When the most recent epidemic of seastar wasting syndrome (SSWS) began back in 2013, the forcipulate stars were the first to succumb. This group includes conspicuous members of intertidal and subtidal habitats, such as: In the past year or so, I’ve noticed P. ochraceus making a comeback at local intertidal sites. At first I was…
Feeding or sex (or both)?
About three weeks ago I collected some mussels from the intertidal, to use both in the lab and in the classroom. A mussel can itself be an entire habitat for many other organisms. Many of the mussels I brought into the lab this last time were heavily encrusted with barnacles and anemones. I wanted to…
Photography challenge, Part II
Last week I finished my 30-day personal photography challenge, and I’m finally getting around to putting up a follow-up to this post. These are the photos from the second half of the challenge. Day 16: Egret on the stack at Younger Lagoon. A high surf warning is in effect through today and the waves are BIG! This…
Green Friday
In recent years the day after Thanksgiving has become known as Black Friday, a day when retailers across the nation offer fantastic sales in order to separate Americans from their hard-earned cash. I hate shopping even under the best of circumstances, and you couldn’t pay me enough to step foot in a shopping mall on…
Pugnacity, and the need to regrow limbs
My friend Peter Macht is the aquarium curator at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. He is responsible for all of the live (i.e., wet) exhibits and has a team of student and volunteer aquarists who help him care for the animals in the hall and behind the scenes. Peter and I go way back together,…
Half a year
I have now been concussed for six months. It has been a long half-year. My brain has done a fair bit of recovering, and at least the constant headache is gone. It still hurts when I overexert my brain and I’m still easily overwhelmed by visual and auditory stimuli but overall I feel that I’m getting…
Photography challenge, Part I
About three weeks ago I received as an early birthday gift a new camera. I had been thinking for a while now that I should get a “real” grown-up camera with interchangeable lenses; you know, a DSLR. My little Olympus point-and-shoot camera is a fantastic field camera–it takes amazing macro shots and I can dunk…
Why does the ocean stink?
Several people in the past few days have asked me why the ocean stinks. The answer is simple. The red tide that I documented a month ago is back, and worse than ever. The culprit is the same, but now it is present in even higher numbers. I can’t show you how it smells, but…
Fall colors
People who live in other parts of the world often say that California doesn’t have real seasons. I would argue that we do indeed have seasons, they’re just . . . subtle. Certainly here on the coast the Pacific Ocean moderates weather so that we don’t have to deal with temperature extremes. However, in the…
Balancing act
When the concept of conservation biology was first introduced in the 1970s, it applied to the species that were disappearing due to deforestation in the tropics. Biologists began to realize that species were going extinct as a direct result of human activity. As conservation science evolved over the decades it has become a multidisciplinary melding of population biology and…