Monterey Bay is shaped like a backwards letter ‘C’, with Santa Cruz on the north end and the Monterey Peninsula on the south end. The top of the ‘C’ is comparatively smooth, while the bottom is punctuated by the Monterey Peninsula, which juts north from the city of Monterey. The most striking geologic feature is…
Tag: marine invertebrates
A steady diet of worms
Today is the first day of the week of low tides dedicated to Snapshot Cal Coast, a statewide citizen science project headed in my area by the California Academy of Sciences. This week groups and individuals will be making photographing the organisms they see in the ocean or along the coast, and uploading observations to…
Things strange and beautiful
This weekend I was supposed to take a photographer and his assistant into the field to hunt for staurozoans. I mean a real photographer, one who has worked for National Geographic. He also wrote the book One Cubic Foot. You may have heard of the guy. His name is David Liittschwager. Anyway, his assistant contacted…
Squidlets
Every once in a while some random person drops off a creature at the marine lab. Sometimes the creature is a goldfish that had been a take-home prize at a wedding over the weekend (now weddings taking place at the Seymour Center are not allowed to include live animals in centerpieces). Once it was a…
Trailblazers
Who do you think makes these tracks in the sand? Any guesses? Here’s another photo, taken from farther away to give you a bigger picture of the scale of things. Believe it or not, the maker of these trails is the little black turban snail, Tegula funebralis. They are one of my favorite animals in…
Creepy crawlies
There are certain creatures that, for whatever reason, give me the creeps. I imagine everyone has them. Some people have arachnophobia, I have caterpillarphobia. While fear of some animals makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense—spiders and snakes, for example, can have deadly bites—my own personal phobia can be traced back to a traumatic childhood…
The tiniest advantage
Although the world’s oceans cover approximately 70% of the Earth’s surface, most humans interact with only the narrow strip that runs up onto the land. This bit of real estate experiences terrestrial conditions on a once- or twice-daily basis. None of these abiotic factors, including drying air, the heat of the sun, and UV radiation,…
My favorite larva — the actinotroch!
Five days ago I collected the phoronid worms that I wrote about earlier this week, and today I’m really glad I did. I noticed when I first looked at them under the scope that several of them were brooding eggs among the tentacles of the lophophore. My attempts to photograph this phenomenon were not entirely…
A different take on ‘vermiform’
If I asked you to draw a worm and designate the front and back ends, you’d most likely come up with something that looks like this: And you would be entirely correct. A worm, or any creature described as ‘vermiform’ for that matter, has an elongated, wormlike body. Some worms have actual heads with eyes…
Lunacies
For several centuries now, Earth’s only natural satellite has been associated with odd or unusual behavior. Lunatics were people we would describe today as mentally ill, who behaved in ways that couldn’t be predicted and might be dangerous. The erratic behaviors were attributed to the vague condition of lunacy. These words are derived from the…