week

Left to right: Week long progression of beautiful weather on day 1 to pouring rain on day 4. Sites: Cranberry Rd, Gouldsboro, ME; Bracy Cove, ME; Marshall Point, ME; and Newagen Seaside Inn, ME

Kylla BenesMay 14, 2012

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Photos

Rasit (my husband) armed and ready to put up his poster on phylogeography of inverts in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

Top: Hollis Jones inspects a coral skeleton. That muddy rock has been around for longer than human civilization. Bottom: Bill talks about the history of Bocas reefs and explains how we can use coral fossils to tell us about the natural world of the past. (photo credit: Janine Ledet)

Fair-well my old Dell!

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

Asco-fix-em! Quick thinking and improvising are key for successful field work: if your tool breaks, patch it together with some seaweed!

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

Runners stopping for water during the 2012 Boston Marathon. Photo: hunffingtonpost.com

Green sea turtle – not actually an illustration, this is a sand sculpture I made on a beach (one of my more bizarre artistic hobbies)

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

Reef research underway

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

A comparison of heatmaps made using some common color schemes: red, black and green (top left), default heatmap colors in R yellow to red (middle left) and red & blue (bottom left), along with their corresponding simulation for red/green deficit on the right.

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

Liz Hemond and Prof. Vollmer at the Marine Science Center

The proportion of megabytes for “Graduate School” and for “Everything Else”

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

Here’s part of a lobster nervous system pinned out in a Petri dish.

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

Steps to perfect blancmenge: 1) dry harvested irish moss and while waiting 2) teach an old dog new tricks and 3) take sexy seaweed shots. 4) Gather supplies. 5) Warm milk with chosen ingredients and irish moss. Once the ‘gel’ has been released from the seaweed 5) strain and put into individual serving cups. Let set overnight in the refrigerator and enjoy!

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

Exploring the expansive intertidal for Marine Ecology class surveys

You can’t understand how good this looks until you’ve spent nearly 2 months living in a field station. They gave us homemade blackberry juice for goodness sake.

Left to right / top to bottom: Make shift field lab in Darling Center Cabin, make shift field lab in the field (!), Maine-ly Meat Restaurant, Acadia NP, Alewife fish ladder in Damariscotta, ME, grass roll, and sunset.

Morning in Bocas

A polychaete worm we found in the mud – check out those parapodia!

Blue clab – colored pencil

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

An owl helps with oceanographic research! Photo by John Lund, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

A real live nautilus! In the aquarium at California Academy of Sciences

Catherine celebrating the big day (right) with her father and sister. Brendan (left) starting his defense presentation.

Geoffrey Mutai finishing the 2011 Boston Marathon. His time of 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds set a new record of the fastest marathon ever. (Photo: http://www.npr.org)

It goes on and on and on and on.

Winning marathon times for the Boston Marathon 1933-2004. Open diamonds represent men’s times, closed circles represent women’s times. (Figure 2 from Miller-Rushing et al. 2013)

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

“What! We have to fit all our stuff into that little thing!”

Don’t mind us, just destroying some echinoderm innocence.

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

Worms!!

Ode to a microscopic world. (photo credit: Joelle Kilchenmann, Hollis Jones & Janine Ledet)

In case you were wondering, this is Comet Pan-Starrs. Thanks to Boston light pollution, it was not visible to the naked eye in Framingham. http://www.space.com/20056-comet-panstarrs-march-night-sky.html

I was moved to tears. (left photo credit: Sam Csik)

Snowy sunset at the MSC

Front view of RoboLobster

Littorine snails congregate on the scarce rocky refuges of the primarily sandy beaches of Costa Rica.

Right: Sand covering a head of Siderastrea siderea. Each point is a different grain of sand. (credit: Janine Ledet & Kali Horn) Left: sediment infiltrating the polyps of a Montastrea cavernosa. The arrows show the movement of one grain of sand, proving that corals can direct the movement of foreign substances. (credit: Andrea Burton & Joelle Kilchenmann)

First light hits U.S. land each morning here at Quoddy Head Light

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Of course, we had to take a pit stop on our drive for some tidepooling!

Ice layer in the high intertidal

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Waves trickling through polished pebbles before Egg Rock. Nahant, MA, 2012.

A clear, penetrable membrane seals the body cavity of the lobster, but still allows blood to be taken as needed.

Professor Matt Bracken helps students identify some inverts living in the mud

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

This should probably be marine themed, but… well, feel free to imagine it is a spiny fish…

A terrific drawing of what I assume is my student, me and the fetal pig we dissected in lab.

The Vollmer Lab at STRI! I promise that water bottle will be out by the time experiments begin but it’s important to stay hydrated while moving heavy boxes and dodging cockroaches the size of small rodents.

Photo: news.cnet.com

No words.

Helpers colored a marine animal or plant to add to our food web, and then we connected them with string to demonstrate links in the food chain.

Our shiny new lab space at the Northeastern MSC! So many shelves and drawers and windows!

Geoff explaining our awesome new seawater system amidst the construction of the new and improved pumphouse.

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

left to right: White Band disease experiment, falcon tubes with coral fragments, the omniscient autoclave

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Moose looks on as I filter water samples in the backseat of the MSC van.

Even the fetal pig thinks I am a good TA! Thats all the gratification I need….

Putting your face near poisonous animals is a staple of the 3 Seas immersive experience.

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

Maybe this Blue Planet moment will give you some idea. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

The Sea Education Campus (SEA) in Woods Hole, MA, where the retreat was located. Photo: patricialapadula.com

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Our dear Kylla presenting her fancy statistical modeling of intertidal algal ecosystem biodiversity.

Left to right: Scuba smurf inspects survey gear, Christine Newton sets up a transect line for survey

The new Hughes greenhouse, to be completed this spring, just in time for collecting marsh plants!

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

I thought students might be squeamish about the fish – but they loved it!

This isn’t even base camp… what the $#&% are we getting ourselves into…

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

This sign is no joke, those seals are huge! And they can move faster than you think…

Professor Bracken and our guide, Deb, deploy the CTD at our open ocean sampling site

Tony’s Market: your local source of Pringles and cookies

Small (left) gel rigs hold about 1/3 the number of samples of a large (right) gel rig.

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

Reef buddies

Male releasing spermatangia (left pictures) and female releasing oogonia (right pictures). Note the female receptacle (top right) has ruptured and conceptacles inside the recepatacle are visible.

Students reference their self-made field guides to ID species during a rocky shore survey on Georges Island

We barely had a boat ride where we didn’t see one or both of these. It was seriously magical. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

Ecological relationships between marsh cordgrass, mussels, and fiddler crabs. Published in Hughes et al. 2013.

Barnacles entombed in ice

I was lucky to glimpse this snail after a wave exposed it, before it quickly burrowed back into the sand.

In this nutrient-poor bog, these carnivorous pitcher plants subsist by trapping insects in their “pitcher” filled with sweet nectar

Franklin’s 1770 map of the Gulf Stream (Image courtesy of NOAA Photo Library)

1856 portrait of Mr. Verne. All sea captains should have such a beard http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Verne.gif

Wiring success! Maybe I will start moonlighting as an electrician.

The same beach, Canoe Beach, during Hurricane Sandy. The waves are near 10 feet high in this photo

Frozen tide pool

Left to right: Week long progression of beautiful weather on day 1 to pouring rain on day 4. Sites: Cranberry Rd, Gouldsboro, ME; Bracy Cove, ME; Marshall Point, ME; and Newagen Seaside Inn, ME

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

Pit Organs have thousands of nerve endings that can sense temperature changes of less than a thousandth of a degree.

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

My lost and found glasses! Now part of the marine debris sculpture!

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

A little marble can make a big difference….

Sea surface temperature data collected by NOAA satellites. Notice the dark orange band indicating the warm Gulf Stream. (Image from www.science.nasa.gov)

Boo!!

View of the Bay of Fundy from a beautiful coastal trail in Quoddy Head State Park

La Jardinera del la Esperanza, Punta Nizuc, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Top left: whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus) Top right: crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) Bottom left: Moorish idol (Zanclus cornutus) Bottom right: goliath grouper (Epinephelus quinquefasciatus)

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

Basic diagram of the neurosecretory system of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Edited from Skiebe 2001.

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

Kylla and Me and the Wicked Half Marathon finish last year.

Massachusetts Sea Level Curve from USGS. Click image to go to source.

Also this happened. That’s King Sebastian, our fearless boat driver and all around hero.

Forbes sea star and common periwinkle just chillin’ in the tank

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

My new shiny Dell! Did I mention it was touch screen! Hello 21st century!

Holy Man, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be an efficient way to grow A. cervicornis… they need more room – but I will be interested to see how this looks in 1-2 years.

Rainbow of colors seen in full spectrum (left) and with two types of red/green deficit: protanopia (middle) and deuteranopia (right). Images from wikipedia.

Lauren Josephs squirts fluorescein dye into the water column. By measuring the dye dispersal over a time-lapse video you can get an idea of water turbulence around coral reefs.

… and allegedly some ghosts.

Rachel Carson with Bob Hines conducting marine biology research in Florida in 1952. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

NC Analyzer

Fish printing on t-shirts is a great way to show off your artistic talents!

Just some of the contents of our lab’s outdoor storage shed… the “scientific equipment” we marine ecologists use.

Commemorative stamps released in 2006 representing various pursuits of Ben Franklin (Image credit: http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/images/AI7546-6.jpg)