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

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Photos

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

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

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.

Morning in Bocas

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

NC Analyzer

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

Canoe Beach on a “normal” calm day

Blue clab – colored pencil

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

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.

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

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

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

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

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)

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

Chris and Mariah dazzle students with fun facts about lobsters, crabs and snails!

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.

It goes on and on and on and on.

Pyrexia? Why don't they just say 'fever'?!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

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

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

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)

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

Liz Hemond and Prof. Vollmer at the Marine Science Center

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

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

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

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

No words.

Pottery shards are likely from an ancient sieve, used in the step to strain the solid curds from the liquid whey.

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

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

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)

Tiniest spoon EVER!

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

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

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

The growing tip of an Acropora cervicornis branch under the dissecting scope. Photo: Liz Hemond

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.

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

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.

cc Brendan A Ryan http://www.flickr.com/photos/brendan2010/8016155898/

Good morning sun!

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

Traditional New England Clambake

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Barnacles entombed in ice

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

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

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)

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

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

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

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

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

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

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

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.

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

One of Maria’s many beautiful illustrations: search her name to see more!

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

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

A little marble can make a big difference….

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

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

… and allegedly some ghosts.

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

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!

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

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

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

Boo!!

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

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

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

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

Frozen tide pool

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

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

Reef buddies

Photo: news.cnet.com

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

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

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

Reef research underway

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

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

Snowy sunset at the MSC

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

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

Fair-well my old Dell!

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