Now is not a good time to be a sea star in my care. Although to be honest, I doubt these animals would be better off in anybody else’s care, either. And what’s going on today isn’t so much a series of unfortunate events as a trio of additional episodes in the two-year serial catastrophe that we…
You are what you eat, part the third
To recap: Way back in January I spawned some sea urchins. The resulting progeny are now almost 7.5 months old, counting from the day that they were zygotes. Once they metamorphosed and became established as post-larval urchins in June, I divided them into three feeding treatments: the kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, the green alga Ulva sp.,…
Spying on filter-feeders
Late yesterday afternoon I met my friend Brenna at the harbor to go on a slug hunt. Brenna is working on the taxonomy of a group of nudibranchs for her dissertation, and we’ve gone collecting out in the intertidal together a few times. I knew I’d need some harbor therapy after teaching a microscope class in…
Hanging on
Day 3 of wasting in Leptasterias The saga continues. When I checked on my ailing stars yesterday I saw, as expected, that most of what I had called Leptasterias #1 (the pink star that had ripped itself into pieces the day before) had disintegrated into small piles of mush. There was no sign of life…
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Sometimes the only word that will do is a bad word. I generally try not to use a lot of bad language because on the occasions when I do swear I want my f-bombs to really mean something. Late this afternoon I was on my way out of the lab when I made a quick…
A plug, and a caveat
Early next week (31 August – 2 September), PBS and the BBC are going to present a huge “live” media event. I say “live” because although the event will be aired in the evenings, all the preview footage I’ve seen has been shot in during daylight hours. Anyway, you can read all about it in…
Chasing the bloom
Having read multiple news accounts of domoic acid (DA) events up and down the Pacific coast of the U.S., I decided to do my own informal survey of the culprit that makes DA. Domoic acid is a naturally occurring toxin that is produced by some (but not all) species of the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia during a plankton bloom….
Fair is foul, and foul(ing) is fair
Next week classes for the Fall semester begin, and this will be my fourth term teaching a marine invertebrate zoology class at this particular institution. I have built this class on a foundation of comparative anatomy and functional morphology; lab activities include dissections (to observe how bodies are put together) and diversity labs (to examine the morphological…
Falling in love
Today Scott and I gathered all of our tiny Pisaster stars and assigned them to food treatments. We’re not doing a feeding experiment per se but have the goal of getting these juveniles to grow, and to do that we need to figure out what they eat when they’re this small. Nobody knows, or at least…
The Enemy of the State
I came of age, in an academic sense, working as a technician in a lab where the research focused on colonial hydroids. The other tech in the lab, Brenda, and I would get sent out to collect hydroids, then spend another day or so picking the predatory nudibranchs off the colonies. The PI of the…