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

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

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

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

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

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

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)

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

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

It goes on and on and on and on.

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

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

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

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

Frozen tide pool

Fair-well my old Dell!

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

Liz Hemond and Prof. Vollmer at the Marine Science Center

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

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)

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.

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)

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

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

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.

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

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

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

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

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

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

… and allegedly some ghosts.

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

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

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

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

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

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

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

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

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.

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

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

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

Reef buddies

Barnacles entombed in ice

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

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

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

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

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

Tiniest spoon EVER!

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

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

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

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

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

NC Analyzer

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

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

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

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

Worms!!

Front view of RoboLobster

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

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

Boo!!

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

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

Blue clab – colored pencil

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

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

We barely had a boat ride where we didn’t see one or both of these. It was seriously magical. (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

Reef research underway

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

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)

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.

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

A little marble can make a big difference….

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

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

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

Photo: news.cnet.com

Snowy sunset at the MSC

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

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

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.

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

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

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

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

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

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.

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

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

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

Morning in Bocas

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

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

Traditional New England Clambake

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

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

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

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

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!

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)

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.

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

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

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

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

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!

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

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

No words.

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

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)