AHHHHHH! New doliolid terminology! "Purple waves"!

Play this on a loop for every enthusiast of this slop in higher ed.

Had my car broken into last night and my birding backpack stolen. The Sav-PD just returned my bag with entire contents. What just happened, the police just solved a petty crime.

I'm allowed to be salty about having to address "reviewer #3 comments" after I submitted a "minor revision" 3 months ago. It's not my fault someone went MIA.

I love mm-sized hydrozoans because I genuinely know nothing about them, struggle to find research on them, but their tentacle morphologies clearly suggest different evolutionary-functions.

The emperor and king penguins were how myself, a 7-year old in a landlocked state, developed a special interest in our planet's oceans. That led to my passion for the complexities of biological oceanography. I have no other input besides the obligation to share that Emperor penguins jumped 2 stages.

Oceanography students would benefit from improv-classes. It genuinely is always, "Yes, and..." when considering the interactions between physics, chemistry, and biology. Learning to roll the conversation topic depending on the audience is a learned skill.

My favorite new hobby is topping up my gas tank every other day because it's inevitable my country will continue to fuck over the entire world's fuel supplies. /s

Biological data: very fun to talk about, very not-fun to write about.

I'm impressed that a phyllosoma (spiny/slipper lobster larva, can't tell 100% which by the angle here) can capture a siphonophore. Those things chug along at a high velocity for their size! Gelatinous zooplankton are far from a trophic dead-end.

Some doliolid phorozooids (the asexual life stage of an asexual life stage) are absolute beasts. Each budding gonozooid (the final sexual stage) is also actively feeding during growth as a bud. This is counted as "1 phorozooid ROI" in calculations... but in reality is more complicated.

I *think* these are all the same Appendicularian/Larvacean species (images from same sampling tow). Pro's and Con's of shadow imaging, I have 3 images from many-thousands that are my best shot at ID'ing a small organism.

Salp chains constantly are the bane of my existence. At least doliolid chains are smaller so it's easy to say "just the colony". Sizes matter (& number of zooids). For functional traits in a community, a big colony is not equal to a small colony, but 1 ROI = 1 ROI. Biovolumes may provide the keys.

The Canadian broadcast displaying a bunch of "Canada is not for sale" signs in their hockey pre-game is quite a bit more... moving than the USA's "once in the 1980's we beat the Soviets".

I am definitely too emotionally invested in the story of Punch the baby Macaque.

Writing goals were not met today b/c: I drove past a fatal accident caused by ICE on my way to my cubicle. Can't quite compartmentalize today.

Trying to schedule PhD committee meetings with Oceanographers is one of the more annoying dissertation hurdles to jump over.

So that Yale Prof. that bragged about recommending his undergrad to Epstein is also the Yale Prof. that The Unabomber tried to blow-up with a mail-bomb. That's.... you can't make that up.

This is insane. Under absolutely no circumstances should a prof ever discuss the physical appearance of a student in a rec letter! I can’t believe I even have to say that!

Today I learned there is a thing called "writing/screen apnea" and that quite a few people have trouble breathing regularly while writing at computers.

Some weeks it feels like you make years worth of progress.

I chuckled so hard at this post in a local aquarium group. Maybe I should come in and undercut the market hahaha

One of my Oceanographer friends (and OSM roomie way back) formed a band in Tampa, FL to let out some angst (of being NOAA-employed). It's sludge/metal so a very select taste, but I still feel the need to share. Yes, the lyrics are Oceanography adjacent.

Some great examples of "ChatGPT and LLMs show you what it thinks you want to see" from the Soelberg trial evidence. (That's the former Yahoo exec murder-suicide).

My biological data is giving me some tight linear relationships.... I'm scared, that never happens.

"You have to enjoy the process" is the best advise I have been given that I am trying to make into a routine, again. One of my personal joys is producing a clean figure that condenses quite a lot of raw observations. (Not giving context b/c WIP)

Shark Whisperer is lying to you: a look into the harmful effects of Ocean Ramsey and shark influencers | This quotes me and is very thorough. Check it out.

If the Giants can fire their leader, does that mean there's hope for Democrats?

It's so weird that when I ask AI about subjects I have zero understanding in, I get great help. Yet, when I ask about subjects I'm familiar with the answers are dogshit. /s

Hyping up one of my favorite plants I keep, the Yaupon holly. It is the only native NA plant to contain caffeine (tea plant) and grows densely on the SE-USA coastline. The strong and fibrous root systems are an under-appreciated guard against soil erosion.

Really, really tired of trying to tune out the neon-flashing signs of "fascism is here, now" so I can finish a dissertation. Thankful for therapy.

Saxsquatch, the only sasquatch playing sax and mixing with EDM, is playing 1 & 1/2 hours from me in a few weeks. Genuinely my favorite artist to have on playlists, hear people like, then be able to state, "Yea, that's a dude in a Sasquatch costume".

"Consider the influence of two tropical systems on each other's trajectories" is a crazy final exam hypothetical that I'm enjoying watch play out in the model-predictions. Either hitting Florida or east of Bermuda, beautiful uncertainty.

Had some fun "getting as far up-river as possible in 30 minutes one-way" today with my senior undergrads.

I would like to stop living in interesting times, please.

Some senior MARS undergrads are in for my big (little?) invert-energy tomorrow; I get to give a mini Zooplankton-Phyla lecture and lead an image-data lab (with R-coding)! I'm curious to see how many of them prefer the Tidyverse way of life.

The chiltepin pepper is the only Capsicum native to the USA, and has become one of my favorite backyard crops. Good heat, fruity flavor, easily dries into peppercorns that look pretty and are useful.

There are far too many 35+ year old dudes who are trying to re-live their high school glory days in recreational sport leagues.

The large number of "clickbait weathermen" is something I never (was algorithm fed) noticed until recently. There are clearly many 'normal' people who cannot tell these pages are sensationalist, and use cherry-picked individual model runs.

Nobody warned me about the variety of emotions that follow clicking "submit" on a manuscript yourself for the first time.

"Let's make every show/movie as dark as possible, as often as possible, to save on our budgets".

The 7th Zooplankton Production Symposium was the best experience possible for an early career researcher. We are keeping in touch, and we are motivated.

"...to move vehicle between depths of approximately 3 m from the surface, to avoid bubbles generated by the ship propeller, to approximately 4 m from the bottom, to give plenty of error room so we don't crash the instrument into the sediments when crew fail to answer the walkie." (I'm joking...)

I don't think I've seen a doliolid nurse like this before... what is hanging out from the trophozooids? My gut is saying fungus?... Could be 'stuck diatom chains', but the strands bend; could be fecal material, but it looks too solid and long. Sticking from every trophozooid, so not image-artifact.

After >10 years as a Google/Chrome system user, the continued push to remove ad-blocking plug-ins (such as uBlock) is the straw that sends me back to Firefox.

My favorite part of the zooplankton-imaging 'niche' is that I get to read ecology papers from across the land-sea interface. Turns out, nets really hamstring your ability to meet statistical assumptions and make inferences. Such as this cool research on prairie chicken possible habitat.

Surreal to see people proudly wearing concentration camp merchandise. I am not proud to be an American today.

It's kind of fun telling undergraduate interns, "You literally already have more experience with R than I did when I was in your spot." It's the little things in life that I'm holding onto while watching my future plans become defunded.

"Doliolids look like hand grenades" oh great, now I'm researching why hand grenade shapes influence trajectory

I love how much energy some larval/juvenile fishes invest early into eyes and jaws. Pictured here are some young eels (Leptocephalus) from the South Atlantic Bight during August 2022. Look at that jaw on the smaller ~2cm individual! #FishLarvae