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!
For years now we’ve known that the world just beyond our back deck was owned by a variety of wildlife. We’ve seen coyotes and bobcats often enough to think “Good to know you guys are still there!” and of course we hear coyotes a lot more often than we see them. We’ve also known the arroyo behind our house to be in the territory of a mountain lion—a collared female had been tracked there. She, however, has proven to be much more elusive, hiding from people just like the cat she is.
In late November I bought a critter camera for my husband’s birthday, and it arrived on the slow boat from China about two weeks later. We joked that it would be really cool if we caught a mountain lion some time, ha ha ha. But we honestly had no great expectations. I mean, once you set up the camera you have to hope that it’s pointing in the right direction and that something interesting walks in front of it. Alex set up the critter camera in the afternoon of Sunday 10 December, and then we forgot about it until the next day. . .
. . . when we saw that the camera had captured both photos and videos of something, and it was a big something! It was a big cat!
Funny how even a mountain lion (Felis concolor) is still a cat. The posture and behavior is not at all different from the feline tasty morsels that live inside the house with us. We thought that someone we know should buy a new refrigerator, so we can give the big kitty a box.
Look at the size of these paws!
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-10
Note the time stamps on the photos and video. This cat was prowling around after dinner time. Of course, being mid-December-ish it was already full dark, but this is hardly the middle of the night. So the camera caught its first big animal just a few hours after it went live. Call it beginner’s luck.
A week later we caught another mountain lion! Or maybe it was the same mountain lion. This one was also uncollared and, from what we can see of the footage, has about the same build. Given that mountain lions tend to be territorial, I think this is the same cat, and this path above our beehives is a regular thoroughfare for it and other wildlife.
Mountain lion (Felis concolor) caught on our critter camera 2023-12-17
In a related coincidental matter, the first mountain lion was filmed using the new wildlife crossing that goes underneath Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains!
Last weekend the fabled Western Flyer came home to Monterey for a brief visit. For anyone who doesn’t recognize the name, the WesternFlyer is the boat that Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck took to the Sea of Cortez in 1940. At the time of the trip she was just another purse seiner in Monterey, and after the collapse of the sardine fishery she passed through several owners’ hands and was outfitted first as a deep water trawler and then as a crab boat. Several decades passed, and in 2012 the boat, now named the Gemini, sank near Anacortes, WA. She was refloated and sank again in early 2013. This time she was left on the bottom for several months. In June 2013 she was refloated again and taken to dry dock in Port Townsend, WA, where she sat for a couple of years until she was purchased and the long journey towards restoration began. The Western Flyer Foundation has more about the acquisition, restoration, and new purpose of this boat.
Fast forward to 2023, and it was time for the Western Flyer (somewhere along the way she was rechristened to her original name) to return to California. The majority of the work to restore her (woodwork, mechanical engine stuff, etc.) was done up in Washington, which was fitting because she was originally built in Tacoma. She had to come down to California, however, to be kitted out to do science. And she will live here and work out of Monterey.
On Saturday 4 November 2023, the public was invited to welcome the Western Flyer to Monterey. It was a big event, with a boat parade, a decorated boat contest, and much speechifying. The plan was for boats to gather outside the Monterey harbor and wait until the Flyer arrived from Moss Landing with her escort, wait until she was berthed in her temporary spot in the marina, and then parade past her and wherever the judges were. I never did quite figure out where that was. We trailered our friend Murray’s boat, Scherzo, down to Monterey to see the Flyer and tootle along in the boat parade. Scherzo has her own stories to tell, as she was built in Murray’s backyard over a period of several years. Murray was unable to join us, so it was just Alex and me in the boat parade aboard Scherzo.
It was hard to count the boats out on the bay waiting for the Flyer, but there were about 40. We were in the middle of the pack. Most of the boats were sailboats but there were a few motorboats and one research vessel along for the ride. Scherzo was definitely the only little boat!
Given our position in the middle of the boat scrum, we didn’t get a very good view of the Flyer when she arrived. But once she got into the harbor, the fireboat escort made it easier to see where she was.
We were instructed to wait outside the harbor until the Flyer was docked, and then position ourselves into single queue. Being quite ignorant about how these things are done, I imagined that getting ~40 vessels of various sizes and propulsion systems, all bobbing around in Monterey Bay, into a single-file line would be like herding cats, but it was very well organized. Clearly these boat captains know what they’re doing.
And how was I doing with my infamous seasickness, you ask? I was hopped up on Dramamine, the only drug that works for me. And I was fine while on the water. After that, though, the sleepiness took hold and I had to take a nap on a park bench.
The Flyer was docked at about noon, and the speechifying began. Tours of the boat would start at 13:00 and end at 16:00. We left to get some lunch, hoping to beat the crowd, and came back at around 14:00 to find that there were still hordes of people waiting to go aboard. So we took Scherzo out for another tootle, first cruising around the harbor to get some nice shots of the Flyer.
Western Flyer, docked in MontereyWestern Flyer, docked in Monterey
We still had time to kill, so we left the harbor and went down the coast as far as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, stopping to look at sea otters and murres. Then we looked at the time and saw that it was about 15:30, so we turned around and high-tailed it back to the harbor. We got Scherzo out of the water and ran over to the Flyer. By my watch it was 15:58, so I convinced the volunteer to let us get in line.
Even at the end of the public access period, it took about 45 minutes for us to get onto the boat. Once aboard, we could wander around and take pictures of pretty much everything. My eye, as usual, was drawn to the less obvious things.
This gentleman wearing the colors of the Italian flag, was explaining how purse seiners work. This display was on the rear deck, directly above what was originally the fish hold.
We were not allowed to go below decks into the fish hold, because that’s the part of the boat that isn’t finished yet. The aft section of the hold will be the science lab and will eventually be kitted out with microscopes and a small library. I imagine there will be computers, too.
One of my favorite bits of the boat was this wooden turtle inlaid on the aft deck. It wasn’t until we got home that I remembered this passage from Sea of Cortez:
They hung the turtle to a stay where it waved its flippers helplessly and stretched its old wrinkled neck and gnashed its parrot beak. The small dark eyes had a quizzical pained look and a quantity of blood emerged from the pierced shell. . . . And now a strange and terrible bit of knowledge came to Tiny; turtles are very hard to kill. Cutting off the head seems to have little immediate effect. This turtle was as lively as it had been, and a large quantity of very red blood poured from the trunk of the neck. The flippers waived frantically and there was none of the constricting motion of a decapitated animal.
Steinbeck, John, and Edward Flanders Ricketts. Sea of Cortez, The Viking Press, New York, 1941.
I didn’t think at the time to ask, but I bet this inlaid turtle marks the spot where the hawksbill turtle came to its unfortunate end.
Inside the cabin we could see just how crowded things were, for a total of seven people on a 6-week expedition. There were three pairs of narrow bunks for scientists and crew, and a separate room for the captain behind the wheelhouse. There would be no privacy.
The galley, on the other hand, felt rather spacious. The modern Western Flyer has a nifty modern fridge unit and seems well arranged to maximize usable space. The coolest part was the stove, which is the same model (although not the same exact unit) as in the original Flyer. It runs on diesel fuel and would have done a great job of heating the cabin area.
The Western Flyer was in Monterey for another day (Sunday), so visitors could come and take pictures of her, but no additional tours were allowed. Then on Monday she went back up to Moss Landing. She will be there for about six months, for the installation of the science lab. After that, the Western Flyer goes back to school. She will take students on cruises, to study oceanography and marine biology, combined with the arts and humanities, with the goal of fostering curiosity about the natural world. The Western Flyer Foundation offers these educational programs free of charge. If you would like to contribute to this endeavor, please consider donating to the Western Flyer Foundation.
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!
Yesterday, 30 June 2023, was deemed by the National Museum of Natural History to be International Polychaete Day, and the Smithsonian had an entire day of talks and activities for visitors to learn about the marine segmented worms. And you know me: I’m in favor of any event that draws attention to the animals that are not like us. So this is my own little celebration of worms I encountered over this past week.
Living with sea stars
I’ve written before about how many of the bat stars (Patiria miniata) I see at Pigeon Point carry small commensal polychaetes on their oral surface, often associated with the ambulacral groove. Several taxa of echinoderms are known to have associations with polychaetes, and I’ve seen worms crawling around on sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. Oxydromus pugettensis is the polychaete I’ve seen on the bat stars in the field.
Years ago now, I collected some bat stars to bring back to the lab. Some of them had worms, and I was interested in seeing how long the worms stuck around once the stars were in captivity. The answer was “Not very long.” I seem to remember that the stars had lost their worms within a week. And since then, despite having many bat stars come through my hands at the lab, none of them have acquired worms.
Until now. This past week I was moving stars around and cleaning tables after flushing seawater pipes. I have a large bat star and a smaller one running feral in one of the tables. I picked up the larger star and turned it over just to check on it, and saw a dark squiggly thing. It was a worm!
This is the first time I have ever seen a sea star acquire a commensal worm. It’s gotta happen, because we see worms on stars in nature. But I do wonder about this relationship. The worms are highly mobile and probably leave one star and join another quite frequently, or remain free-living (i.e., not on a host star). I had brought in some algae the previous week, and it’s quite possible that the worm came along as bycatch and found its way to the bat star. I checked on the star later in the week, and did not see the worm. It hadn’t joined the smaller of the bat stars, either.
Baby worms
This past Monday I did a plankton tow off the end of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. This was my first plankton tow of the year, and I wanted to see what was there. The water was very clear and the phytoplankton were lacking, but there was a decent diversity within the zooplankton. Of particular interest to this report were the baby worms.
Baby worms are present in any plankton tow collected at any time of the year, although they may be more abundant at some times compared to others. Clearly there isn’t much seasonality to reproduction in some of our local polychaetes. The most commonly seen baby worms in plankton samples are the metatrochophores of worms in the family Spionidae.
Adult spionids are benthic and live in tubes. They have two long palps that extend from the anterior end and are typically used to scrape up organic deposits from the area surrounding the tube. Like most polychaetes, spionids are broadcast spawners that cast gametes out into the water, where fertilization and development occur. Polychaetes go through a larval phase called a trochophore, defined by a ring of cilia (the prototroch) that produces the feeding current for the animal. Incidentally, many molluscs also go through a trochophore stage, but that’s a story for another time. Some polychaetes, including the spionids, have a second planktonic stage called a metatrochophore. The metatrochophore is a much larger and more elaborate version of the trochophore, with eyespots and few to many segments complete with associated bristles. They can crawl as well as swim. Some of them can be 3 mm long, which is pretty big for something that is still up in the plankton. The spionid metatrochophore also has the two long palps, which sometimes remind me of the flaps on Elmer Fudd’s hat.
These are photos of the same individual worm. It’s about 2 mm long, a little longer if all stretched out.
There was another type of polychaete metatrochophore in the sample, but I don’t recognize which family this one comes from. I should, because I see it frequently enough to know it isn’t unusual. It might be a young phyllodocid metatrochophore, but that’s just a guess. Anyhow, this creature has fewer segments than the spionid metatrochophore and lacks the spionid’s long palps. It does have eyespots, segments with bristles, and (I think) two pairs of tentacles associated with the head region. This individual also contains a lot of oil droplets, visible as those small dark circles in the dorsal half of the body behind the head. Oil droplets serve as energy stores and flotation devices. Many marine invertebrate larvae stockpile calories as they feed and store them in oil. In some cases, these calories are needed to sustain a later larval stage that doesn’t feed.
There you have it, my belated contribution to International Polychaete Day 2023. I always enjoy finding worms in our plankton. They have a lot of personality, and it’s fun to watch them zooming around. They are really fast swimmers, and I have to squash them under a coverslip—just a little—to get them to hold still long enough to take photos. Always worth the effort, though!
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.
Like many (most?) Californians, I was swept up in the 2023 wildflower superbloom, which followed on the record-setting rain and snowfall we saw in the previous winter. The rain caused disruptions in many areas of California; in my area, I had multiple students whose homes were flooded when the levee along the Pajaro River failed. I didn’t have to deal with anything nearly that serious, although I did have to make a lot of schedule adjustments for the field classes that I taught.
In my rather desultory way, I noticed that the flowers seem to be blooming later than usual. In previous years (2017 and 2019) we went flower hunting during my spring break at the end of March, and in some places the peak of the bloom had already finished. This year (2023) we went in mid-April, and the many of the flowers had yet to reach peak bloom. Another thing we did differently this year was to bypass most of the sites at lower elevations such as Carrizo Plain, which were way too crowded to be thoroughly enjoyable, and visit the hills where the roads were less tourist-friendly and thus less traveled. In general, flowers at the higher elevations are always a little behind those at lower elevations.
I took a ton of photos, of course, and the one that most accurately encapsulates the splendiferousness of the views is this one:
This was the typical color palette in these hills. At first I thought all the yellow was due to goldfields, which we had seen at lower elevations, but it turned out to be something entirely different. And note that there are two distinct shades of purple. Who are these? Here’s a key to the different floral colors in this landscape.
Flower A: Common hillside daisy (Monolopia lanceolata)
I remember seeing Castilleja exserta on previous trips, in dry, sandy areas. But I’d never seen dense patches of them, so that was new and fun. They are the flowers that make up the violet purple color. It is a low growing flower and seems to occur in open places among grasses.
The bluer shade of purple is due to Phacelia. I’m not sure which species, and my observation on iNaturalist hasn’t yet been identified. I think it’s P. ciliata, as it looks right and has been found in this area.
Flower D: California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Last, but certainly not least, was our state flower, the California poppy. We did see some dense patches of poppies in the hills but there were more prevalent in the flatlands—Carrizo Plain, Antelope Valley, and the Shell Creek Road area were chock full of poppies.
What the photos don’t depict is the dynamic aspect of these landscapes. At these elevations there was almost always a soft breeze, and the flowers sway with the wind. It’s really very soothing to watch. I had to zoom way in to record this video, but it’s totally worth it.
Just for funsies, I want to show off what might be my favorite photo of the weekend, taken at the end of the day. I encountered these handsome fellows along the Wildflower Loop at Windwolves Preserve. They both stared at me for so long that I had to take their picture. I never thought a bovine portrait would wind up in my portfolio, but there you have it.
With so much emphasis on the wildflower superbloom, one can easily overlook the torrential and destructive rains that were at least partly responsible for it. Ongoing climate change may mean that California oscillates between severe drought and flooding rains for the foreseeable future. It’s more than a little unsettling, but at least the rains bring flowers for us to enjoy.
Ask any marine biology student to list some interesting factoids about barnacles, and one of them should be “Barnacles are benthic and sessile” by which they mean that barnacles live their entire lives glued to a single spot. This definitely describes what it means to be benthic. Barnacles are indeed stuck, for better or worse, to the location that their cyprid larva selected. Once the cyprid glues its head to the rock or other hard substrate, that’s it. A bad choice could mean that the barnacle starves, desiccates, or is unable to mate. A good choice means an opportunity to live long and prosper.
How is it, then, that we have things that are called pelagic barnacles? These are barnacles that live permanently attached to objects that move through the water. The objects can be living (e.g., whales or turtles) or non-living (e.g., boats). Pelagic barnacles are not just traveling versions of the species we see in the intertidal or on docks and pilings—they are different species altogether.
Yesterday morning I went to Younger Lagoon to see what had happened during the most recent storm. The lagoon had once again breached through to the ocean, and bits of Monterey Bay were sloshing into the lagoon. None of that was unexpected.
What did catch my eye were the fuzzy blotches on some of the pieces of wood that had washed up onto the beach.
A closer look confirmed my thought that these were pelagic barnacles in the genus Lepas. These are a type of gooseneck barnacle, similar in overall morphology to the very common intertidal Pollicpes polymerus.
These barnacles were small, and having been emersed for at least several hours were definitely not looking their best. They didn’t smell dead just yet, but since they had zero chance of getting back into the water before the next high tide, were doomed. A few of them had their cirri—the modified thoracic appendages that barnacles sweep through the water when feeding—extended, which I’ve seen before with barnacles on their last leg. See what I did there? I did touch some of the cirri, and the barnacles did not respond at all, although they had not yet dried out to the point of crispiness.
Lepas makes a living attached to objects that float in the ocean. I usually see them on logs or smaller pieces of wood, as they are here, but do occasionally find tiny ones on the blades of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera). Living attached to objects that float with the currents means the barnacles are constantly moving through the water, able to feed 24/7 without the constraints of high and low tide. Compared to the robust gooseneck and acorn barnacles of the rocky intertidal, Lepas is translucent and delicate, with plates that are only weakly calcified. Given its lifestyle, Lepas rarely has to withstand bashing surf or waves; by the time it does, its substrate is inevitably headed onto shore, where the barnacles will die anyway.
So there you have it—a barnacle that flouts the rule and manages to be both benthic and pelagic. Or perhaps I should say that it is benthic but has a pelagic lifestyle. Either way, Lepas is making the best of both worlds, isn’t it?
A week ago I was with a group of students at Moss Landing, where we spent a couple of hours watching birds on our way down to Fort Ord Natural Reserve for an overnight camping trip. The visit was well-timed: we arrived at low tide so there was a lot of mud flat exposed, meaning ample real estate for foraging shorebirds. By now the students were pretty comfortable using binoculars, and it warmed my heart to see them getting used to one of my favorite tools in the naturalist’s kit.
The real stars of this particular tale were the birds. Specifically, a pair of willets (Tringa semipalmata). As we walked along the road towards the dunes and beach, I caught sight of a pair of willets involved in what appeared to be an altercation of sorts. I snapped off a bunch of photos and continued on.
When I had time to review the photos a few days later, I saw that what I had thought was some display of aggression was actual mating, or preliminary activities to actual mating. Oops! That hadn’t occurred to me at the time because somewhere in the back of my brain I thought that willets are winter visitors here who breed elsewhere. Of course, courtship and pair-bonding involve multiple bouts of copulation, and any single copulation event may or may not result in successful insemination. It does make sense for copulation to occur before migration to breeding grounds, whether the “real thing” happens here or in the birds’ summer range.
All this to say that I captured a series of photographs that, if they were of our species, would be considered pornographic. But since the subjects were willets and not humans, I can call them wildlife photography!
This is a series of 21 photos, presented as a slide show. The entire sequence of events took about 10 seconds.
I didn’t catch the exact moment of cloacal contact, if indeed there was any. It does still feel a little bit voyeuristic, but that’s why I like watching birds in the first place—they carry on their lives and don’t care about human morals or pruderies. It is always an honor and a privilege to witness nature doing its thing. And who knows, perhaps a new generation of willets was conceived by this pair!
Today my co-teacher, Gabe, and I took our Ecology students up the coast a bit for the first field trip of the semester. We spent the morning at the bottom of Big Basin State Park, where we did a little walking and a lot of looking and talking. In 2.5 hours we traveled maybe a mile, which is the appropriate pace for studying nature.
Much of this area burned in the CZU Lightning Complex fires of 2020. That was 2.5 years ago now, and a lot of vegetation has returned. My favorite thing to see was the lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii. It drapes over plants and has a special affinity for the coast live oak Quercus agrifolia, just like I do. I was very happy to see a lot of new growth in the lichen, all spring green and fresh.
After lunch we crossed the highway and went down to Waddell Beach. The tide had receded and we could see that a tremendous amount of sand had been washed away by the storms, leaving exposed rocks that were usually covered. Students found all sort of interesting rocks, including fossils. We also found several sand dollars, a few of which hadn’t been broken.
This was one of my favorite finds:
It’s the test of the sand dollar Dendraster excentricus. In life, sand dollars are a purplish gray color, covered with apparent fuzz that consists of short spines. I’ve seen sand dollars described as gray shag carpets, and that’s actually not too far off. When the animal dies the spines and living tissue erode away from the test, leaving behind the white calcium carbonate.
Okay, but what’s that round black spot? That’s the super cool thing.
It just so happens that there’s a barnacle, Paraconcavus pacificus, that attaches to sand dollars. It lives on other hard surfaces, too, but the fact that it lives on sand dollars buried in the sand brings to mind all sorts of questions.
Question #1: How does the barnacle’s cyprid larva find a host? My best guess is that the cyprid locates a sand dollar by scent. Sand dollars live partially buried in sand, like tortilla chips in guacamole. Enough of the sand dollar protrudes from the sand to provide plenty of real estate for home-hunting cyprids.
Question #2:What happens to the barnacle if the sand dollar gets completely buried? Well, this I don’t know. A barnacle buried in sand cannot feed. But if the barnacle is attached to the part of the sand dollar that is always (or almost always) sticking out of the sand, then the barnacle could feed perfectly well. Which brings me to . . .
Question #3:Do the barnacles always attach to the same part of the sand dollar? The answer to this question is “Yes”, because sand dollars bury themselves with the “posterior” part sticking up. Yes, it’s hard to talk about anterior and posterior in an animal with pentaradial symmetry, but sand dollars do crawl across the sand in one direction, which defines “anterior” even though the animal doesn’t have a head. Since the sand dollars bury their anterior edge, barnacle cyprids have access only to the posterior edge.
Which in turn explains why the sand dollars with barnacles have barnacles at the bottom of the petaloid, the bit that looks like a 5-petaled flower. That’s the posterior area.
Question #4: Does the weight of the barnacle affect the sand dollar, perhaps by making it top heavy? I can’t imagine that it doesn’t have some effect on the sand dollar. A barnacle is a pretty hefty object, after all. But I can’t find any research about these barnacles and their strange habits.
Returning to that black patch on the test above, now. That’s the scar left behind by a barnacle that used to live on that sand dollar. I have no way of knowing whether the barnacle died before or after the sand dollar died, and suspect it could be either. This barnacle-on-a-sand-dollar is one of those known phenomena that are pretty much not studied at all. It’s really too bad, because I’m convinced there is a fascinating story to be told.
