Tag: Cambridge Science Festival

Cambridge Science Festival ‘Science Carnival’

This Friday we took time to present at the Cambridge Science Festival ‘Science Carnival’. I particularly like this event because it is so big! We always had a crowd around our table, and I had the opportunity to talk about science with people ranging in age from toddlers to octogenarians. I was even able to speak to some children who only spoke Portugese by having … Continue reading Cambridge Science Festival ‘Science Carnival’

Lara Lewis McGrathApril 24, 2012September 21, 2012Leave a comment

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Photos

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

A little marble can make a big difference….

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

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

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

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

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

Good morning sun!

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

Barnacles entombed in ice

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

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)

Worms!!

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

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)

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

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

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

Canoe Beach on a “normal” calm day

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

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

Frozen tide pool

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

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

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

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.

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

Exploring the expansive intertidal for Marine Ecology class surveys

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

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

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

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

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

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

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

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.

No words.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It goes on and on and on and on.

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

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

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

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

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

Front view of RoboLobster

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

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

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Photo: news.cnet.com

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

Traditional New England Clambake

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

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

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)

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

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

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

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

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.

Morning in Bocas

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

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

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

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

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.

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

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

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

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

Reef buddies

Fair-well my old Dell!

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

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

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.

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

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

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

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)

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

Snowy sunset at the MSC

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

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

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.

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

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

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

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

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

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

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

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Reef research underway

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

NC Analyzer

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

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

Ice layer in the high intertidal

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

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

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

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

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

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

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

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

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

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

… and allegedly some ghosts.

Boo!!

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)

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

Blue clab – colored pencil

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

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

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

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

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

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

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

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

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!