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…
A series of unfortunate events
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…