Update with snails

I know it's been forever since I updated. The semester started and hit me like the proverbial train, and since then it's been nothing but teaching and research at full-tilt. There was a collecting trip in there, and several experiments started, and a couple finished. I gave an invited talk for the first time at another university, and may have inspired a student to start doing research in ecology.

Here are a few select photos from the last two months:

A tidepool full of Crepidula plana and surrounded by barnacles. Photo taken in September on a collecting trip.

Seaweed (probably Sargassum washed up on a beach in Florida. The seaweed was full of little critters living on and in it, and at night something was bioluminescing in the seaweed clumps. Photo taken in October on a for-fun trip. I am astonished by the colors every time I see this shot.

My local field site, sunset, early November (the day before the end of daylight savings).

What inspired me to come back to the blog today was nothing that I have done, but rather this post from Rachel Collin's lab in Panama (I've mentioned their work with Crepidula before). One of the grad students in the lab has gotten actual video footage of mating Crepidula, and the videos are up on the lab blog.

Go. Check it out. It's really quite amazing.