Mar 9, 2024
Making a list of plant genera for no particular reason and this is what I get…
Making a list of plant genera for no particular reason and this is what I get…
I got a fellowship at the Smithsonian! Hooray for job security for the next 3 years! But it also means I’m going to live not on the west coast for the first time ever.
2021 field season highlights
Just wanted to share a cute amphipod I measured today. This is Apolochus barnardi, which sometimes shows up in the eelgrass beds of Bodega Harbor. Most of the amphipods in the eelgrass are herbivores or detritivores, but these are members of a family mostly thought to be parasitic and/or commensal inside larger animals, and it’s a total mystery to me what they’re doing in the grass. I’ve never seen one alive and that makes me sad because 1) it’s super cute when it’s dead so it’s probably adorable when it’s bumbling around in the grass and 2) members of this family are usually pretty colors that fade quickly in alcohol.
The amphipod family Pleustidae is comprised of about 230 species, most of them cold-water amphipods from the northern hemisphere. Pleustids are notable in that many of them are brightly colored or strongly patterned when alive, but quickly fade when preserved in ethanol, making live pleustids a treat to see. Colors and patterns that might be useful in distinguishing species are frustratingly absent from keys, which is a shame because a lot of pleustids are best distinguished by examining mouthpart morphology, which I certainly don’t have time for. Here are 3 species of pleustid from this summer, collected on Coast Miwok land.
1-2. A female Gnathopleustes with a handsome pink vest, found among surfgrass on the outer coast.
3-4. Another outer coast species of Gnathopleustes, this time in orange.
5-7. Thorlaksonius brevirostris, from a population established in an eelgrass common garden tank at Bodega Marine Lab. This genus also contains snail-mimicking species. They have the same resting snail shape, but I haven’t read anything that says this particular species is a mimic.
Eelgrass rhizomes are sweet and salty.
Me and the other Stachlab firsties on the rocks at Bodega Marine Lab doing some algal diversity surveys
I don’t want to respond to these gotdamn reviewers.