This morning I went out on what will probably be my last low tide of the season. We don’t get any good (i.e., below 0 feet and during daylight hours) until November, so it’s time to hang up the hip boots for a few months and work on other things. I had planned to go…
$hit happens
Very early in the morning of Sunday 12 August 2018, the F/V Pacific Quest ran aground near Long Marine Lab. I found out about it because the lab facilities manager sent out a global e-mail telling us that a boat had wrecked and telling us that the seawater pumps had been turned off just in…
Rodent patrol
About a week ago, as part of yearly summer fire prevention, some of the fields at the marine lab were mown. After this happens many of the little critters living in the dried grasses are left homeless and become relatively easy prey for predators of all sorts. Since the mowing I had been seeing a…
The Selkirk Loop
In early July we joined my in-laws on a 2-day driving trip around the International Selkirk Loop, a series of highways that follow rivers and lakes through the northeast corner of Washington, the northern skinny part of Idaho, and southern British Columbia. These roads pass through some beautiful country in both the U.S. and Canada,…
Green
The marine macroalgae, or seaweeds, are classified into three phyla: Ochrophyta (brown algae), Rhodophyta (red algae), and Chlorophyta (green algae). Along the California coast the reds are the most diverse, with several hundred species. The browns have the largest thalli (the phycologists’ term for the bodies of algae), including the very large subtidal kelps as…
The flowers have brunch
When low tides occur at or before dawn, a marine biologist working the intertidal is hungry for lunch at the time that most people are getting up for breakfast. And there’s nothing like spending a few morning hours in the intertidal to work up an appetite. At least that’s how it is for me. Afternoon…
The other side of the Bay
Monterey Bay is shaped like a backwards letter ‘C’, with Santa Cruz on the north end and the Monterey Peninsula on the south end. The top of the ‘C’ is comparatively smooth, while the bottom is punctuated by the Monterey Peninsula, which juts north from the city of Monterey. The most striking geologic feature is…
A steady diet of worms
Today is the first day of the week of low tides dedicated to Snapshot Cal Coast, a statewide citizen science project headed in my area by the California Academy of Sciences. This week groups and individuals will be making photographing the organisms they see in the ocean or along the coast, and uploading observations to…
Banding party
This morning, after months of invitations that I could not accept due to teaching commitments, I was finally able to join a group of folks at the Younger Lagoon Reserve (YLR) for their weekly bird banding activities. During the summer months they start early, trying to catch birds in the few hours after dawn. I…
Means of persuasion
This afternoon we got a call about some bees that were swarming in a residential neighborhood near us. We had caught a swarm the other day and that was a very good thing, as both of the colonies in our Apiary #1 had died out in the last few weeks. The first swarm went into…