My baby urchins have become scum-eating machines! They are 88 days old now and I am beginning to wonder if I can generate scum fast enough to keep up with them. I did a head count this morning and have three bowls, each of which holds a population of ~100 urchins, and a bowl that…
The good father
In case you were wondering, here’s what our red-tailed hawk nest looks like from our deck: See that little red circle? That’s the nest. Without the spotting scope, even with binoculars it’s hard to find. WITH the spotting scope, we can spy on the nest from our deck. And using a nifty gadget that clips…
Symmetries II
Most of the animals that we are familiar with (think of any pets you’ve ever had) have bilateral symmetry: they have a head end and a tail end, a left and a right, and a top and a bottom. In scientific terms that translates to the anterior-posterior, left-right, and dorsal-ventral axes. Also, most bilateral animals…
Feeding babies
For the past several weeks we have been watching a pair of nesting red-tailed hawks across the canyon. They built a nest in a eucalyptus tree, then the female began incubating a clutch of eggs. The male would bring her food and spell for short stints on the nest, while we spied on them through…
Symmetries I
As a long-time student of invertebrate zoology I have for most of my life appreciated the immense variety and ingenuity of animal body plans. And one of the things I’ve always found the most intriguing is the pentaradial symmetry of echinoderms. I remember thinking, the first time I encountered a live echinoderm (probably a star at the…
Catching a mondo swarm
On Easter Sunday we got a call about a big swarm of bees in our neighborhood. The woman who called has a couple of hives in her backyard, one of which had swarmed three weeks earlier. We caught that swarm and installed it into our Green hive at our house. This time it was her other…
And. . . we have mouths!
Finally! At long last I have evidence that my juvenile urchins have mouths and are feeding. A week ago I put a batch of seven teensy urchins onto a scuzzy glass slide and have been watching them daily ever since. And yesterday, just as I was beginning to worry that they’d never be able to…
What’s wind got to do with it?
Everybody knows that climate change is a hot–pun intended!–topic in both science and politics these days. Here along the northern California coast it seems that sea surface temperature (SST) has been elevated for at least a year now. I remember a time, not too many years ago, when I would put my hands into my…
Old skills
When I was in graduate school I found myself drawn to the “old-fashioned” skills of classical zoology: observation of and experiments with living animals. I had, and still have, very little interest in the new-fangled high-tech methods of studying animals, and part of me strongly resents having to homogenize an animal to know what its…
Long live the queen!
This afternoon we inspected our Purple hive to check on how the queen is doing and see if they need more space for either brood or honey. For the past few weeks I’ve been able to smell that they’re making some very tasty honey (it smells like buttered popcorn) and we want to make sure that…