I always find that autumn is a tough season for me, in terms of maintaining enthusiasm and fascination with the world around me. I feel, like most creatures, that autumn is a time to hunker down and take it easy until the winter solstice, after which we’ll be gaining daylight again instead of losing it….
Off with the old, Case B
ORGANISM OF THE MONTH: Pugettia producta, the kelp crab For a few months now, I’ve had a pet kelp crab running around in one of my seawater tables. I don’t remember where I collected it, or even whether or not I collected it at all; quite often crabs and other animals arrive as hitch-hikers on…
All good things. . .
. . . must come to an end, so they say. And Scott’s and my little experiment growing Pisaster ochraceus came to its end when the last of our teensy stars gave up the ghost a week ago. We aren’t entirely surprised, as nobody before us had succeeded in growing these guys in the post-larval…
Cuteness strikes again!
That cute little Melibe I found last week is still alive, and still super cute. It lost one of the two large cerata on its back the second day I had it, and I wasn’t sure it would be able to survive long without it, but it has hung in there and started growing a replacement….
Warming, and bees
Much ado is being made of the fact that Africanized honey bees have recently been found in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the articles I’ve read on the subject have disseminated information that is good, but can be confusing to the average person who isn’t a beekeeper. Most people who don’t understand bees…
Cuteness warning: High alert!
This morning I was doing some routine cleaning of animal-containing dishes at the marine lab when I noticed a little blob of snot on the outside of the bowl I was working on. Normally I just wipe off blobs like that, but something about this one caught my attention in a different way and I…
The busy-ness of life
In a desperate attempt to escape from the heat yesterday afternoon I went down to the marine lab and vowed to find something to do that would keep me there for a while even though I had only a few minor chores to take care of. Fortunately there was a lot going on in the ocean. The tide…
Thar she blows!
Let’s just get this out of the way: I live in a paradise of natural beauty. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I get to call this gorgeous place my home. However did I get so lucky? Case in point. For the last week or so a juvenile humpback whale has been hanging out in…
Happy as a . . .
. . . clam, right? Yes, except in this case the bivalve is not a clam, but a scallop. I was out at the harbor with Brenna again this morning, looking for molluscs for tomorrow’s molluscan diversity lab. Brenna was hunting for slugs, of course, and had drawn up a rope that had been hanging…
Off with the old, into the new
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center, where I spend some time hanging out several days a week, has a spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) on exhibit. While the lobster doesn’t have an official name, for obvious reasons the aquarists call it Fluffy. We don’t know if Fluffy is male or female, but for convenience sake we’ve been referring…