SpinelessTimes

Rejuvenation

2012-02-09T23:56:00.001-08:00

Yes, folks,
It's been well over a year, almost 2 years, since my last post. Time to revive and sprout anew.

So, what's been happening in the ensuing months? Thousands of photos, a few very brief videos that still need editing, and my ongoing newsletter for the Seattle Aquarium, the Weekly Critter. Photo and text topics include octopus mating strategies, cuttlefish chromatophores, marine worm symbiotes with sea stars, mating threesome bumblebees, and even occasional vertebrates such as canoodling long fin sculpins and camera-shy red-throated sticklebacks.

And, oh yes, grad school. I'm two terms into my graduate program in conservation biology, the Advanced Inquiry Program, which will lead to a masters in zoology (If I had a teaching certificate as an official school teacher, it would be a masters in education). The focus is on inquiry-based science and community outreach, with a heavy reliance on research, communication and collaboration with one's cohorts (pretty much daily and often in great detail and depth), technology, including all forms of social media. At all points in the program participants are asked for creative thinking and innovative projects, and to constantly refine their ultimate conservation education goal/s. This highly subsidized program works for formal and informal educators. It's mostly online, suited for working folks who are able to commit to the considerable chunk of of time required each week. For more info go to: http://www.projectdragonfly.org/aip/

More on all of this later, since my primary reason for reanimating this site was to crank up my blogging for this grad school program.

How They Do It

2010-02-20T23:15:00.000-08:00

OK, so you haven't spent sleepless hours trying to figure out how sea stars or octopus or potato bugs make babies. But contemplate now the weirdly wonderful world of sex among the wiggly, squishy, crunchy, often faceless creatures that make up most of the animal kingdom.

And I'm talking sexual reproduction, not asexual. Big difference. Simply put, throughout the living world as we know it, sexual reproduction is the union of egg and sperm. Period. Sex, though, is only one form of reproduction. Cloning, budding, splitting, and such gruesome-sounding activities as pedal laceration, are asexual forms of reproduction that take place without the union of egg and sperm.

The complexities of sexual reproduction, especially with animals that lack obvious organs such as penises or vaginas, is what I want to introduce today. The sea star (AKA starfish) for instance, is among the lucky animals that practice *pretty safe sex. No female or male parts collude in lustful embraces. No touching at all. Mature females release eggs into surrounding sea water and males release sperm into the same environment. Sometimes boys go first, sometimes girls. Often one animal's release triggers others nearby, turning the waters into a veritable soup of gametes. If the animals are close enough and the currents work in their favor, egg and sperm will meet, resulting in tiny larvae that will usually join the throng of multi-species plankton that is the basis for most of the marine food-webs.

There is definitely nothing safe about octopus sex. If you want the details (and they are amazing) let me know and that will be my next blog.

*At least one species of NW sea star, the mottled star, Evasterias troschelii, is often invaded by a parasite which causes no visible damage until the sea star spawns. Sea stars expend a lot of energy spawning and are often weakened afterwards, which is when Evasterias's parasite attacks, causing the sea star to literally fall apart and die.

Of slime, bathroom visitors, and biomimicry

2009-11-18T18:52:00.001-08:00

Going right onto another topic without finishing the last one (why gender matters when talking about critters) is well, maybe tacky or lazy or both. If you want to know the rest of the story, let me know and I'll finish it.

But right now I'm interested in what I found the morning after the last big rain storm (2 days ago?). I was reaching for a towel in the bathroom when something dark and thin appeared on the pale gray linoleum. "Hmph. Wonder if that's a scrap of my last collage littering the floor? I'll get to it later." My housekeeping can generously be called impulsive, light, and infrequent. I tried to ignore the blackish smudge as I scrubbed my face. Then I realized that it was moving--real slow. "Aw crap."

A 2" mottled gray slug was laboriously slimeing across the very dry linoleum towards my spot by the sink. "Where the heck did that thing come from?" The bathroom sat about 6 feet above the concrete walkway outside, and the small window was jammed shut. The bathroom's plaster wall, mostly held together with a wretched pastiche of left-over latex paint applied by some previous colorblind renter, has no obvious holes to the outside. Then I noticed where the molding was absent along the floor, exposing some dark crevices at the edge of the wall. I suppose it may have come up that way, but that's the basement down there. What could it be eating and why come up to a dry place when they need to stay moist?

A few years ago in Portland I discovered a critter that freaked me out when I first saw it. As I reached over the rim of my bathtub to turn the water on, a 2"-3" a hairy scary scurrying thing was frantically running back and forth along the bottom. Imagine a combination of 5 or 6 big spiders all stuck together, butt to head to butt to head. And moving really really fast like an alien on amphetamines. After the initial shock of seeing my first house centipede, and realizing it was waaay more scared of big ol me, I got to wondering how it made it into the bathtub. Not via the plumbing, a closed system. Research revealed that it was probably trying to reach water and had crawled up into the tub from the bathroom floor, couldn't get out, and freaked. These centipedes roam around in houses searching for silverfish, roaches, and any other small critters they can find.

The slug on the floor made less sense than the centipede in the tub, but there it was, a small Limax. These slugs, that can stretch to over 4" long, are usually found in my moist worm bin about 3 yards away from the back porch steps, competing with the compost worms for delicious rotting vege leftovers in the bin. Which was where I tossed it after picking it's squishy little body up with a tissue--you don't want to get slug slime on your skin, especially the form slugs produce when stressed. The stuff can be so resilient that it stays on your hands through several washings, scrapings, and a lot of cussing. It's so persistent that a couple of decades ago the US Navy was investigating it's gluey strength for use underwater. Apparently it didn't pass muster, but another relative's sticky product did.

Blue mussels, an eminently edible relative of slugs, produce byssal threads. These tough strands anchor the mussels to rocks and and other hard surfaces so the mollusks don't get swept away by waves or low tides. But they have another more exciting function. If a predatory snail crawls up onto a bunch of mussels (remember, they're stuck in one spot), the mussels shoot out byssal strands to entrap the snail. It's all over for the predator, which is now permanently stuck in starvation mode. These threads don't dissolve in sea or fresh water, so they would seem to be ideal for underwater adhesion.

I don't know the results of the Navy's research (should go online to search), but this is one of thousands of natural substances being studied for use in medical, industrial/commercial, architectural, and military arenas. Spider silk, the special connective tissues of sea cucumbers, the venoms of various poisonous marine snails, and the silica skeletons of some sea sponges are a few of the myriad of known substances and structures that have been the basis for the science of biomimicry. Nature really does do it best. Yet another reason to preserve all of those creepy crawlie critters that compel some people to ask: "Well if you can't eat them, what good are they?"

I never did discover how or why the slug made it into the dry bathroom. Go figure.

What just happened here and why does it matter?

2009-11-05T07:48:00.000-08:00

Two adults are peering into a tidepool and reaching towards one of many very similar-looking sea stars. They both ask questions such as: “Does he bite? Will he sting me? How fast can he move?”

I smile as I reply in my warmest naturalist tone: “She is very slow and does not bite or sting.” And her food doesn’t move and so she doesn’t need speed. It’s perfectly safe to touch her gently with one finger.”

One of the visitors looks up at me and asks: "How do you know it's a female?"

How indeed. Without knowing anything about sea star biology except that males and females look the same until they spawn, what do you think just happened and what do you think I said next to the visitor?

Alien lips? Strange roots? Floating kid's toy? Mating spiny sea worms?

2009-10-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

I'd like to say it's #4 above, but It's actually a slurp-fest. This juvenile California sea cucumber is sucking something yummy off the surface of the water. Its white feeding tentacles, at the far right, are snatching particles with their mucosy tips. One by one the feeding tentacles were pulled into the central mouth and sucked clean of sticky food, much like peanut-butter-covered fingers in a human mouth. The double image was created by the water's reflection of the animal's underside.