This year I’m teaching Ecology for the second time. It is a field-intensive course: we have all day on Fridays to meet outside the classroom and do something outdoors. Most people understand that hands-on experiences are the best way to learn, whether the subject matter is field-based or computer-based (such as working with software for statistical…
Tag: natural history
Let there be . . . fish!
Today my students and I visited the Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project hatchery, to learn about local efforts to save the federally endangered coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch). The coho is one of five species of Pacific salmon found on the coast of North America, the other four being the Chinook (O. tshawytscha), the chum (O….
Birds on the brain
This past weekend I participated for the first time in the Audubon Society’s Great Backyard Bird Count, in which ordinary folks spend at least 15 minutes observing birds in their own yards. Turns out you can also observe in other sites, but I opted to watch birds from my back deck. As my house backs…
Seek and ye shall find
Before Christmas I was invited to speak at one of the monthly public talks hosted by the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. I’m always happy to be asked to speak to students or the public, so my default answer to these requests is “Yes!” Usually for this kind of presentation I get to choose the topic,…
Gotta getta gecko
This past weekend I was in the San Joaquin Valley to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday. On a cold and rainy Saturday morning we gathered at my parents’ house to take care of some last-minute things before the big party later that evening. We were in the backyard when I noticed a tiny lizard on…
Happiness is . . .
. . . taking a small group of highly motivated students into the field! My invertebrate zoology class this semester has only 10 students, which allows me a lot more freedom to improvise on the fly and actually participate in the course instead of having to stand back and supervise 30 of them at the…
A pilgrimage, of sorts
If I were the type of person to make and keep a bucket list, today I would have been able to cross off one item. For some reason until today I’d never managed to get to Ed Ricketts’ Great Tidepool, even though I’d been several times to Point Pinos which is right around the corner….
Cuteness warning: High alert!
This morning I was doing some routine cleaning of animal-containing dishes at the marine lab when I noticed a little blob of snot on the outside of the bowl I was working on. Normally I just wipe off blobs like that, but something about this one caught my attention in a different way and I…
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…
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….