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

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.

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

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.

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

Reef buddies

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)

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

Worms!!

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

Photo: news.cnet.com

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

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

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

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

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

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

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

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

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

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

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

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

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

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

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

Exploring the expansive intertidal for Marine Ecology class surveys

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

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

Blue clab – colored pencil

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

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

Traditional New England Clambake

Liz Hemond and Prof. Vollmer at the Marine Science Center

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

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

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

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

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.

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

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

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

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

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

Morning in Bocas

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

Ice layer in the high intertidal

NC Analyzer

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

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

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

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

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

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

Frozen tide pool

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

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

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

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

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Reef research underway

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

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

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

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)

It goes on and on and on and on.

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

Good morning sun!

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

No words.

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

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

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

Barnacles entombed in ice

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

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

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

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Canoe Beach on a “normal” calm day

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)

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

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

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

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

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)

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)

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

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

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)

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

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

Snowy sunset at the MSC

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

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

… and allegedly some ghosts.

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

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

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.

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

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

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

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

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

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

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.