Sound Explorations on a New Moon

I wrote this post a long time ago, but apparently I forgot to post it! (Hopefully, you get the title.)

I began this blog to document my sabbatical year at Yakima Valley Community College. One of my goals following my sabbatical was to develop and offer a marine biology course at YVCC.  You might be thinking that Yakima isn't exactly coastal, but with 71% of the world covered in ocean, we're all sort of "coastal."  What you do from day to day probably impacts the ocean in some way (think food and carbon dioxide emissions). After six weeks of studying the ocean floor, tides, currents, and phyla and classes of marine organisms, I took my marine biology class to Salmon Beach in Tacoma. Below are some pictures from my spring 2010 class.

Spiny, Tough Skin

I realize that this is the Cnido-site and not the Echino-blog, which is a really neat blog by the way, but I often manage to take very bad pictures of Echinoderms (sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, etc.).  My solution is to crop the pics way down and look at the beautiful patterns on the echinoderms', well, dermis.  Echinoderm really means spiny skin (think echidna, a pretty spiny little bugger, and dermis).  I now have plenty of close up Echinoderm pics so I can present some of my favorites.  Since I always lose track of old pictures, most of these were taken recently at Sund Rock in Hood Canal.  All are of sea stars, except one sea cucumber.  Can you guess which is a sea cucumber?  If you into Echinoderm close-ups like I am, then check out my previous posts from Hawaii which had a number of pics of urchins and a crown-of-thorns sea star too. 

Repairing Links

I know that day after day you've been logging onto "Cnido-site Discharge" patiently waiting for me to fix all of the videos that haven't been working.  Finally, after a year of your constant visiting to the site, I have had time to  repair the html so that the videos once again work.  I apologize for the hundreds of hours that you have wasted waiting for these repairs to be complete.  When Google took down their "google pages" site, where the files were hosted, every link was broken.  I now have a new host, so you can spend countless hours replaying these videos and enjoying the content within.  Thanks again for your patience. 

Run over by a Moon Snail

Yep, you guessed right. This moon snail is running over a couple of opalescent nudibranchs. Oooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh .......... Nooooooooooooo ....... Waaaaaatch ..... Ooooouuuuuut .... Fooooor ..... thaaaaaat ..... Snaaaaaiiiil... ! ! ! ! !

New Tunes

I decided to update the "Random Tunes" section because it has been a while. Once this quarter is over, I'll post about my BIOL 140 (Marine Biology) class that I taught this spring.