The Himalayan Monal Is A Large Member Of The Pheasant Family Found In Parts Of Asia. While During The

“What’s that on the beach?!" 

Monterey Bay beachcombers and divers were treated to a huge bloom of salps this weekend! Salps are gelatinous filter-feeders that drift with and feed in the plankton. Wind and waves sometimes blow these open-ocean emissaries onshore by the thousands, a feast for fishes, invertebrates—and for the eyes of curious naturalists!

There were several species of salps in this weekend’s bloom, including these in the genus Salpa. Salps do not sting—in fact, they’re more closely related to fishes and people than they are to other "jellies”! The brown/orange orb is the salp’s gut. Pumping muscle bands push water from one end of the animal to the other through an internal plankton-pasta strainer.

Salps have an incredibly successful reproductive strategy, allowing them to explode in numbers when conditions are right. Ready? Here we go: Salps can be found as solos, or as a chain of dozens of individuals attached together. Same species, two different body morphs. The solos produce the chain asexually, and the individuals in the chain are all clones. 

OK, still with us? The next part is a doozy: A young chain is female, and each female clone produces another solo salp from an egg that is fertilized by older male chains. The older male chains are female chains that changed sex as they aged—this is called sequential hermaphroditism. This whole process allows salps to produce new generations at an incredible rate, to take advantage of fleeting oceanic conditions. Phew, we did it!

Salps are thought to have an outsized effect on the flow of nutrients in the ocean’s food web. Because their fecal pellets sink, salp poop delivers vital nutrition from the ocean surface to the deep seafloor, and helps take carbon from the atmosphere to the deep, which helps regulate the planet’s climate. Spent salps from these huge blooms become food for countless organisms throughout the water column. Certain deep sea communities may even depend on these ephemeral feasts to survive in the desert of the abyssal plain, according to research by our colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

This weekend’s salp bloom is a jiggly reminder of the vast community of gelatinous drifters—the gelata—that drift in the open ocean, connecting the surface to the deep and adjusting the Earth’s energy flow, unseen by most until a chance encounter on the shore.

Photo: Charles Schrammel Gif: Alison Smith

drowning in that lovin gendrya and braime juice

Menstruation products* but yeah real safety would be making them free as they should be 🙃

Hematopoietic stem cells ready for re-injection. Image from Steve Gschmeisserner.

Went out to a vernal pool today and saw some crazy toad action

About to burst

A geyser forms due to water being heated by the energy beneath the Earth’s surface. The water is heated past the normal boiling point of water, but remains in a liquid state because of the pressure of the water on top of it.

Eventually, enough water turns to steam that it begins blasting the column of water upwards. Once the first bit of water is removed, the pressure drops, causing more water to turn to steam and leading to a runaway eruption of the water.

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New project!

I received a new research project in my lab today on concurrent ehrlichia infections in dogs! All the happy feels! 

Sanity check

Hi everyone, I overheard a very troubling conversation between a neighboring grad student and my PI. In this conversation, the neighboring grad student said the following:

She has no work-life balance. Most of the times, she comes in very early in the morning (before 7 or 8 AM) and leaves very late (after 10 PM).

She says she’s fine with this but also says she’s under constant state of stress because of her PI’s expectations, and my labmate and I have actually ran into her crying in the stairwell.

She’s actually concerned about her peers when they can relax in the evenings instead of being in lab or at least working from home, or when they get to do things on the weekends.

I just want to see how other PhD students are handling their work-life balance after hearing this conversation just to make sure I’m not slacking off.

For me, I come in 9 AM - 5 PM (sometimes staying later depending on experiments, but this is NOT the norm). Sometimes, I come in for a few hours on the weekends to speed things up or if need be (also not the norm). After dinner, I usually do homework, prepare powerpoints for journal clubs or seminar presentations and other non-lab related things, but sometimes I do some work (interneuron quantifying, schedule and plan experiments for the next day/week, etc). I do want to incorporate more literature reading in the evenings or mornings. Regardless, the majority of my work is done on the weekdays 9 AM - 5 PM.

My reasoning is that I’d rather go “normal” pace and steady since I’ll be here for 3+ years to avoid burning out. I want to enjoy my work, and that’s not happening if I feel like I NEED to be here and NEED to do all these things on this impossible schedule. I have been having thoughts of mastering out in the back of my mind, but at the end of the day, I do enjoy my work and my PI’s mentorship and I think I can learn a lot more being here for 3+ years of my PhD.

In addition, we get paid barely above minimum wage as a grad student if we work 40 hours a week. During crazy weeks (which everyone has), that increases by a lot, which means we get paid less than minimum wage, for very specialized and skilled works. Yes, we are in training as PhD students, but if the expectation is for us to work all day, all night, all week, then the PhD feels less like training and more like slave labor disguised as training.

How are your schedules like as PhD students? @cancerbiophd @queenofthebench @whitecoatjourney @adorable-amygdala and many others!

What do you name a virus that is 1,000 times larger than the flu virus, has 200 times as many genes, and 93% of those genes are previously unknown to science? The mythical Pandora’s Box seemed an appropriate inspiration, and so the genus was dubbed Pandoravirus.  These extra-large viruses may have been missed in the past because of their size, and were likely thought to be bacteria. Pandoraviruses do not behave typically, and may re-open the conversation regarding viruses as a life form. More info: http://bit.ly/1bwvYuY Image via Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie

“our work should equip the next generation of women to outdo us in every field this is the legacy we’ll leave.”

- rupi kaur