On Tuesday 8 July 2025 I had a total joint replacement of my right knee. Over the past year and a half or so the osteoarthritis had gotten really bad, to the point that I couldn’t walk without pain. Much less actually do anything active, like hiking or tidepooling or even carrying a camera around to take pictures. I hobbled my way through winter and spring this year and finally got a surgery date, hopefully early enough in the summer to allow some degree of recovery before the fall school term begins.
One of the folks on the surgical team, who had been shepherding me through all of the more conservative treatments—cortisone shot, hyaluronate injections—told me that the recovery schedule for a total knee replacement (TKR) goes something like this:
For the first four weeks I wouldn’t want to talk to anybody and would wonder why I let “them” talk me into this in the first place
For the next several weeks I’d be willing to talk to people and might even say “Hi” to the medical folks
After about six months I’d smile at the medical folks and will have regained much of my lost mobility
After a year I’d want to take them all out for a drink
I am at Week 5. Last week I had my 4-week post-op appointment. The nurse practitioner had me do another set of X-rays, to make sure that the implant was still correctly positioned, and checked on my incision. The X-rays tell the story and reinforce that the surgery was indeed necessary.
Mirror image X-ray views of my right knee, before and after TKR
The opaque white in the “After” image is the titanium implant, secured into my femur and tibia. The polymer cushion that replaces the worn-to-nonexistent cartilage doesn’t show up in X-rays. I had moderate osteoarthritis in all three compartments of the knee: lateral, medial, and patellar. Osteoarthritis only ever gets worse, and the conservative treatments can alleviate symptoms but don’t fix the underlying problem. Surgery was definitely needed. While he was in there replacing parts of my femur and tibia, the surgeon also completely reshaped my patella, shaving off the bone spurs and forming a smoother surface that will glide correctly between the femur and tibia. No more Rice Krispies in that knee!
For the past week and a half or so, every afternoon between about 14:00 and 14:30 there has been an outbreak of coyote noise in the canyon behind my house. It starts up, goes furiously for about 5 minutes, and then abruptly stops. I’m rehabbing a new knee joint and am not really mobile now, but have hobbled out to the deck with binoculars to see if I could find the coyotes. The first time I heard all the noise I worried that the coyotes had gotten into a fight with someone’s pet dog. But when it kept happening every day at the same time, I decided it must be part of the coyotes’ afternoon routine.
We heard it again today, and both went out to look. While all the yipping was going on I looked for any telltale movement in the bushes—nada. But after they had quieted down, I was looking at a grassy slope where we’ve seen all kinds of animals hanging out. And a coyote wandered out! And she had three pups following her! I took a bunch of pictures, none of which were anything to share. I did also catch about 30 seconds of video:
Mystery solved! Nice to know the next generation of California’s most successful mesocarnivore is growing up. There is a ton of food in these canyons, so there’s a good chance that this trio of pups will all survive.
My home town of Santa Cruz made national news the other day, 23 December 2024, when a series of massive swells caused part of the Municipal Wharf to collapse into the ocean. People in the restaurants and other businesses had to evacuate immediately, and three people were dropped into the water of Monterey Bay (they were all rescued safely and no human lives were lost). The bathroom building fell into the water and washed up on the beach at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. Almost immediately, memes appeared, advertising a 2-bathroom unit with both river and ocean views, renting for $6000/month. Given the exorbitant rents here, you could argue that maybe this is a pretty good deal.
That afternoon, the same swell tore through the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor and replicated the damage done by the Fukushima tsunami in March 2011. The damaged docks had been replaced in 2014, but this recent damage ripped them up again. Boats and docks were thrown around and crashed into each other. An unknown amount of diesel fuel and gasoline were also “liberated” into the water.
My friend Murray has a little boat, Scherzo, that lives in the upper harbor on G dock. On the day of the worst swell, Murray had gone down to see how Scherzo was faring. At that point she had taken at least some cosmetic damage to her paint but didn’t seem to be taking on any water except rain water. The harbor patrol had closed all of the docks so he couldn’t get close enough to see if there were worse injuries. At one point another boat had come down the channel and gotten wedged under Scherzo so she was floating on top of it. Somebody rescued Scherzo and tied her up at a spot just under the ramp from her usual berth. Yesterday, Christmas Day, Murray called us to say that he was down at the boat and asked if Alex (my husband) could help him get her out of the water, as more big swells were forecast. I’m not very useful when it comes to boats, but I went along to watch things from above and hold lines and such.
Before they could take Scherzo out of the water, they had to make sure she was seaworthy enough to be driven down to the boat ramp at the lower harbor.
Behind Murray, who is wearing the pink cap, you can see damage to the finger dock. And notice that the big boats aren’t sitting straight in their slips. Scherzo‘s usual spot is on the other side of the ramp; she got pushed under the ramp and a kind soul tied her up here.
This is the capsized boat that had gotten wedged under Scherzo. It was now stuck under the ramp, just in front of Scherzo‘s spot.
Scherzo‘s engine started right up, and the boat itself having been deemed safe to drive by Alex the Engineer, Murray took her down the harbor slowly. Alex and I met him at the boat ramp.
While we were waiting, we noticed that some of the pilings from the busted-up Wharf, which is more correctly a pier rather than a wharf, had been hauled out of the water and set in the parking lot.
Knowing that the biota on the pilings would be very similar to the critters I see in the rocky intertidal, I had to investigate. And it was very sad. Most of the animals had died waiting for a high tide that wouldn’t return. Some of the barnacles were still alive, albeit just barely so.
To get a feel for how big Balanus nubilus and Tetraclita rubescens are, my left index fingernail measures exactly 10 mm across. That B. nubilus is a big sucker!
Balanus nubilus is a strictly subtidal species that I never see in the intertidal. Tetraclita rubescens occurs in both the intertidal and the subtidal; some of these subtidal specimens were larger than the ones I see in the intertidal. Most sessile marine invertebrates can feed only when they are covered by water, which means that the ones living in the intertidal don’t feed at low tide. Thus the subtidal T. rubescens can get larger than their intertidal conspecifics, simply because they can feed 24/7. We see the same pattern with mussels in the intertidal: those higher up in the mussels’ range are smaller than the ones in the lower part of the range.
Some of the barnacles were still alive. They can close up their shells and wait out a low tide. But sitting out of the water for longer than a day was more than even they could withstand.
Other old friends were there, including many sea anemones. This is the sunburst anemone, Anthopleura sola, looking the way it does when I see it in the intertidal at low tide.
Probably the saddest thing was a desiccated red octopus on the pavement. It had probably plopped out of a nook and tried to make its way back to water. Poor little thing.
The organisms on these pilings were caught in their final moments of life, just as the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum were when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Some of them had tried to escape (the octopus) and some were not quite dead yet (the barnacles), but the inevitable is well, inevitable. At some point the pilings will be removed to the landfill. The same thing happened when the harbor docks were replaced in 2014. I happened to be there with a class and we saw all of the old docks piled up in the parking lot, with all of the attached biota slowly drying up in the sun.
So while there will be reports in the coming days about how many millions of dollars it will take to rebuild the harbor (again) and the pier, let’s not forget that there were other losses that cannot be assigned a dollar value. There is also a potentially major ecological impact of new (again) harbor docks. When the old docks were removed in 2014, they had been covered with a decades-old fouling community. The new docks were pristine new habitat for recruits, and shortly after they were put in I noticed an invasive brown alga, Undaria pinnatifida, which I hadn’t seen before. Undaria is a western North Pacific edible seaweed that is known culinarily as wakame. In recent years it has become one of the most abundant macroalgae in the lower areas of the harbor. The docks that were destroyed this week had been in place for only 10 years or so, and it will be interesting to see how primary succession occurs when new docks are installed. Hmm, that sounds like something I can have my Ecology students document and monitor!
Año Nuevo Island is a small island just off Point Año Nuevo along the San Mateo County coast. These place names come from the fact that the first European to see this bit of California, the Spaniard Sebastián Vizcaíno, first saw it on 3 January 1603. Of course, the native people of this area, the Quiroste Indians, knew about it for probably around 13,000 years!
I don’t usually make a big deal out of the new year. But I ran across this photo and thought it would be a good way to usher in 2024. I hope it is a good year for all of us!
This coming semester, Fall 2023, I am teaching marine biology (BIO 11B) at Cabrillo College. I’ve done this for years, but what makes this semester different is that I’m teaching it asynchronously online. We’ve been teaching in-person for a few semesters now, but due to an unusual crunch for lab space the marine bio class is online for Fall 2023.
For the first time, I developed a liquid syllabus for the class. This is basically a web page that can be distributed before the semester begins, to tell students what to expect. The good news about asynchronous online courses is that you don’t have to be physically present at any particular location at any particular time. So you can take this course from anywhere! There are 4 field trips that we do in-person, but if anyone takes the course from out of the area we can come up with alternate activities for those labs.
If you’ve ever read something here and thought, “I really wish I could take one of Allison’s classes!” now is your time!
For the past several weeks now, the by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella) have been washing up on local beaches. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one floating on the surface of the sea, which is Velella‘s actual habitat. And when you see one Velella on the beach, all you have to do is take a quick look around and you will see hundreds more.
In life, the part of Velella that sticks up into the air is completely transparent, as you can see in the photo above. The parts that are at the water line or hang into the water itself are a dark blue color shading towards indigo. The habitat where Velella lives, called the pleuston, has zero shelter from the sun. Velella‘s blue pigments may act as sunscreens, reflecting the dangerous UV radiation that damages DNA in living cells.
A really big Velella is a little longer than the palm of my hand. The ones we saw today were sort of average sized.
What appear to be bits of white plastic flotsam are actually many dried Velella velella. They fade as they dry, and gradually take on the appearance of potato chips. There is a clear demarcation between the white Velella and the bluer ones behind. The blue ones are still dead, but haven’t been on the beach as long; they probably washed up in the high tide that preceded this morning’s low.
Here’s a closer look at that demarcation between long dead and more recently dead Velella. This was taken from the other side of the pileup as I was returning from the intertidal area. To give you an idea of how these piles are oriented with respect to the water, the ocean would be off to the left.
I was fascinated by the shapes and colors of these corpses as they lay in their windrows on the beach. They made for some spectacular abstract photos. Click on each photo to see a larger version.
Irruptions of Velella like this aren’t an annual event, although we do get some washed onto the beaches every year. They certainly don’t want to be here, but living as they do at the mercy of the currents they don’t have much say in the matter.
For whatever it’s worth, earlier this month NOAA confirmed that an El Niño event has formed and is likely to persist through the winter. El Niño typically brings warmer water up the California coast. Might these swarms of Velella portend a warmer-than usual winter for us? Hmmmm. That’s something to think about. It also makes me wish I were a better oceanographer than I am.
Over the weekend we had dinner with some family members down in Monterey, and my niece gave me a leaf. She had collected it somewhere and carried it around for a while, and I never did get a clear answer about where it came from. To me it looks like a magnolia leaf. When I said it looked like a fun leaf to paint, she told me I could take it home.
December’s leaf
The next day I sat at my desk and studied the leaf for a while. And, as most things do, the leaf became more complicated the longer I looked at it. The shape wouldn’t be difficult to get on paper, but I wanted to work with the colors. I always think that getting the right color is easier with colored pencils than watercolors, so I started with what I assumed would be the greater challenge.
As anticipated, I had real difficulties with the highlights. I still haven’t figured out how to paint shine. And in retrospect it might have been better to paint wet-on-wet instead of letting the paint dry before adding more color.
And that shape, which I thought would be a slam-dunk? I was so wrong about that! The paper in my sketchbook isn’t heavy watercolor paper at all, and with all the erasing I had to do to get that foreground curve right I was afraid I’d remove too much of the texture. I like the overall effect, and I did kind of get the perspective right, which is always hard for me. I stopped before experimenting more with the bright highlights because I didn’t want to overwork this sketch. I still don’t know what to do about those.
Now, onto the pencil version.
As I noted in the sketchbook, what I thought would be easier ended up being not. I do like the color rendition here, and I think the toned paper works well. And as an aside, the Prismacolor Black Grape pencil does make pretty shadows. In this sketch I positioned the highlights with too much symmetry, and as a result this leaf looks like a feather. It might look better if I made the veins more visible. I can still do that.
Looking at both of these sketches, I think I like the watercolor version better. What do you think?
In this strange pandemic school year with classes online and student clubs not able to meet in person, the Natural History Club has been meeting virtually twice a week. We can’t go out as a group on any field trips, so the students have been sharing their nature journals online. Yesterday we played Jeopardy! I didn’t win, but I didn’t embarrass myself, either.
Last spring I was scheduled to give a tidepool talk as an event for the club. The talk was scheduled for mid-March, exactly the time when COVID19 arrived and threw all plans into the blender. The good news is I get to give the talk virtually next month, as the first event of the year. Please come!
California has been burning for almost a month now. Wildfires rage up and down the state, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. I haven’t bothered looking up the latest stats on acreage destroyed because, frankly, it would be too depressing. All across social media today people posted photos of orange skies that made everything and everyone look kind of sick. The photo above was taken at 17:10 this afternoon, a full two hours before sunset.
There’s a thick layer of smoke blanketing most of California for weeks now. Over the Labor Day weekend the smoky conditions combined with a record-breaking heat wave and made for widespread misery. Fortunately for those of us on the coast, the marine layer returned yesterday and brought cooler temperatures. The marine layer creeping in from the ocean is also acting as a buffer between the smoke and us, keeping air quality at ground level pretty nice. People even a few miles more inland from us are still suffering from dreadful air quality.
The double layer of fog and thick smoke has resulted in the twilight we’ve had all day. I noticed that the wildlife responded to these unusual conditions.
The cats have been sleeping more than usual, even for cats. They’ve been sleeping like we’re near the winter solstice rather than on the sunny side of the autumn equinox. And I’ve also been very sleepy all day. Like the cats, it feels like mid-December to me, too.
Hummingbirds—During the heat wave they didn’t visit our feeders much, I think they were trying to shelter out of the heat. Yesterday and today they were feeding frantically. They normally visit the feeders occasionally throughout the day, and in the hour before and after sunset they tank up before going into torpor for the night. The hummers and all of the other diurnal birds have gone to bed a good two hours before sunset.
Insects—The nighttime cricket serenade is going full-strength. They normally don’t start up until full dark. Tonight they’ve started a good few hours earlier.
None of us knows how many days like this we’ll have before the skies clear again. It is very unsettling, to say the least. Now imagine the same kind of thing, only more pronounced and lasting for decades or centuries, as would have occurred during periods of extreme volcanic activity in Earth’s history. After today it’s a little easier to understand at a gut level what I already knew at an intellectual level, that severe levels of atmospheric smoke and dust can change the biota: if the sun never gets brighter than it did today then plants would die, resulting in altered community structure.
As I finish up this post, it is now about the time that the sun should be setting, and it has been full dark for well over an hour now. Feels like bedtime!
Today’s report was written by a guest blogger, Alex Johnson, who also happens to be my husband.
26 August 2020
In the late afternoon last Saturday, the wind shifted and we got our first breaths of fresh air all week. We even saw actual clouds and blue sky for the first time in 5 days! Also fortunately, the thunderstorms predicted over the weekend bypassed us, and since then the weather has been much more cooperative for the firefighters: our marine layer came back (which at least helps in the lower elevations near the coast), the winds have been relatively calm, and the temperatures have been more moderate.
We no longer have ash and burnt vegetation falling continuously from the sky. Only sporadic ash fall now. However this morning the smoke came back, so our air quality is terrible again.
Finally, the fire crews were able to construct fire lines over the weekend to protect our area of town. Two lines were constructed. The primary line runs from Wilder Ranch at Highway 1 up to the far upper reaches of the UCSC campus (at Twin Gates) and then down to Highway 9 south of Felton. A secondary line runs through private land between the Moore Creek Preserve and Wilder Ranch up to Empire Grade Road just south of the west entrance to the UCSC campus.
Yesterday I took a hike to have a look at the secondary break. Here’s what I saw:
1 – Fire break at UCSC campus, looking southwest.
2 – Fire break from Moore Creek Preserve, looking southwest.
3 – Fire break from Moore Creek Preserve, looking north.
4 -Fire break from Moore Creek Preserve, looking southwest.
5 – Fire break from Moore Creek Preserve, looking north toward UCSC.
In the areas I took a look at, they used bulldozers to widen existing ranch roads (dirt), to about 50 feet in width. While digitizing the lines on the map, I noticed that the firefighters appeared to do this where ever possible. In other areas it was evident they had to cut through heavy timber/brush.
Needless to say, with these fire breaks in and the improved weather, we are feeling very much relieved and more secure. We still have our bags packed and are ready to leave, however.
Also because I’m a mapping geek I created my own web maps, pulling together data from various sources so I can keep track of what’s happening. It includes these photos, the fire breaks, evacuation areas, and other info I’ve found useful. The maps above came from those web maps, so here’s a link if you’d like to explore:
The situation remains fluid, but at least the weather is cooperating for now. The breaks that have been established are protecting both the city of Santa Cruz and the UC Santa Cruz campus. Smoke in the air remains a problem, and air quality has ranged from not-too-bad to don’t-breathe-if-you-have-to-go-outside. Still, at least we aren’t likely to have to evacuate any time soon.
