a day at the beach

[nibot]

Diane and I went on an awesome trip today, tidepooling at Bodega Bay. We went with the group Cal Rugged that seems to do all kinds of fun things (canoeing on the russian river, bicycling on angel island). The trip was lead by Rick who has one of the awesomest jobs ever. He is a marine biology collections specialist for the department of integrative biology. This means that when some department needs some obscure specimen not already in the collections here on campus ["say, suppose they need a tentacle from a particular type of sea anenome"] then they call up Rick and send him off on an airplane to get it. [What was his 'freakiest' collection assignment? venom from a particular kind of poisonous water snake. they just showed him how to milk a snake using a plastic snake model and then sent him on his way!] So we went tramping about in the tide pools, and Rick enthusiastically explained all kinds of things about the various critters we encountered. There were all kinds of multi-colored sea stars and anenomes, nudibranchs (?), sea-slugs, even some feisty crabs. nifty!

Now I have quite a sunburn and some very soggy shoes.

Various creatures:

Comments

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

aww, i am so jealous of you california kids and your close proximity to so many neat things! when i was backpacking in california a few years ago, we stopped along the highway north of monterey to play in the tidepools -- holding "hands" with a sea anemone is still one of my favorite memories from that trip. :) plus, tide pools are way more fun when you know something about the critters! (in our case, we'd just come from the monterey bay aquarium).

i want that job.

and i want a sunburn!

[probablevacancy.livejournal.com]

In Florida, we don't have tide pools, but we do have swamps. And we go visit the swamps, and look at fish and mud, and put on sunscreen. I remember one field trip in which my friend Morgan Beasley asked something about all the little orgasms (instead of organisms) and everyone laughed. I didn't know what orgasms were, and neither did she. It bothered us a lot.