It’s the time of the year for students to graduate from one stage of their education to the next. We don’t have students of our own at home, unless you count the cats, but we graduated some 10,000 or so bees! Let me explain. Since the car accident and head injury in 2016, my activities…
Unusual numbers of the usual suspects
Today was the first time I’ve gone out on a low tide since before the whole COVID19 shelter-in-place mandates began. Looking back at my records, which I hadn’t done until today because it was much too depressing, I saw that my last time out was 22 February, when the low tides were in the afternoon….
A different sort of coral
I’m willing to bet that when you think about coral, what comes to mind is something like this: The reef-building corals of the tropics are indeed spectacular structures, incredibly rich in biodiversity and worthy of a visit if you ever get the chance. These coral colonies come in many shapes, as you can see in…
Hovering
We have all heard about hummingbirds and their ability to hover and fly backwards. These tiny feathered jewels are a delight to observe. They are birds of the New World, and I feel sorry for people living in parts of the world that don’t have hummingbirds. Where I live, on the coast of Northern California,…
Altercation in the air
We Californians are all under a state-wide mandate to stay at home, to minimize the spread of COVID-19 this spring. School hasn’t been cancelled, but all classes have converted to distance learning. I had four days to figure out how to deal with that. Fortunately we are in spring break this week, which gives us…
Practicing ecology on a defunct military base
Back in 1994, the U.S. Army base at Fort Ord was closed in one of the base closure events that occur every once in a while. UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) acquired some 600 acres of the former base to establish the Fort Ord Natural Reserve, which serves as an outdoor laboratory and teaching space for…
The many faces of anemones
Of course, sea anemones don’t have faces. They do have mouths, though, and since a mouth is usually part of a face, you can sort of imagine what I’m getting at. The sunburst anemone, Anthopleura sola, is one of my favorite intertidal animals to photograph. Of the four species of Anthopleura that we have on…
Life is a beach
The first field trip of the semester for my Ecology class is always a jaunt up the coast to Rancho del Oso and Waddell Beach. It’s a great place to start the practice of observing nature, because we can explore the forest in the morning, have lunch, and then wander along the beach in the…
Findings on the beach, and a puzzle
A while back now I went out on a low tide even though the actual low was after sunset. I figured that it was low enough that I’d have plenty of time to poke around as the tide was receding. And given that there were promising clouds in the sky, I took my good camera…
Tidepooling with visitors
It has been a while since I’ve spent any time in the intertidal. There isn’t really any reason for this, other than a reluctance to venture out in the afternoon wind and have to fight encroaching darkness. There’s also the fact that I much prefer the morning low tides, which we’ll have in the spring….