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…
Tag: natural history
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…
The fluidity of sex
We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either Female or Male. And while we, as a species, generally do things this way, in the larger animal kingdom sexual function doesn’t always follow these rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having…
Gulls
Earlier this week I accidentally came upon a baby bird. I was on my way out to the cliff at the marine lab to dispose of a corpse (a fish that died of natural causes) when I noticed a western gull perched on the fence railing and allowing me to get unusually close. It was…
Snow in July
The Sierra snowpack is California’s largest single reservoir of fresh water, accounting for 1/3 of the state’s water supply1. A state with a mediterranean climate, such as California, receives precipitation only during the short rain/snow season. During years of drought, when the average Californian frets about how little rain is falling, state water managers are…
Puzzling
The marine macroalgae are, as a group, the most conspicuous organisms in the intertidal. Yet, most tidepool explorers dismiss them as “seaweeds” and move on to the next thing, which they hope is somehow more interesting. This is akin to visiting the jungles of Brazil and not paying attention to the lush foliage that defines…
Now you see it, now you don’t
This morning in the intertidal I was reminded of how often I encounter animals I wasn’t looking for and almost missed seeing at all. That got me thinking about color and pattern in the intertidal, and how they can be used either to be seen or to avoid being seen. Some critters–the nudibranchs immediately come…
When big is small, and small is big
As far as animal sizes go, we Homo sapiens are rather on the large side of things. While it’s true that many animals are larger than us (we can conveniently lump these animals in the category of ‘charismatic megafuauna’), the truth of the matter is that most animals are much smaller than us. We tend…