A new place for a new year

Bienvenue. Since I wrote last I have finished my Ph.D., uprooted my entire life, and started a postdoc in a foreign language, in a faraway land. But I think about this space periodically, and so here I am again.

I miss my field site in New York. I knew I would, and I felt a little sad every time I went out there last summer, knowing it might be the last. When I was sure it was the last time, I was very sad. But the snails are still there, doing their snail thing, whether or not I am there to check on them.

My new job involves a lot of deskwork right now, and will involve a little bit of lab work, but nothing in the field and precious little with live larvae. I'm trying not to be too bummed about it. I mean, if this is the view from the lab, how bad can it be to have to stay there?

Isn't it wonderful? This photo was taken in early December.

Plus, I finally have running seawater, which is something I've wanted for years. I spent an absurd amount of time and mileage hauling seawater during grad school (and I was lucky to have it within hauling distance, rather than having to make my own). I calculated that during peak seawater use that I was hauling around 30 gallons a week, in muscle-building three-gallon jugs. It's rather ironic that I didn't have running seawater when I really could have used it and now that I have it, I won't be needing it very much...but so it goes. I'm still hoping to be able to get some experiments done here.

Here are a few cool things I have seen since moving.

Winner of coolest animal seen so far. This is a crinoid. It's an echinoderm, like sea stars and sea urchins.
Many crinoids are stalked and live really deep, but these feather stars live in warm, rocky habitats.
It's the first time I'd seen one, meaning I got to add a whole taxonomic class to my life list.
Everyone has an invertebrate life list, right?

The lacy fan in the middle is a bryozoan, or moss animal.
They are all colonial, and are really common members of the hard-substrate fouling community.
This particular guy is called Neptune's Lace, and the squiggly white things are worm tubes.

One bonus of living here rather than in New York is that we have true limpets.
Crepidula are called 'slipper limpets' but they're actually a totally different group of
molluscs from these guys, the true limpets.  (Probably genus Patella.)
I spotted them in the pitifully small intertidal zone here, during my first couple weeks.

Hopefully I can get back to this space more often this year, now that the rush of graduating and moving is mostly done. But we will see.