the green alga Ulva sp.,…
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…
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Sometimes the only word that will do is a bad word. I generally try not to use a lot of bad language because on the occasions when I do swear I want my f-bombs to really mean something. Late this afternoon I was on my way out of the lab when I made a quick…
Falling in love
Today Scott and I gathered all of our tiny Pisaster stars and assigned them to food treatments. We’re not doing a feeding experiment per se but have the goal of getting these juveniles to grow, and to do that we need to figure out what they eat when they’re this small. Nobody knows, or at least…