Phytoplankton: An Overview Of The Small, Plant-like Organisms That Make The World Go Round. 

Turtle by TomMeyer

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Marine Life of the Maritime Provinces, Canada

After months of work and waiting, here is at long last the full MARS commission. MARS (Marine Animal Response Society) is active in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and is called upon whenever a marine creature is found dead or in distress. These illustrations will be used to educate their volunteers and assist in making species identifications during strandings or at sea.

With 42 separate illustrations, this is my largest project to date - quite a load of work! But it was an absolute pleasure to do. I got to paint animals I have never painted before, as well as revisit some old friends. The diversity of species found in this one area is impressive and made for varied painting.

I’m pretty pleased seeing them all together like this, and I hope you’ll enjoy them too! 

More on phytoplankton to come soon! Check out my first introductory post if you missed it.

Phytoplankton: An overview of the small, plant-like organisms that make the world go round. 

http://becausephytoplankton.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-are-phytoplankton.html?spref=tw

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Aqua/MODIS via Flickr

What if we told you that a group of gelatinous animals helps control the planet’s climate? Your disbelief would be salp-able! 

Salps are filter-feeding gelata related to pyrosomes that pack up plankton produce into poo pellets that precipitate into the deep, capturing carbon from the atmosphere and tucking it away in the depths of the hydrosphere.

Thanks to local photographers Michelle Manson and Joe Platko for the salp selfies! Joe’s photo on top shows a solitary Pegea confoederata ready to birth the same kind of long chain that Michelle found in her lower photo! 

(The pink orbs are the salps’ guts, and these tubular animals are essentially a passing pasta strainer for plankton!)

Meet Bruce McCandless. He was a bit of a bad-ass. In 1984, Bruce was aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle and became the first human to walk in space without a safety line. By utilising a nitrogen propelled Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), he stepped free from Challenger into the blackness of space for a 90-minute space walk and wandered as far as 97 meters from the ship. The result is this amazing image which captures ingenuity, innovation and most certainly bravery.

Bruce McCandless died yesterday at the age of 80.

-Jean Image Credit: NASA

Covering the oceans in darkness….

Phytoplankton blooms produce some fascinating textures in Earth’s oceans, and consequently we’ve shared images of them taken from orbit many times (http://tinyurl.com/qhzwbr9, http://tinyurl.com/pwasxol). This bloom, however is a bit different from the others – in this photo from NASA’s Aqua satellite, it looks, well, black.

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When This Sea Slug Eats, It Prefers the Turducken of the Sea

A species of nudibranch was found to engage in what researchers call kleptopredation — “steal your meal and eat you, too.”

Nudibranchs are dainty, colorful, voracious ocean predators. And this species figured out how to get two meals for the price of one!

Fellow Study Abroad Students

Most Common Profile

Fellow Students

My Background

Adjustments

The most common profile in study abroad is students from "elite colleges, white, female, major in arts/humanities, and have highly educated parents."  Let's see how that compares to me. I am from a small liberal arts school (does that count as elite?), I am white (check), male (nope), I have majors in biology (nope) and Spanish (check), and both of my parents completed high school but never went to college so they would not be considered highly educated.  

Now, compared to my fellow study abroad students, that profile fits a bit more. Girls out number guys by slightly more than 2 to 1, most of us are white, I think there are two science majors max (including myself), we have representatives from American University and other liberal arts schools, and I know at least some of them have parents that are medical doctors or have a doctorate in the arts or humanities. This is my first time outside the United States, but I know that at least five others have spent at least a few weeks outside of the U.S. at some point in their lives. So overall, everyone else is more well-traveled than me.

In general, I usually do not think that my background as a first generation college student affects my interactions with my peers. I think it's a little awkward when someone says that their father is a doctor or that their father has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, but usually, it's just someone that comes up in a casual conversation and they do not expect me to say what my parents do.

I think that I have learned to be independent and I usually do not rely on others when navigating the college system, and I think that is probably also true for learning how to adjust to life abroad. I just need some time and I make the adjustments on my own. I'm sure that the students that have been abroad may be able to adjust easier, but I don't really know if it is that different from my fellow study abroad students.

When wood turns into glitter

Many moons ago, in the area that is now Nevada ancient woodlands were living through events that would result in some stunning pieces that grace museums around the world. Some 14 million years ago in the Miocene, the area was thickly forested rather than displaying the arid environment of today. It was also much closer to sea level, since the area has been extensively uplifted since then, due to tectonic stresses caused by the subduction of the Pacific and Farallon plates under the North American one. The area also saw intense subduction related volcanism (ongoing along the USA’s west coast to this day), which periodically covered the forests in silica rich ash. As groundwater interacted with the magma below, weathering the layers of ash into clays, it dissolved silica, precipitating it when conditions such as temperature and pressure changed, replacing the ash covered trees with opal, sometimes so clearly that every cell is visible. While not really suitable for jewellery use due to its tendency to crack as it dries out (called crazing in the trade), these rare logs from the Virgin Valley of Nevada make for stunning collector’s specimens

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