Anybody who has visited one of the sandy beaches in California has probably seen kids running around digging up mole crabs (Emerita analoga). These crabs live in the swash zone at around the depth where the waves would be breaking over your ankles, moving up and down with the tide. They are bizarre little creatures,…
Competence
In the parlance of invertebrate zoologists, competence is the state of development when a larva has all of the structures and energy reserves it needs to undergo metamorphosis into the juvenile form. In the case of my sea urchins, this means that they have four complete pairs of arms, each with its own skeletal rod, and…
Sea and sky
As a native Californian, I’ve been living with drought my entire life. Well, maybe not so much during the El Niño of 1997-98, but even then the thought “We have water now but might not later…” was always in the back of my mind. This season we had a great few weeks of rain in…
Perfection! And yet….
Thirty-one days ago, on 20 January 2015, I spawned purple sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) and generated six jars of larvae. I’ve been examining the larvae twice a week ever since. At first they were doing great, developing on schedule with no appreciable abnormalities or warning flags. Then, at about Day 24, the cultures began crashing for…
Wasting leather (star)
Until recently I hadn’t closely observed what it looks like when a leather star (Dermasterias imbricata) succumbs to wasting syndrome. When I had the outbreak of plague in my table almost 18 months ago now, my only leather star was fine one day and decomposing the next, so I didn’t get to see what actually happened…
In all her glory
This afternoon I was enjoying the sunshine and watching the small finchy birds flitting about in the big coffeeberry bush off our back deck. I call this bush the “conference bush” because every spring the birds congregate in it and chatter to each other like conventioneers. When the bush blooms it becomes populated with foraging…
Off to the races!
Yesterday I drove up the coast to Pigeon Point to do a little poking around. I had originally planned to search for little stars, survivors that had made it through the most recent outbreak of wasting syndrome. But I got distracted by other things and gave up on the stars, for now. I need to…
Larvae as . . . particles?
On another glorious afternoon low tide the other day, with the help of a former student I collected six purple urchins, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. Given that we’re in about the middle of this species’ spawning season, I reasoned that collecting six gave me a decent chance of ending up with at least one male and one…
A whole lotta pink
The temperate rocky intertidal is about as colorful a natural place as I’ve seen. Much of the color comes from algae, and in the spring and early summer the eye can be overwhelmed by the emerald greenness of the overall landscape due to Phyllospadix (surf grass, a true flowering plant) and Ulva (sea lettuce, an alga)….
Sex on the Beach
Every winter northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) return to their breeding rookeries in central and northern California. These animals spend the majority of their time foraging at sea, but as with all pinnipeds they must return to land to birth their pups. The breeding site in central California is Piedras Blancas, a few miles north…