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 spiny lobster that spent the long drive up from the Channel Islands in a cooler, and became the Exhibit Hall favorite, Fluffy. This time the objects had been collected off the beach and brought in by somebody who thought they might still be alive.
These white objects are egg masses of the California market squid, Doryteuthis opalescens, that had been cast onto the beach at Davenport. Sometimes the masses are called fingers or candles, because they’re about finger-sized. Each contains dozens of large eggs. Squids, like all cephalopods, are copulators, and after mating the female deposits a few of these fingers onto the sea floor. Many females will lay their eggs in the same spot, so the eggs in this photo represent the reproductive output of several individuals. The cephalopods as a group are semelparous, meaning that they reproduce only once at the end of their natural life; salmons are also semelparous. After mating, the squids die. Not coincidentally, the squid fishing season is open right now, the idea being that as long as the squids have reproduced before being caught in seines, little harm is done to the population. Most of the time the squids are dispersed throughout the ocean, and the only time it is feasible to catch them in large numbers is when they gather to mate.
These egg masses look vulnerable, but they’re very well protected. The outer coating is tough and leathery, and the eggs must taste bad because nothing eats them. I’ve fed them to anemones, which will eat just about anything, and they were spat out immediately.
The eggs were brought to the Seymour Center because the person who brought them in thought they might make a good exhibit. I happened to be there that day and got permission to take a small subset of the bunch so I could keep an eye on them. And they did and still do make a good exhibit.
At this stage it is impossible to tell whether or not the eggs are alive. The only thing to do was wait and see.
30 April 2018: After waiting two weeks with apparently no change, I decided it was time to look at the egg fingers more closely again. Lo and behold, they are indeed alive! Look at the pink spots in the individual eggs–those are eyes. And if you can see the smaller pink spots, those are chromatophores, the ‘color bodies’ in the squids’ skin that allow them to perform their remarkable color changes.
9 May 2018: A week and a half later, the embryos definitely look more like squids! Their eyes and chromatophores have darkened to black now. The embryos are also more active, swimming around inside their egg capsules. You can see the alternating contraction and relaxation of the mantle, which irrigates the gills. Squids have two gills. More on that below.
At this point the squid fingers began to disintegrate and look ragged. They became flaccid and lightly fouled with sediment.
14 May 2018 (today): Almost a month after they arrived, my squid eggs look like they’re going to hatch soon! I didn’t see any chromatophore flashing, though.
In the meantime, some of the eggs on exhibit in the Seymour Center have already started hatching. The first hatchlings appeared on Friday 11 May 2018. The hatchlings of cephalopods are called paralarvae; they aren’t true larvae in the sense that instead of having to metamorphose into the adult form, they are miniature versions of their parents.
Peter, the aquarium curator at the Seymour Center, allowed me to take a few of the paralarvae in his exhibit and look at them under the scope. The squidlets are about 3mm long and swim around quite vigorously. Trying to suck them up in a turkey baster was more difficult than I anticipated. But I prevailed!
You can actually see more of what’s going on in a video:
The cup-shaped layer of muscular tissue that surrounds the squid’s innards is the mantle. When you eat a calamari steak, you are eating the mantle of a large squid.The space enclosed by the mantle is called the mantle cavity. Because the paralarvae are transparent you can see the internal organs. Each of those featherlike structures is a ctenidium, which is the term for a mollusk’s gill. The ventilating motions of the mantle flush water in and out of the mantle cavity, ensuring that the gill is always surrounded by clean water.
And now we get to the hearts of the matter. At the base of each gill is a small pulsating structure called a branchial heart (‘branch’ = Gk: ‘gill’). It performs the same function as the right atrium of our own four-chambered heart; that is, boosting the flow of blood to the gas-exchange structure. So that’s two hearts. Between the pair of branchial hearts is the systemic heart, which pumps the oxygenated blood from the gills to the rest of the squid’s body. This arrangement of multiple hearts, combined with a closed circulatory system, allows cephalopods to be much more active swimmers and hunters than the rest of their molluscan kin.
I expect that my fingers will hatch very soon. If and when they do, it will be a challenge getting them to eat. I’ve never tried it myself, and cephalopods are known to be difficult to rear in captivity. But I’m willing to give it a shot!
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 of a make-up for that missed lab; because it’s a Saturday I couldn’t compel the students to attend, but I offered a little extra-credit for those who did. It just so happened that Joe Miller, the field manager at FONR, had organized a Bioblitz for another group of students, and he welcomed my Ecology class as well.
Located adjacent to the city of Marina in Monterey County, FONR is one of five natural reserves administered by the campus of UC Santa Cruz. The other four are the Campus Reserve (on the main campus of UCSC), Younger Lagoon Reserve (on UCSC’s Coastal Science Campus), Año Nuevo Natural Reserve (up the coast in San Mateo County), and Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve (along the Big Sur coast). FONR occupies some 600 acres of a former military base that was closed in 1994. The reserve opened in 1996. As with all the other UC natural reserves, FONR exists to provide students, teachers, and researchers with natural lands to be used as outdoor classrooms and laboratories. Field courses at UC Santa Cruz and CSU Monterey Bay make extensive use of FONR, and students carry out independent studies and internships there.
After all of the participants arrived at the Reserve, Joe described the activities he had planned for the day. He told us that we could wander around the Reserve on our own if we wanted, but there were several hikes we could choose to join:
One to where some people were finishing up the day’s bird banding activities
One to collect samples of environmental DNA
One to ID various tracks in the sand
One to the different habitats and vegetation types
One to check out some pitfall traps for small rodents and reptiles
Because my knowledge of the local flora is sorely lacking, I went on the plant hike with Joe. Many of the spring wildflowers had either finished or were finishing up their yearly bloom. The poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) is looking amazing this year; I think it has been able to take advantage of two consecutive wet seasons with a decent amount of rain. There were many poison oak plantlets scattered around all over the place, and the established bushes are lush and green. There is no way I didn’t come into contact with the stuff at least once on this hike, so today is going to be the true test of whether or not I am allergic to it.
Much of the terrain at FONR is a maritime chaparral. The soil is extremely sandy (Pleistocene sand dunes, Joe says) with a poor nutrient load and water content. It’s not a desert, because we do get a fair amount of precipitation along the Monterey Bay, but the plants have adapted to thrive with low soil moisture levels. It’s also often very windy, and there are no trees. Even the coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), which can be magnificently massive and meandering, are stunted here. Much of the foliage is low-growing perennial shrubs or annual plants.
Joe led us through the habitats of the Reserve, mostly on trails but also along narrow-to-nonexistent tracks that we called Poison Oak Lane, Rattlesnake Drive, and Tick Alley. And yes, we did see a rattlesnake! My husband spotted it, right about where he was going to put his foot. It wasn’t a big snake, maybe half a meter long, and was sunning itself in a narrow opening between manzanita bushes. I didn’t stop to take a picture because there wasn’t a good space to do so, and I wanted to let other hikers pass the snake quickly. The snake didn’t seem to react to us, but it’s always a good idea to leave them alone.
Just beyond where we saw the rattler, Joe had found a pair of southern alligator lizards (Elgaria multicarinata) mating. When Joe picked them up the male had grabbed the female with a bite behind her head; he does this to keep her from running away, and it also shows his strength and suitability as a father for the female’s offspring. The lizards didn’t like being interrupted in copulo, so to speak, and the male released the female and escaped back to the ground, leaving his lady love behind in Joe’s hand. Hopefully they were able to find each other again once they were both let go.
To me, the picture above exemplifies what a Bioblitz is all about. We have two people examining a natural phenomenon, and one of them is taking a picture that he will presumably upload to iNaturalist. People learn a lot when they participate in a Bioblitz–they usually see things they’ve never paid attention to before, and when their observations are ID’d or corroborated by the community of iNat experts, they get to put a name to the thing they saw. True, it’s a better learning experience to sit down with a specimen, hand lens, and book to figure out what an organism is, but most people don’t have either the inclination or the luxury of time and the necessary books. And while I’d rather have people look at the real thing with their eyes instead of their phones, getting people to go outdoors and pay any attention at all to their surroundings is a minor victory. I find Bioblitzes to be a little unsettling sometimes. My preferred method for observation is to examine fewer things in greater depth; this is what my graduate advisor Todd Newberry referred to as “varsity” observations. I don’t think a Bioblitz has any place in varsity studies, because of its very raison d’être–to record as many observations as possible–means to some degree that instead of taking a deep look you have to glance-and-go. Still, it does have its place in natural history, and I value it as a way to get more people involved in science.
I was on the plant hike, so many of the organisms I photographed and uploaded to iNat are new to me. Some are California endemics and all have adapted to survive in the difficult conditions of a maritime chaparral.
And I did see one of the California native thistles. Invasive thistles are such a problem that the knee-jerk response is to stomp on them or yank them out of the ground. This one, for which I’m still waiting on an ID confirmation, is silvery and sort of looks like cobwebs. Joe said that its blossom is a bright pink.
And one of my newish old favorite wildflowers, Castilleja exserta, was there. The purple owl’s clover occurs throughout California; in 2017 I saw a lot of it on my wildflower excursion to the southern part of the state. It varies in color from purple to pink to white and thus has multiple common names.
We also saw a lot of the peak rushrose, Helianthemum scoparium. It is a California native species that does well in dry, sandy areas, such as throughout most of Fort Ord.
While I was leaning down to photograph this plant, one of the Reserve volunteers pointed out a much paler version nearby. He told me that most of the time the peak rushrose has brilliant yellow flowers, but there are always a few that have this much more delicate color.
And speaking of yellow, I discovered another new-to-me organism! What at first glance looked like a blotch of spray paint on a tree trunk turned out to be something much more interesting–a gold dust lichen in the genus Chrysothrix.
The lichen book1 that I have describes two species of Chrysothrix, both of which can be found in coastal regions of California. The species have some overlap in habitat, with C. granulosa usually living on bark and occasionally on wood or rock, while C. xanthina can regularly be found on bark, wood, and rock. Nor is color by itself an entirely useful characteristic: C. granulosa is described as brilliant yellow, and C. xanthina can be brilliant yellow, yellow-green, or yellow-orange. There are certain tests that would be able to distinguish between the species, but field ID when the lichen is ‘brilliant yellow’ remains problematic. So while I’d guess that this specimen is Chrysothrix granulosa (based on a combination of color, location, habitat, and good old-fashioned gut feeling) I can’t be at all certain.
The discussion of lichens brings us around to the animals. Did you know that fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants? Well they are, despite being included in more botany than zoology courses. And of course we did see animals on our plant hike. Hawks and turkey vultures soared overhead, song birds and hummingbirds flitted among the trees and shrubs, alligator lizards mated, and there was that one rattlesnake, which even the people on the herps walk didn’t get to see. As we hiked through the various plant communities in the Reserve, Joe occasionally called out “If you see a horned lizard, catch it!” A woman in our group, Yvonne, managed to do so, despite being loaded down with a backpack and a camera. She pounced on it and held it up for us to photograph.
The last critter we saw as we were walking back to the gate after lunch was a juvenile gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer). By the time I got there the snake was resting in the road. It was a very pretty snake. I wanted to take it home and release it into my yard, where there are enough gophers to feed an entire family of snakes, but alas, collecting is not allowed at the Reserve. I do wish that a gopher snake would move into my yard, though.
It is now about 24 hours since we got home. We did our tick checks and didn’t find anything, thank goodness, then showered and scrubbed. There’s no doubt that we were both exposed to poison oak; it is impossible NOT to be, this time of year. This is the real test for whether or not I am allergic to it. I haven’t been so far, but there’s a first time for everything and I will never say that I will never get it. My husband, who gets poison oak very easily and very badly, says it could take up to two days to be sure. I’m not itchy today. Tomorrow may be a different story, though.
1Sharnoff, S. 2014. A Field Guide to California Lichens, Yale University Press
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 lab scope I’d been using didn’t have. Or maybe had but didn’t work that well. I never wanted anything especially fancy or high-tech–no USB capability or polarizing light necessary. I knew I wanted a non-standard set of objective lenses (10x, 20x, 40x) so would probably not be able to buy a microscope off the shelf, so to speak. I also wanted to take really good photographs through the scope, using my DSLR. The iPhone-through-the-eyepiece does surprisingly well, but it felt like it was time to grow up and use a real camera to take photomicrographs.
These were the must-have features:
A 20x objective! Most compound scopes have 4x, 10x, 40x, and 100x objectives. That jump between 10x and 40x is huge, and I got spoiled because the old lab scope has a 20x objective that provides the perfect magnification for my needs. Seriously, that 20x is the Goldilocks of objective lenses!
Brightfield, darkfield, and phase-contrast lighting
A trinocular head so I can attach my DSLR and still have two eyepieces to look through while the camera is mounted
Fortunately, microscopes are not like cars, and it is quite possible to mix and match features to build the exact instrument to suit one’s needs. I did some research, decided for real that I DID NOT require either polarizing or differential interference contrast (DIC) lighting, each of which would have raised the cost by quite a bit, and bit the bullet, placing the order in early April. Some of the parts were on backorder, delaying delivery for a few weeks, and the microscope arrived last week.
It’s here!
I didn’t have time to do more than open the boxes and see what was inside.
After this quick peek I had to wait over a busy weekend before diving into the boxes yesterday. I didn’t want to try to assemble the microscope after a day of teaching, when my brain would be tired. I’m already not the most mechanically inclined person in the world, and knew I needed a fresh brain to tackle this oh-so-crucial job. Monday was the first day that I didn’t have stuff scheduled in the morning, so I could devote a few hours to it.
Step 1: Remove plastic wrapping from the body and remove pieces of tape in the order mandated by the directions.
Step 2: Attach the trinocular head.
Step 3: Screw in the objective lenses. As the self-nominated Queen of Cross-threaded Fittings I was especially careful to get these right. One of the things I like about this microscope is that it comes with space for five objective lenses, so if I decide in the future to add a 100x objective or upgrade one of the others, I’ll have space to do so.
The microscope went together pretty easily. It feels solid and well built.
Step 4: Find something microscopic to look at!
I picked up a piece of red filamentous alga which I thought would be Antithamnion defectum, made a wet mount, and slid it under the lens. And oh my word, the image is beautiful!
Switched to phase-contrast and was just as impressed:
Antithamnion defectum, viewed with phase-contrast lighting 7 May 2018 Allison J. Gong
See how much more definition you get with phase-contrast lighting? One of the reasons I really wanted phase-contrast is that it makes transparent organisms, which white light just passes through, visible.
And the pièce de résistance, a different piece of the same alga viewed in darkfield:
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 basin, the Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii henshawi), to the point that the latter was thought to be extinct.
Fast forward several decades, and Professor Mary Peacock of the University of Nevada, Reno, has found some long-forgotten Lahontan cutthroats in tiny streams in eastern Nevada near the Utah border. This is Professor Peacock’s story to tell, not mine, and you can read about it in this newspaper article. The article has a link to the actual scientific paper, published in an open-source avenue of the Royal Society. This truly is a resurrection story!
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 Natural Bridges to meet up with one of my students, Maddie, who is studying anemones for her independent research project. The tide wasn’t particularly early at 07:08, but there was nobody out there. No surfers, even. The only person I saw out there was Maddie.
There are few things better than an overcast morning in the intertidal. Peaceful, calm, not windy, and uncrowded. I could feel the stress melting away as the only sounds I heard were the coming and going of the surf and the high-pitched ‘cheeps’ of the oystercatchers.
Natural Bridges is probably the intertidal site that I know the best. It’s close to home, so access is easy. It is a state park and a marine protected area, so collecting of any sort is not allowed and the tidepools are about as undisturbed as can be, considering that it is heavily visited. And in the early morning the intertidal is just wonderful. Visiting there and having time to slow down and really pay attention is a real treat for me.
And perhaps the homecoming I felt this morning is due to the fact that just last week I gave a talk to the docents at Natural Bridges State Park. There’s something about this particular group that inspires me and rekindles my interest in this special site.
It is now springtime, and the intertidal is in the full flush of reproduction. The algae are starting to regrow and hinting of the lush coverage that we’ll see in the next few months.
There are several species in the genus Ulva, referred to as the sea lettuces. They come in a variety of morphs, but all are variations on the same theme: a thin sheet, two cell layers thick. Some Ulva species have blades that are large, while in other species the sheets are rolled into thin tubes or short tufts. Many of them look alike, making field ID problematic, so with few exceptions I simply call them all Ulva sp.
The other common green alga at Natural Bridges is one of the filamentous green, Cladophora columbiana. It has a short thallus, rising from the rock surface like a stout pincushion, which is what it feels like. It grows in little clumps among the mussels in the mid-intertidal.
Today I saw Cladophora with little periwinkle snails, an association that, in my experience, is unusual. The periwinkles are small, less than 10 mm from aperture to apex, and I tend to think of them as a high intertidal species. Cladophora can also occur in the high-mid intertidal but for some reason seeing them together with the periwinkles took me by surprise. There were many of the little snails crawling around in the mid zone, on bare rock or on other animals.
In fact, today was a good day to see lots of animal recruitment. Several areas of rock in the mid-intertidal that were recently devoid of animal life have been colonized by mussels or acorn barnacles.
Most of the individuals in this field of barnacles are Chthamalus dalli/fissus. Those are the small, light brown barnacles. The taller whitish barnacle near the center of the photo is Balanus glandula. But see all the teensy barnacles below and slightly to the left of the Balanus? Those are new recruits, 1-2 mm in diameter. If you click on the photo for a larger view, you can see that while most of the recruits are Chthamalus, there are a few Balanus in there as well. And notice that some of the recruits have landed on other barnacles. This is a smart decision for them. As I’ve described before, barnacles can’t reproduce unless they have close neighbors of the same species. Settling on an established conspecific adult is one way to guarantee that a young barnacle will have potential mates when it grows up.
The largest barnacle in the intertidal around here is the pink barnacle, Tetraclita rubescens. It is fairly common at Natural Bridges, and quite conspicuous because of its size and pink color.
Speaking of owl limpets, their tendency to monopolize territories in the intertidal can strongly affect the makeup of the community. It’s not just the barnacles that recruit to the intertidal in the spring; mussels do the same, and often quite spectacularly. The disappearance of predatory ochre stars (Pisaster ochraceus) due to sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS) allowed mussels to expand lower into the intertidal, where they would ordinarily be eaten. The ochre stars have been reappearing in the past few years, and hand-sized P. ochraceus are now very common at Natural Bridges. We would now expect predation to cause the lower edge of the mussel bed to retreat back up a bit.
Mussels cannot recruit to Lottia farms because the limpets routinely cruise around their territories and scrape off any newly settled larvae. Lottia farms occur in what would otherwise be prime real estate for mussels, except for the fact that the larvae landing there never get a chance to become established. However, even a big owl limpet doesn’t live forever, and when one dies a whole swath of now-vacant area becomes available.
Those two bare patches in the photo above are former Lottia farms. I looked for the owl limpets and didn’t find them. And note that band of young mussels running horizontally in the middle of the photo. They are young mussels, relatively clean of encrusting mussels or algae, but aren’t new recruits. I’d guess that they’ve been there a few months. Whatever the age of the mussels, they are taking advantage of the space that used to be occupied and defended by an owl limpet. Or maybe two owl limpets, as that space would be a very large farm for a single limpet.
After two days of class taking me out of the intertidal, I get to spend the next two mornings back out there. I have some collecting to do!
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.
We joined a tour and the docent explained the significance of many of the architectural and artistic details she pointed out to us. She told us that when the building was designed in the 1890s, the intent was to portray the United States as a major player on the world stage, able to build in the Classical style as well as the Europeans did, while adding details that are distinctly American. For example, the mosaic floor of the great hall features a motif of an ear of corn, to represent a New World plant that isn’t native to Europe.
And this painting, high up on a wall, represents Sport. It features baseball, that most American of sports! The corresponding painting on the opposite wall shows American football. And of course the athletes are naked, because that’s how the ancient Greek athletes competed. Artistic nudity, either in painting or in sculpture, was not a problem in the 1890s. There were no prudes calling for fig leaves to be placed over statues’ genitals, or for female nipples to be covered with pasties.
Our docent told us that the building’s designers were all Americans, but that some of the actual artisans were brought over from Europe. Likewise, much of the stone came from quarries in the U.S. The marble for those columns with the fancy capitals, however, was mined near Siena, Italy. She wasn’t sure if it was Cararra marble. I think the look is right for Cararra marble, though.
There a lot going on, visually, inside this building. It’s exactly the kind of visual input that should have killed my brain right on the spot. However, because all of the elements conform to the theme of Classical Greek and Roman design, they fit together thematically. The net result is very pleasing to the eye. I would really like to return and go on a tour with a different docent, who would highlight other things for us to look at. The amount of symbolism and history in the building is fantastic. Every item and detail means something.
Our docent pointed out that there were no depictions of named women, anywhere in the Library of Congress. However, female figures were often used to portray broad themes such as wisdom, philosophy, culture, government, and the like. There is one mosaic of the Roman goddess Minerva:
Minerva is located at the landing on the staircase leading up to the overlook. Tour groups are allowed up to the overlook one at a time, and nobody is allowed to stop at the Minerva mosaic. The only way to photograph her is from across the room.
The overlook looks down into the Reading Room. It sounds like anybody needing to do research can obtain a library card and use the resources, including the Reading Room. As mere visitors, we were restricted to looking down from above.
The docent described how Gutenberg had to set, by hand, every single letter on each page he printed, and that he needed a way to organize all of the letters so he could find them easily and use them again. He decided to put all of the capital letters on the upper levels of his shelves . . . which is why we call them ‘upper case’ letters! And the lower case letters were, of course, organized in the lower levels of the shelves. I had no idea how or from where we inherited that terminology. If Gutenberg had put all the capital letters in boxes on the floor, ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case’ would mean the exact opposite of what they do mean!
Thomas Jefferson’s library is housed in this building, as well as memorabilia from Bob Hope. It also holds much of the estates of George and Ira Gershwin, some of which is displayed in the Gershwin Room, opened as a permanent exhibit in 1998. We got to see George Gershwin’s piano! It’s a black Steinway grand, a smaller version of what you’d see in any concert hall and doesn’t look particularly special until you consider the musical genius of the man who sat at it and composed Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. Not to mention Porgy and Bess. I mean, WOW!
Finally, on the afternoon of our last day, we got to visit the NMNH. My friend, Dr. Chris Mah, works in the Invertebrate Zoology department of the NMNH. We arranged to meet him outside the staff entrance so we could bypass the ginormous line, then wandered the hall for a couple of hours before meeting up with him again for a tour of the behind-the-scenes stuff.
To be honest, while I love exploring any natural history museum, this one was too crowded for me to relax and enjoy. Again, it was because I was there during spring break, and all of the museums were especially packed with visitors. We had time to wander through the Ocean Hall, the fossils, and the minerals and gems. The minerals and gems are often my favorite part of a natural history museum, because (a) I’m not a geologist, so there’s always stuff for me to learn; and (b) I love the colored minerals. I don’t covet precious gems because of their monetary value, but I do love looking at them for their brilliant colors.
I took only one good picture on the main floor of the museum–there were too many people around for me to be able to take the time to frame shots nicely and after a while I gave up. But this is the fossil skeleton of a whale ancestor. Note that this animal didn’t have just the pelvic bones that modern whales have; it had fully formed hind limbs. The most recent thinking is that Ambulocetus natans was entirely aquatic, but may have been able to walk around on the seafloor even if it never came out onto land.
The real treat for us was meeting up with Chris again at the end of the day. Chris took us through the security doors to the Invertebrate Zoology department, where the various collections are housed. This is where all the cool (and bizarre) stuff is kept. Most of the items are not going to be displayed, but are used by scientists studying particular groups of animals. Chris works at the NMNH but also travels to museums in California, Paris, and Tokyo to identify sea stars in those collections. The bowels of a museum are like the bowels of any other building–fluorescent lighting, dingy walls, old posters and whiteboards on the walls.
This was the best door sign. In recent years the federal museums have undergone reorganizations and consolidations. I don’t know why and forgot to ask Chris, but the Invertebrate Zoology department inherited the entire National Parasite Slide collection. I bet it’s a huge collection of parasites sectioned and mounted on slides.
In one of the collection rooms, sitting against the wall, was one of the most godawful objects I have ever seen.
It’s a giant clam shell (Tridacna sp.) mounted on a silver base of mermaids. At first I thought it was a bathroom sink, but Chris said it’s a punch bowl. Apparently there’s a whole set of punch cups that go with it. The whole shebang was a gift to one of the early 20th-century presidents. Seems it might be a better item for the American History Museum, but may be they got right of first refusal and refused to accept it. Or maybe because of the clam shell the IZ department wanted it? Doubtful.
The collections are housed in movable shelves, in some order that hopefully makes sense to both the curators (people who decide what goes where) and the scientific users. Here’s a bit of the coral collection:
Items that are being actively studied or need a temporary place while their permanent home is being decided or made ready end up spread out on big tables. This is the kind of thing that I find fascinating. The detritus of working scientists is fun to examine.
Chris said that the museum acquires items from a variety of sources: private collections, smaller museums or schools that can no longer keep all of the material in their own collections, and donations from individuals. Some of the artifacts are quite old, and arrive in quaint containers such as these nostalgic match boxes. Other things are packaged in paper towels and plastic bags. This, of course, is for dry specimens. Wet specimens, preserved in alcohol or formalin, are stored in buckets elsewhere.
Chris showed us some specimens that were of special interest to this marine biologist from California. The first were some brittle stars, Ophiocoma aethiops, collected by Ed Ricketts! Get a load of the label on this box:
There were four other boxes of the same animal. The date (March 20, 1940) and location (Espiritu Santo) indicate that this specimen and the several others just like it were collected during the trip that Ricketts and Steinbeck immortalized in their book Sea of Cortez. I read this book every so often, and use bits of it in lectures. I know that most of Ricketts’ collection was deposited with the Hopkins Marine Station, part of Stanford University in Pacific Grove, after his death, and it was really cool to see this set of specimens in the Smithsonian.
The other special item that Chris likes to show visitors from California is the type specimen of one of our local sea stars, Pisaster giganteus. Before the onset of sea star wasting syndrome I’d see this star occasionally in the low intertidal, and divers would see it subtidally in kelp forests. The biggest one I’d ever seen was probably about 23 cm in diameter, a bit larger than my completely outstretched hand. What the Smithsonian has in its collection, for reasons that I don’t remember, is the type specimen for this species. The type specimen is the individual (or group of individuals) that is the basis for the scientific description of a species and the species’ name. You can think of it as the ‘default’ for a species, with an important caveat. Many times a species is named based on a type specimen that turns out to be not the norm for the species, which is why we encounter scientific names that are descriptive but make no sense.
The tag says that this animal, which indeed lives up to its species epithet, was collected from Tomales Bay in 1857. It’s easily three times the diameter of the conspecific stars that I’ve seen alive. And even in photos of subtidal stars, I haven’t seen a P. giganteus this big. Do they just not get this big anymore? Does it have something to do with habitat? I wouldn’t have expected to find P. giganteus in Tomales Bay, because I usually associate them with a rocky bottom in a more exposed habitat. So what’s going on with this type specimen? I don’t know, maybe nothing. This thing is remarkable for its huge size, though. Stuff like this is very cool. I always like going backstage and getting to see things that will never make it into the exhibit hall.
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 through security. And this was like going through security at the airport–all coats and belts removed, all pockets emptied, walk through the metal detector, then retrieve belongings and get dressed again. At least they let us keep our shoes on.
Of course, everybody at the Archives wants to see the Charters of Freedom. I’d never heard of that term before but it refers to documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There were very long lines to get into the room where these items are displayed, and this was the location where my head really was unhappy with the crowds. Many of the tourists were school groups on spring break, and they were loud. It was exactly the kind of stimulus that my brain, still suffering from post-concussion syndrome, can’t deal with.
Oh, and there’s no photography allowed at all in the Archives, so no pictures to share.
The Charters of Freedom are exhibited in a dimly lit room. Museum staff let in group of ~30 people at a time, and people would rush from case to case. As soon as the crowd began to dissipate another group would come in and there wasn’t any time to really look at any of the documents. Given their age it is not surprisingly that they are faded with time. The ink is visible but difficult to read. Some day I would like to go back when it isn’t so crowded and spend some time inspecting them. There is something undeniably special about seeing one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence in person, even if it is sealed in a special case behind glass.
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
After lunch we made our first visit to one of the Smithsonian museums. Air and Space is always one of the most popular of all the museums in DC, and the day we were there it was predictably crowded. The staff was also setting up for a fancy shindig of some sort, which I imagine must happen fairly regularly in places like that. The folks arriving towards closing time were dressed in formal cocktail attire, and the rest of us were herded towards the doors right at 5:30 p.m.
The Air and Space Museum makes for tricky photography: all of the artifacts are behind glass and most are dimly lit so photos end up glare-y and/or noisy. A lot of the cool stuff is hanging from the ceiling, but there are so many vehicles suspended up there that it’s really hard to get the entirety of any one item in view without it being at least partially covered up by something else. Still, there’s no other way for some of these huge planes and craft to be displayed, and it’s really cool seeing the actual sizes of things. You can walk through the Skylab module, which we did right at closing when they were shooing visitors out the doors. I didn’t know they had a real shower up there!
This is probably my favorite artifact of the bunch. It’s the Apollo command module. I don’t know why, but I think it looks really cool.
As someone who suffers from mild claustrophobia, it’s really hard for me to imagine what it would be like to be cooped in this capsule for longer than about five minutes. And the Gemini capsule would be even worse! This module was used to learn how humans perform in space and how they can work in space, leading up to the Apollo moon missions.
Two astronauts would stay in this tiny capsule for as long as the anticipated length of a lunar mission, up to 14 days. Two whole weeks! See those chairs? That’s about all the space there is. There was nothing in the signage about how they took care of bodily functions when restrained in a tiny compartment for that long. Surely I can’t be the only person who wonders!
This is the suit that Eugene Cernan wore on the moon. He became the last human to leave the moon’s surface by being the last to return to the lunar landing module in Apollo 17. He died in January 2017. Some parts of each moon walker’s suit were left behind on the moon to minimize weight for the voyage home.
And hey, here’s that flag from MTV! This isn’t the actual flag that astronauts left on the moon, obviously, but is a replicate. There were six U.S. flags planted on the moon, by astronauts from Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. According to this NASA site, five of the six flags were still standing on the moon’s surface until fairly recently. I think many scientists were surprised to learn that the flags have survived several decades on the moon’s surface, with constant exposure to full solar radiation and extreme temperature. They must be completely faded by now.
I have been fascinated by the idea of robots crawling across the surface of Mars and sending data home to Earth since the Sojourner rover landed on Independence Day 1997. And I remember watching and listening with bated breath as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers approached for its landing on Mars in 2004. To me, the fact that we sent robots to another planet and communicated with them for over 10 years as they collected data, is the epitome of scientific success. Spirit‘s wheels got stuck in the sand and NASA was unable to free it, but the robot continued to send data back to Earth until March 2010. As of today, Opportunity is still alive and roaming.
But I’ve never known how big these robots are. Air and Space has a life-size model of the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012 and remains operational. Based on this model, Curiosity is about as long as and both wider and taller than my car, a Honda Fit.
Of all the weird gizmos and gadgets displayed in the Air and Space museum, one of my favorite displays was this panel of equipment included in the return modules. I think that now, with Russian Soyuz capsules serving as the vehicles taking astronauts and cosmonauts up to and back from the International Space Station (ISS), returning space travelers land in Kazakhstan. But before the use of the Space Shuttle, astronauts came back to Earth by splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that their return kit included these items:
Those NASA engineers sure thought of everything, didn’t they? I wonder if any of the astronauts had to use the shark repellent. Unfortunately, the signs didn’t say.
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. I like that the names of the states carved into the frieze above the colonnade. I first saw these names on the back of a $5 bill when I was in grade school. Kinda cool to see that they’re also present in the real thing.
Inside the memorial has a very different feel. There’s the famous sculpture of Lincoln sitting on that big chair, of course, with his various writings carved into the walls around him. But even though that statue is so dang big, it doesn’t feel cold or distancing. Lincoln looks like he’s just a person. Viewed from ground level the statue’s hands and feet are enormous compared to the head; I don’t know if the sculptor did that deliberately, or if it’s just an artifact of perspective because we’re looking up at it.
I’m strongly drawn to the hands of this sculpture. Neither of them indicates a relaxed posture; the fingers of the right hand are gripping the armrest of the chair, and the left hand is closed in a fist. I don’t know what those hands are intended to convey, but to me they suggest tension.
Isn’t that slightly raised right index finger interesting? I wonder if that was an actual mannerism of Lincoln’s, or just an artistic decision made by the sculptor.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is, of course, among those writings inscribed on the wall of the memorial. For some reason I’d assumed that the bit we all know was the beginning of a much longer speech. But no, the entire thing is contained in this single panel. Simple and eloquent. Why the heck do politicians talk so dang much today? And why do they so often seem to say so little?
Vietnam Veterans Memorial I knew what the Vietnam Memorial was going to look like, having seen plenty of pictures and followed from afar the design and construction of it. And everyone I knew who had seen it raved at how touching it is. The one thing that pictures and words cannot convey is what it feels like to walk by the wall. Getting to the wall from the Lincoln Memorial you walk past a monument to the U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam.
It’s slightly larger than life-size and the details are amazing. From the expressions on their faces these men are exhausted and yet resolved. I wish we’d had more time so I could take pictures of this piece from different angles.
The Vietnam Wall is shaped like a long, meandering trapezoid. Like the FDR Memorial, this is one that you don’t just approach and leave; the path takes you along the entire length of the Wall. The panels on each end taper up towards the panels in the middle. This is visually pleasing, but the effect results from the fact that each panel bears the names of the soldiers who died in a given year of the war, and so the overall shape of the wall is a long, tapered trapezoid. I didn’t have the right equipment to get all or even any significant portion of the Wall in a photograph, so I didn’t even try.
You might not expect a simple list of names to be so moving. I certainly didn’t. And while this listing might seem like a way of making the names anonymous, it had the opposite effect. I don’t have a relative whose name is on the Wall so none of the names here meant anything to me personally. But when you are confronted with the sheer magnitude of the mortality and the (mostly) young people who were lost to their families, it’s very sobering.
Note that there are no ranks among the names. Each name on the wall represents a person who served and died, and military ranks don’t matter to the dead. Nobody gets special treatment in this memorial.
Slightly off the beaten path and therefore not heavily visited is the Vietnam Women’s Monument. There are only eight women’s names on the Wall, but there were ~11,000 women who served in Vietnam, mostly as nurses. The Vietnam Women’s Monument recognizes the skills of these women as they tend to a wounded soldier.
The blue cards on the base of the monument are thank-you notes written by schoolchildren in Kansas. They said things like “Thank you for serving your country” and “I wish I had your courage.” Smart kids.
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 bloom. Alas, it had snowed about a week earlier, there were still patches of snow on the ground, and that day it was cold and windy. The cherry trees were thinking about blooming but hadn’t gotten around to making any real effort yet. It was sunny, though, and nice weather for walking around, since we were bundled up.
Jefferson Memorial Our first stop was the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. We skipped the Washington Monument because it didn’t look very interesting and I didn’t want to wait in the line to go up to the top, from where the view must be spectacular. I did, however, take the obligatory photo of the monument itself.
Inside the rotunda the walls are inscribed with some of Jefferson’s writings. The walls are curved and tall, making them difficult to photograph. Another difficulty I had with this memorial was reconciling Jefferson’s words about freedom with the knowledge that he was a slaveholder. While I do think it’s unfair to judge historical personages by the moral standards of today, I can’t really wrap my brain around that particular cognitive dissonance. This one particular inscription, though, I thoroughly agree with. It seems pretty clear to me that Jefferson never intended the U.S. Constitution to be a static document that could not be amended as required. Rather the opposite, in fact.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
My favorite memorial of the day was the one for FDR. I liked it because it didn’t have present me with any of the minor squicks that I got at the Jefferson memorial. Not only that, but unlike the other presidential memorials this one isn’t a single giant edifice that people walk up to and then away from. The FDR memorial consists of life-sized sculptures mounted at eye level, so passersby can interact with them as they wander along the path. Several of FDR’s quotes are inscribed along walls interspersed with fountains. All this gives us a memorial that we can experience at a human level and gives us a feel for who FDR was as a person, not just a president.
My favorite part of the FDR Memorial was at the far end. Walking along the path you first encounter a series of columns that appear to be covered in bronze plates. The columns and the frieze behind them commemorated FDR’s federal public works projects, a response to the Great Depression.
The really cool thing about this part of the memorial is that the columns are actually the die rolls used to make the panels on the frieze wall. I didn’t see any signage explaining what was going on, so the visitors have to figure it out for themselves. This was another of the things that made this particular memorial feel personal.
Martin Luther King Memorial The MLK Memorial consists of a single large sculpture of the man in front of a wall inscribed with bits of his writings and speeches. The sculpture itself is very imposing and grand, very different from the more personal and humble feeling I took from the FDR Memorial.
From the front of the sculpture he really seems to be looking down on us. He was a preacher, and this expression makes me feel like I’m about to hear a sermon. I don’t enjoy being preached to, so this is not a comfortable feeling for me.
Like the Jefferson Memorial, this one left me feeling cold. It imparts a feeling for who MLK was as a preacher and leader, but nothing about who he was as a person. Most of the inscriptions on the wall were ones that we’re all familiar with. The one that struck me most strongly was this one:
I like this particular quote because I think we often forget how easy it is to be a good person when things are going well, and how bloody difficult it is when things aren’t going well. It may not be fair to judge people by how they behave in times of adversity, but it is fair to say that we are generally not at our best in those situations. And yet, there is something to be said about how having to endure hardship often shows us our true selves. It can be a difficult thing to face up to. For me, the power of MLK’s message comes from his exhortations to us to be better people, and a society, than we have been. We may have come a long way, baby, but we still have a long way to go.
Spring break for me this year was the last week of March. I generally don’t travel far for spring break because it’s nice to have a week of nothing to do but not be working. This year, though, we decided to visit Washington, DC, for most of the break. I had never been before and had always felt in the back of my mind that every responsible citizen should pay a visit to the capital of his or her country. I have a friend who works at the Smithsonian, too. He said he would be in town for the week and could give us a special tour of the National Museum of Natural History, so we went. More on that tour in another post.
Washington National Cathedral
We arrived on Saturday, the day before Passion Sunday. Flying across the country from west to east consumes an entire day, so even though we left San Francisco on an 08:00 flight by the time we got to our apartment and settled in all we had time to do was walk down the street and grab some dinner from a food truck. The March for Our Lives had finished an hour or two before our arrival; on the train into the city from the airport we passed many train cars going the other way that were jam packed with people leaving DC after the march. There was a fair amount of post-march detritus littering the streets, but not nearly as much as I had expected. And the trash, as well, as the enormous bank of portable toilets around the Navy Memorial, cleaned up the following day. Well done, Washington! I guess they’re used to cleaning up after big events like this.
Knowing that we’d be in DC for the right date, we decided to attend the Passion Sunday service at the National Cathedral. The day was cold and clear, with a bright sun that made outdoor photography of the church difficult, at least from the angles that I was interested in capturing. Parts of the building are being restored/rebuilt after major damage sustained in the 2011 earthquake.
I have always found gothic architecture to be extremely beautiful, especially for churches. The well-thought use of line and proportion draw the eye upward, and the use of flying buttresses to support the towers creates the impression of height without weight, making them appear even taller. It really is amazing how the medieval builders figured out ways to make such tall buildings that make the viewer think of light rather than heaviness.
The gothic style is also evident inside the cathedral. The rib vaulting is both graceful and strong, transferring the weight of the roof to the supporting columns. Rib vaulting, pointed arches, and flying buttresses are–to my inexpert eye–the hallmarks of gothic architecture.
Immediately after the service the church staff asked everyone to leave so they could start setting up for a concert later in the afternoon, so we didn’t have much time to look around. We did, however, sneak down to the crypt, where there are several small chapels as well as the tomb of notable persons such as Helen Keller.
Joseph of Arimathea Chapel (also called the St. Joseph Chapel):
Given my love for simplicity in art, it is probably not surprising that one of my favorite items in the entire cathedral was this statue of Jesus as Good Shepherd, tucked into an alcove in the crypt. There was no sign or plaque indicating who the artist is, or when the statue was carved. There were other carvings in similar alcoves throughout the crypt, but none caught my eye like this one did.
We did not stay for the afternoon concert. Instead, we went to a play that evening: a fabulous performance of The Winter’s Tale in the iconic Folger Library. That is one fantastic venue for Shakespeare’s plays. We hadn’t planned on visiting the Folger Library, and it was only by chance that we happened upon a listing for the play. I studied Winter’s Tale in college but had never seen it staged, so it was doubly enjoyable. The Library currently has an exhibition on illustration in the time of Shakespeare, and there were many very cool artifacts on display. The play in the evening made for a long day, but everything was worth it.
