If you’re wondering how I’ve been spending my summer, I think pictures would best illustrate what I’ve been doing four out of five days during the week:

The Derek M. Baylis is designed to be a research vessel, and a lot of thought went into its design to maximize workspace and to make it a model for all other research and educational vessels.
Among some of the notable features, the Baylis sports a wishbone boom (click here to read more about how the sailing mechanics work using a wishbone boom) and a motor that runs on a bio-diesel blend that “sips” gas. What is a wishbone boom and how is it different from a conventional one? The best explanation that I’ve heard is that a conventional boom is to a wishbone boom as a stick shift is to an automatic. The rig self-regulates the shape of the sail since it is suspended and not fixed to one point on the mast.
For more information on the Baylis, as well as Tom Wylie‘s other cool designs, check out this link:
Wyliecat Performance Yachts: Wyliecat 65
Monterey Bay Aquarium and Sealife Conservation run educational and leisure cruises in a joint venture. The aquarium provides the naturalists (of whom I am one) and sells tickets, while Sealife Conservation provides the crew and the boat.

I usually start my day below the docks, picking up the clipboard that holds the ship’s manifest. As you can tell, all of the male California sea lions are coming back from their summer down south in the Channel Islands, where they were busy mating. It’s amazing how quickly they’ve returned, and how valuable real estate has become around the harbor.
Over 90 percent of the sea lions up here are males. The females prefer the warmer waters down south. As one visitor put it, Monterey Harbor sounds like a big frat house because of all of the noise and displays of dominance among the male sea lions.

Giant kelp is the foundation of the ecosystem along the California coastline. It serves as a nursery, a food source, a place to hide, or a place to hold on to for countless organisms. On a piece of drift kelp that we pulled up today, we found polychaete worms, kellet’s whelks, bryzoans, melibes, small shrimp, isopods, amphipods, a baby sea urchin, fish fry, decorator crabs, and kelp crabs. This was a spectacular haul and a great illustration that kelp is some really cool stuff.

Kelp crabs are good at letting you know that they don’t want anything to do with you. Their pincers are sharp like needles, and painful if they catch your fingers. They make searching through kelp interesting for those willing to paw through the slimy kelp.

Anyone for paralytic shellfish poisoning? That’s what you might get if you drank from the codpiece of our plankton net this afternoon (By the way, codpiece refers to the portion of the net where the plankton is concentrated, as the design was taken from a cod fishing nets and that’s where the cods ended up. It is not, as I originally though, named after ye Medieval jockstrap.). The plankton that we’ve been pulling up have mostly turned the net a brownish green, but today it was red with dinoflagellates. Besides causing the red tide when they bloom, they are also responsible for phosphorescense.
I heard the following story from someone who works at the aquarium:

During WWII, the GIs in the Pacific learned that Japanese snipers used to target those using flashlights at night. At night time, some soldiers used their cotton shirts to sieve dinoflagellates out of the water, and allowed them to dry into a powder. By taking a pinch of the dehydrated dinoflagellates, they were able to read their maps with the faint blue light produced by smashing it between their fingers and avoid the snipers, who were looking for the yellow light produced by the flashlights.

So thanks partly to plankton, the Allies were able to achieve victory in the Pacific Theatre…
In addition, phytoplankton produces an over 60 percent of the Earth’s oxygen and is the basis of the food web in the ocean. It sequesters CO2 as CaCO3 (chalk), and layers of fossilized plankton give us SiO2 rich deposits as well, which we use to filter out our swimming pools (salacious earth).
Plankton is some pretty cool stuff.

If you drop a crab trap, or “benthic sampler” (there are many designs, my favorite being a clamshell design that traps mud from the sea floor), down to the bottom of the outer edge of the kelp forest, most of what you pull up is likely to be batstars. This one has it’s stomach out. You may recall that starfish eat by bringing their digestive system to their food. They hug whatever they are eating with their stomach, in other words.
Some other cool facts about batstars:

The orange ones range down to Mexico and the purple ones up to Alaska, and they meet in Monterey.
They often host symbiotic polychaete worms which clean the batstars of food scraps and parasites.
Predators of batstars include, but are not necessarily limited to sea gulls, sea otters, and other larger species of starfish.
They can easily regenerate an arm if they happen to lose one.
Batstars are echinoderms, related to things like sand dollars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. If you look at echinoderms, they all have a pattern of five points radiating from the center.
Some batstars have up to seven arms, and at each tip of each arm is a primitive eyespot, with which they can sense the presence or absence of light.

When the sails are raised, the boat starts to really show off how well it handles. We routinely hit 10 knots with a reefed main sail, without the help of the mizzen (the smaller sail in the back of the boat). Since the boom is so high, the foredeck is a pretty safe and comfortable place to enjoy the cruise. When it’s time to put away the sail, the halyard is released and the sail quickly drops into the hammock below in a matter of seconds.

This is a shot of Monterey Bay Aquarium in the foreground, looking down the length of Cannery Row. We stick to this area in the bay, as it provides a relatively sheltered patch of water, and a great view of the coastline. In this patch of coastline I’ve seen Humpbacks, Grey whales, Common Dolphins, Risso’s Dolphins, Pacific White-sided Dolphins, Harbor Porpoises, California Sea Lions, Southern Sea Otters, and Harbor Seals.
200 years ago, there were grizzly bears feasting on whale carcases, and 300 years ago there used to be a giant sea cow, the Steller’s sea cow, that munched on the giant kelp. After the sea otters were almost hunted to extinction, there were long periods of time where the kelp disappeared from the coastline. Only after otters started to re-populate the coast did the kelp forests return and stabilize.
By telling these stories, making ecological connections, and facilitating discussions, we are able to really educate and inspire those who come along for a ride on the Baylis.

Some of the most accessible public canvasses in the world reside under one bridge or another, even in Monterey.
Unfortunately, graffiti in the US is dominated by taggers who lack skill and so desperately feel the need to be noticed.
Will the wild popularity of manga and anime in the States result in a shift from tagging to creating more legitimate works of public art? Hopefully, the answer will be yes.

Hahaha, it reminds me of the good old days…

To my brother, “irreverent Atom Boy”:

I will celebrate your birthday by toasting you, and drinking a cold, crisp Fat Tire Belgian Ale.

I think this one turned out the best of the lot. Shooting at night is a bit more challenging, especially when you don’t have a tripod. Luckily, the walking path provided a stable rail, providing the camera with a stable base.

Why do most people make new year resolutions during the start of a new year? If you need to make a change now, chances are that you will forget about what it is that you want to change if you wait until the next year rolls around.
I know I’ve been really light in the amount of posts that I’ve been writing since I’ve started my job. I could list off reasons why this has happened, but that would make for a boring post.
Instead, I’m going to start taking more pictures and doing more post-worthy things. I guess this means that I have an excuse to buy the “necessary equipment” that I require to do the best job that I possibly can.
Damn, I should make resolutions more often.

Last night was the Pacific Grove Chinese Lantern Festival, happening right next to my apartment. We sampled gyros, baklava, and calamari from the vendors who had set up food stalls next to the beach.
The residents of Pacific Grove obviously put a lot of effort into this event, as they had erected a faux pagoda on the tip of our small breakwater. A team of swimmers clad in wetsuits pulled a limo-sized dragon float through the water while a court of formally clad girls danced to multi-ethnic music (Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish songs were part of their repertoir).
We walked around for a bit, awed that so many people could fit on the beach and on the park at Lover’s Point. Then we went home.
Just after the sun had set, we popped our heads out of the apartment to see this:





I love being able to see cool firework displays right outside of my apartment. In this respect, living in PG is kind of like living in Juso, where I was able to walk down to the Yodogawa and see one of the best firework shows in Osaka. It’s as if I am destined to live in places that are home to other people, like me, who like to watch and play with fireworks.

…[fringeheads] have a great fondness for empty bottles and cans; the bigger the container opening, the bigger the occupant. In some areas, such as the beer bottle field at the head of Redondo Canyon, southern California, nearly every bottle will house a fringehead. A fish usually lies in its home (which it considers its territory) with just part of its head exposed. Fringeheads are extremely aggressive, and they will lunge at intruders (even divers) with jaws snapping.

This is an excerpt from “Probably More Than You Want To Know About The Fishes Of The Pacific Coast”, a most excellent book by Milton Love.

I had already accepted that I would never see a live Death Valley Pupfish (I’m assuming that’s the fish they’re talking about). When I first heard about these guys, reports about their survival were pessimistic, but after reading this article I don’t know what to think. Awesome.