Sea Scale Snail

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Mane of the Lion

November 1, 2011 Pacific Northwest

“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles. That phrase ‘the Lion’s Mane’ haunted my mind. I knew that I had seen it somewhere in an unexpected context. You have seen that it does describe the creature. I have no doubt that it was floating on the water when McPherson saw [...]

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Local Salmon & the Salmon ISA Virus

October 29, 2011 Agriculture

I came upon Alexandra Morton through a link on a Facebook page — the Orca Network’s page. Morton is a biologist who, according to her brief bio statement, is “a registered professional biologist who was living in a remote archipelago studying whales when the fish farmers came to my town.” Today, she posted a revealing [...]

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Climbing the [Salmon] Ladder to Success

August 10, 2011 Birds

Images taken at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, aka Ballard Locks, in Seattle Washington. Summer means salmon runs at the Ballard Locks fish ladder . . . twenty-one watery steps from Puget Sound, to the ship canal, to the fresh water spawning grounds where the returning salmon were born. Salmon are a miracle of navigational skills, [...]

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CSI: Fish Count

November 20, 2010 Fish

I’ve been monitoring the fish happenings at our local beach — the official “Fish Count” of returning salmon. I knew this park years ago when my family lived close by. It was a figment then of what it’s now become, restored to encourage Coho and Chum salmon to return up creek and spawn. The habitat [...]

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A Budding Amphipodologist

November 16, 2010 Bay Area Faves

Chris Anderson said it back in 2004: The Internet has a long tail . . . so long, in fact, that a person can leap from being a writer one day, to a budding amphipodologist the next. This may not be the anecdote Anderson had in mind when he wrote about the long tail. But, [...]

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A Chorus of One

July 16, 2010 Bay Area Faves

The best things happen in your periphery. It’s the reason I had the astigmatism correction removed from my glasses. The contrast between my sharp, corrected vision — and the blur in my periphery made me chronically queasy. That’s a lousy lede — and I’m too tired to come up with a better one. But workable [...]

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Beach Fleas . . . Again

June 17, 2010 Sea Scale Snail

My late dad and I share a gene that — due to a missed deadline with the Humane Genome Project — hasn’t been mapped for posterity. He dreamed (and I dream) in preposterous anachronisms and juxtapositions. One of Dad’s recurring dreams was about a horse in a penthouse apartment who would fling himself off the [...]

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A Short Visit With Lines Written in Early Spring

May 6, 2010 Philosophically Speaking

I have Frank of EcoSnake to thank for today’s post. He included Wordsworth’s poem in the comment section below one of his photos on Flickr. I can relate to the melancholy of this poem, having many times “sat reclined” in my own grove, contemplating what “man has done to man.” People like Frank are a [...]

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Mudbath

March 21, 2010 Bay Area

I’m keen to see eyes peering out of mudflats . . . the creatures from the bog, the foraging carp, the bullfrog in camo, a Pacific chorus frog in a dewdrop. I shot this photo at Blake Garden, just north of Berkeley in the Kensington Hills. My vision is tuned to anomalies and, sure enough, [...]

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The Great Newt Commute

February 8, 2010 Bay Area

The Great Newt Commute is what happens on the way to the Great Newt Party. From the first winter rains through early spring, California Newts migrate from their summer homes to their winter breeding grounds — to ponds and streams where they mate and lay eggs before trundling back up the hills and into burrows [...]

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Ahimsa at the Tidepools

November 16, 2009 Bay Area Faves

I swear, if I have to ask one more kid to stop throwing rocks at animals . . . It was an imperfect plan to begin with: super-low tide on a Sunday at the gorgeous but hardly-secret Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. I’ve been waiting for a daylight minus (-) tide for a few months. I’d even [...]

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Studies in Vagueness: The Mock Snail

August 20, 2009 Sea Scale Snail

This title, The Mock Snail caused the tiniest bit of confusion on Flickr. He’s a real snail. It’s just that the psychedelic tone rendered by my Raynox 150 lens inspired a Lewis Carroll reference.

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Life Beneath a Water Lily

July 15, 2009 Reptiles & Amphibians

A water lily leaf in its imperfection . . . its asymmetry . . . its blemishes . . . the leaf detritus and pebbles collected at its core. In the family Nymphaeaceae, this — one of many species of water lilies — lives in the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. Its underwater stems provide cover [...]

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An American Bullfrog in Berkeley

July 14, 2009 Reptiles & Amphibians

I don’t usually ignore visual anomalies. They bring me to interesting things. On this Berkeley day, something seemed out of place — that nagging oddity in my periphery. I turned and looked closer in the mud. Sure enough, there was an unusual outline in the creek bed. As quickly as I noticed the frog, it [...]

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Attack of the Giant Fish People

July 7, 2009 Fish

I saw these gigantic creatures slithering through the shallows — whipping up mud with each slap of the tail. They looked like radioactive versions of pond koi, ranging from about two to four feet long. And where I was, it was just me and and wind and the sound of their slither, evoking the Creature [...]

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Encounters With [the Elusive] California Beach Hopper

June 25, 2009 Bay Area

California Beach Hopper or Megalorchestia californiana As fleas go, they’re giants. Not giants in the sense of Bikini-Atoll-nuclear-mutant-gone-bad giants. But by flea standards, they’re positively huge — about 1 inch long. That’s probably because they’re not parasitic dog or cat fleas, but rather, amphipods — shrimp-like creatures who dine on organic matter at the outer [...]

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