a day at the beach

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.

( more pictures )