This weekend I was supposed to take a photographer and his assistant into the field to hunt for staurozoans. I mean a real photographer, one who has worked for National Geographic. He also wrote the book One Cubic Foot. You may have heard of the guy. His name is David Liittschwager. Anyway, his assistant contacted…
Squidlets
Every once in a while some random person drops off a creature at the marine lab. Sometimes the creature is a goldfish that had been a take-home prize at a wedding over the weekend (now weddings taking place at the Seymour Center are not allowed to include live animals in centerpieces). Once it was a…
Blitzing an old military base
This weekend a subset of my students and I spent a day at the Fort Ord Natural Reserve (FONR) to participate in the 2018 spring Bioblitz. We were supposed to visit FONR for a class field trip in early March to do some vegetation studies, but that trip was rained out. Today’s visit was sort…
When geeks get new toys
For several years now I’ve been lusting for a good compound microscope. I wanted one that I could call my very own, and thus justify allowing people to use it only after they have been trained by ME in how to use it correctly, and I wanted it to have certain features that the old…
Rediscovery of a lost species
About a year and a half ago I wrote about salmonids and beavers in the Lake Tahoe-Taylor Creek region, specifically about the non-native kokanee salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) that were introduced into the region in the 1930s and 1940s as a game fish. Since then the kokanee has displaced the only salmonid native to the Tahoe…
Familiarity breeds wonder
This week I celebrate the return of the early morning low tides! I was very much looking forward to this tide series, and even though I am in class on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings I wanted to go out on as many of the tides as possible. On Wednesday morning I went out to…
A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 4
Library of Congress I was completely unprepared for how astoundingly beautiful the Library of Congress is. From the outside it looks like another of the many federal buildings constructed in the Classical style. The interior, though, was spectacular. The ceiling of the Great Hall is magnificent–take a look at this stained glass! We joined a…
A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 3
National Archives We spent the morning waiting in line to see things in the National Archives building. The lines to get in were very long, and even though we’d bought a membership the night before so that we could bypass the entry line, once we got inside the building there were more lines to go…
A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 2 (part 2)
Lincoln Memorial This is one of the most easily recognizable monuments in Washington, DC. It graces the back of our $5 bill and sits directly across the Reflecting Pool from the Washington Monument. Everybody knows what it looks like. From the outside, especially from the bottom of the steps, this is another imposing marble edifice….
A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 2 (part 1)
Monday 26 March 2018 — Memorials On Monday we ventured south of the Mall to the Tidewater area, where an extension of the Potomac river floods into a basin and forms a tidal pond. This area is where the famous cherry trees of Washington, DC, are concentrated, and we hoped to catch some of the…