Tag Archives: nudibranchs

~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed.  It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

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~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

kodiak kaleidoscope

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Kodiak July 2023. I got to see humpback whales right away, day one on the water. And also days two, four, six, and seven. Whale wealth!

 

Kodiak day two on the water brought even more whale wealth than day one. Humpbacks and killer whales. It was gratifying to hear “we’ve only ever seen them one other time in eighteen years of this survey.” I can’t take much credit but I did put in a special request.

Kodiak kaleidoscope:
Giant Pacific octopus
Rock greenling
Opalescent nudibranch
Sunflower sea star
Sea otter
Bald eagle
Tufted puffin
Not pictured but still helping fill my Kodiak wildlife bingo card: Dall’s porpoise, sea lion, harbor seal, and river otter, golden eagle. Not to mention all the rest of the fish, but we won’t say much about the fish, for they are data.
Did you know that one of the collective nouns for puffins is “an improbability of puffins?” I was delighted with not just pairs, but whole rafts, improbabilities, of puffins.
I’ll be back in August to what is quickly becoming another favorite place of mine on Earth.

tidepool immersion ~ brooding and homing

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At the conclusion of my 30 days of gratitude, a friend commented, “we see what we look for.” I have to agree that this is true with gratitude. It also seems to be startlingly true in tidepooling. But sometimes I don’t know what I’m looking for when I begin my walk.

In December, tidepooling becomes an extreme sport because the timing of the low low tides overlaps with the early evening darkness. Oh, and winter weather. Tidepooling in the dark and rain is not an adventure for everyone, but as much as I despise cold and darkness, this adventure had my name on it.

The air was chill as we cut across the exposed intertidal shelf, stepping carefully around deep limestone pools in our extratuff boots. Mist beaded up on my purple raincoat, scattering the beam of my headlamp in all directions, so I knelt beside a tidepool. Kelp and fish permeated the air as I leaned closer, focused my camera lens, trying not to block the light my headlamp provided, laughing at the futility of photography in the rainy darkness, but unable to resist giving it a try.

Here’s what I didn’t know I was looking for…

brooding sea anemone

Brooding sea anemones (Epiactis prolifera)

All of them start off life as females. I was looking for females. I was looking for something that holds embryos in her mouth like so many words bubbling up, tumbling down column to pedal disk, to lodge in a fold of flesh and incubate and grow and become. I was looking for someone who encircles herself with her offspring, who knows about the departures as they start to crawl out into the world and live independent lives of their own.

Nudibranchs (Leopard Dorid – aka discodoris! and Monterey Dorid)

Reportedly, nudibranchs are a predator of anemones, and can incorporate the anemones’ stinging nematocyst cells into their own being for defense. I was looking for someone who could quarantine the weapons of others inside, not to continue to be hurt by them, but to repurpose as raw material for something that serves them better in the future.

Fluffy Sculpin Oligocottus snyderi

They swick their emerald fins in rocky pools from Baja to Alaska. They leave when conditions become inhospitable. When we say, “a fish out of water,” we mean someone out of their element, someone who has been befuddled, disabled by displacement. When displaced, when fluffy is a “fish out of water,” fluffy can still breathe. I was looking for that. I was looking for someone who would up and leave inhospitable conditions, and continue to breathe, unbefuddled.

On the other hand, fluffy sculpins exhibit homing behavior. When displaced, a fluffy sculpin can find its way back to its home tidepool. I was looking for homing, too.

Snailfish Liparis florae

A swish of yellow, a tiny apostrophe easily overlooked, soft-bodied and scaleless, a sucking disc for holding onto the rough rocks. I was looking for someone who could be among the roughness but remain soft, someone good at holding on.

Florae, named for Flora Hartley Greene, advocate for children and suffragette about whom I can read almost nothing. Obscure, dusty, writings leech the color and flavor out of both fish and woman, unobtainable references, her name misspelled, her story traceable only through that of her husband, the fish nerd of the family. I was looking for a tiny fish to remind me of forgotten women who fought for my rights: to vote and be my own woman, not subordinate to a man, no matter how wonderful my husband may be.

chiton under black light

Many tiny six-rayed sea stars twinkled white light as they clung to festive eelgrass tinsel flung about in energetic celebration. Baby stars, such a sign of hope after decade-long star famine. Rich surprised us all by pulling a black light flashlight out of his pocket. It belonged to his father. Bob used it to illuminate rocks and minerals, but we shined it into dim tidepools to find out that the night-emerging shrimp trim their fanning tails and waving antennae in glow-paint. We shined it and pastel anemones lit up the pools, brighter than ever they express themselves in daylight. We shined it to find out that hermit crabs are the most colorful party-goers attending the celebration, the algae covering their shells bright red, their claws neon green, Christmas crabs crawling across inky fields of blue and purple. I didn’t know I was looking for psychedelic hermit crabs.

hermit crab

tidepool immersion ~ possibility

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feather duster worm

kingfisher

turkey vultures recycling a seal carcass

Rich took the day off for our wedding anniversary and we got to go tidepooling together. The photos above are are from our walk. He planned ahead to do this, but told me just beforehand, because he likes spontaneity. He told me the night before, rather than the morning of, because he knows how much spontaneity I can handle! It was a lovely anniversary date. I looked into all the pools, and he says he did, too, but I suspect he was mostly looking at my butt.

~

Below are from the next walk, just me.

Yeah, I was starting to notice a theme, too. Mammal, bird, fish… there is something so striking about bleached bones on the black rock beach.

 

 

pretty sure the orange dots on the snail shell are baby feather duster worms…

 

another feather duster – same pool as the maybe babies

This day was a very low low tide, and I got there with time to try to attempt a goal I had in mind since the summer began – to go to the “end,” the farthest extent of beach accessible on foot. Before I got there, I went way out on the outer edge of sea urchin territory – looking for sunflower stars (and striking out) but also just feeling so lucky to get to wander around out here where it was usually underwater. Basically snorkeling without having to get so cold…

The end. I made it! I had forgotten there was an archway around this corner. Quinn and I trekked out here years ago, but I had forgotten the view was such a treat. It spoke to me like caves and arches seem to speak to humans, of openings and possibility, of ancient connections and solid foundations.

tidepool immersion~blue inside

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(The photo above is from a different beach I visited on a grayer, less photogenic day, save for these colorful anemones.

All that follow are from a single tidepooling trip.)

 

On my recent tidepool walk, I found a fish lying on the sand. A large sculpin? I picked it up to take a picture (as one does). In my hand, its body shifted so that its mouth dropped open and I gazed into a gaping chasm of blue! Its mouth is blue?! Simultaneously, its opercula opened, closed, gasping. It was still alive!

 

I snapped quick photos and rushed it into the water. It lay on the bottom, letting water pour across its gills, brown lumpy body camouflaging its secret bright interior. At home, I looked it up: a cabezon, part of the true sculpin family, a rocky intertidal dweller who feeds on crabs, fish, and mollusks. In its blue inner realm – not just mouth, but also flesh and internal organs – tiny abalone shells are said to become brightly polished in its digestive acids. The cabezon spawns on rocks, where its eggs, poisonous for consumption, can disperse up to 200 miles from shore, drifting as embryos divide, develop, hatch into wiggling larvae, absorb their yolk sacs. Arriving back in their tidepool spawning ground as fry, they hunt and grow into adults who lurk in the kelp beds.

 

I walked to the farthest extent of the beach one can access, and then only on these lowest low tides. Actually, I stopped short of the farthest tippy tidepool at the end once I spotted hauled out seals, and ceased approaching. Took zoom lens photos of baby seals raising their heads and rear flippers like they were rehearsing their swim, strengthening their core muscles.

Discodoris sighting! aka Diaulula sandiegensis from family Discodorididae

I chose fishing line as my genre of litter to collect on this day, filled my pockets.  Stepped across a vein of something agatized or fossilized. Made by pressure, revealed by water, without having to dig.  The smooth light gray rock erodes pockets and dimples. The small black cobbles collect inside. On the farthest stretch, the crabs are less accustomed to having to hide from hikers, and they plop and tumble into tidepools, scuttle and skitter under eelgrass clumps.

 

Otter is the name of the beach I wandered, though the last known individual sea otter swimming in Oregon waters was shot off Newport in 1907. Locally extinct ever since, they no longer exert control over sea urchins, which can overgraze the kelp holding down the base of this ecosystem.

Other species help in the role of maintaining kelp forests, though none to the extent that otters once did. I leaned over every edge of every farthest shelf of rock on this day, hoping and wishing to see a sunflower star.

(Like the one Quinn is touching here in 2010.)

(Or this pair from 2011.)

But sunflower stars have reached critically endangered status as of December 2020, failing to make a comeback from sea star wasting disease. Locally extinct now in the southern part of its range (zero Mexico or California sightings since 2018), sightings in Oregon are now vanishingly rare. I have not been able to find one.

I did see a leather star, though, between meals of anemones. A number of purple and ochre sea stars wrapped around mussels. Some species are making a halting comeback, others not. They will pull on the threads that connect them to other species until a new equilibrium is reached.

 

Maybe it’s because I’ve just finished reading Into Great Silence, a memoir written by a woman who studied the Chugach transient orca pod in Prince William Sound, a diminishing group that has not reproduced since the Exxon Valdez emptied oil into the sound in 1989. There are now just seven individuals. Maybe it’s because the author, Eva Saulitis, included a quote from the poem The Last One by W.S. Merwin, so I read the rest of the poem. I think a lot about these last ones, the impossibly lonely condition of being a last one, that so many species are facing. And then the one is gone, and there are none. Maybe it’s because I felt like I discovered a kindred spirit in Eva as I read her book, and know that she, too, is gone. Or maybe I’m a cabezon. I’m just a little blue on the inside, too.

 

 

tidepool immersion ~ disco doris

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I have been thinking about posting some longer photo-heavy posts of some of my personal nature walks to share so that others can vicariously go along for the hike. These photos are from a tidepool walk on one of the last morning negative low tides of the season (y’all remember how I made my own college course on how the tides work back in January, right?) and I was having trouble choosing which photos would go into a rainbow monday post… so I decided to make them their very own post… virtual nature walk #1 tidepool immersion!

new nudi! ring-spotted doris whose scientific name Discodoris, beats the common name hands down. Disco Doris!

I am not sure what species this egg case belongs to… I’m thinking some kind of mollusk/snail?

 

~summer shorts~ mystical

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With no great vacation prospects on the horizon, I used some of my paid time off in anticipation of changing contracts by consulting my tide chart. I picked a Monday with a negative tide at 7am, and my husband decided to take that day off, too. Suddenly it was almost like a real vacation!

Though the remainder of our day filled itself with comfortable, uneventful puttering, we headed out the door at 6 AM for the beach. We rounded the first headland shrouded in mist and a bald eagle appeared to emerge from it, perched on a large rock surveying the tidal flats.

We wandered along, closing the distance. The eagle was in no rush, but eventually decided to move north and took flight. We headed north more slowly, picking our way over the slick seaweed rainbow covering the rocky shore.

We climbed up the next headland, hoping to glimpse the eagle once more, and sure enough, it had landed in the lone tree on the next headland farther north, where its mate was also perched. A double date with eagles.

Rich turned out to be a lot more into tidepooling than I had expected, and we covered a lot of area that I don’t always manage to visit during my solo excursions. I think I’ll hang onto this adventure buddy of mine. Later that evening, reflecting on our morning in the revelatory fog, he decided the best word for it was mystical.

The dictionary definition of mystical talks of the contemplation of divine truths that are beyond the intellect, of surrendering to the absolute, which feels right for wandering off into the fog on the edge of everything and communing with eagles. It’s common knowledge to everyone who knows us that Rich and I go to church by walking around in nature. We go to nature to know the unknowable, we breathe in the electric salt air to better connect to the source, we peer into the briny crevices to saturate ourselves in wonder.

Jessie Van Eerden wrote, “The way I see it, a mystic takes a peek at God and then does her best to show the rest of us what she saw. She’ll use image-language, not discourse. Giving an image is the giving of gold, the biggest thing she’s got. Mysticism suggests direct union, divine revelation, taking a stab at the Unknown with images, cryptic or plain, sensible or sensory. A mystic casts out for an image in whatever is at her disposal and within reach like a practiced cook who can concoct a stew from the remaining carrots and a bruised potato, or like a musician improvising with buckets and wooden spoons. She does not circumvent; she hammers a line drive. A mystic is a kid finding kingdom in an ash heap.”

I hung on every word of this definition as I read the essay I am quoting from, then burst out laughing when I got to the kid finding kingdom in an ash heap. It recalls to mind the oft-told tale of my older brother and I spreading the contents of the ash buckets lined up in the cellar way from the wood furnace that heated our home, then padding up to our nine-months-pregnant mother with our sooty 2T clothes in our hands asking for our swimsuits, because, “we made a beach!”

nudibranch sighting 2020; i’ll leave this here beside the naked nudie story…

I may have always had a streak of mysticism, as well as a tendency to seek out the divine on a beach.