They’ll make a big enough tent to include this moron, but heaven forbid progressives be allowed to find a foothold in the party apparatus. www.politico.com/newsletters/...

A view from the Surfliner train. The floaty thing on the right in the water is our mussel mooring in Los Penasquitos Lagoon.

New mussel data loggers are back out in the Tijuana River estuary and broadcasting to monitormywatershed.org/sites/TJSURF...

An intertidal sampling trip at Cabrillo National Monument ahead of the impending rainstorm.

I go by this sign a few times a week, and so far the only funny thing I’ve seen is a tractor drop a bunch of pipes in the road. I expected more comedy.

Servicing the oyster/mussel mooring via kayak.

A sea star at sunset and a giant owl limpet hanging out in Pacific Beach.

reflectionsonpaperspast.com Saving this for later.

Checking on our oyster/mussel mooring at Los Peñasquitos Lagoon via kayak. It’s almost as idyllic as it appears in pictures.

Our field assistant this afternoon. Probably unrelated, but there was a suspicious number of cracked-open limpets nearby.

Up until now I’ve never pulled apart one of these big bead filter things on a seawater system, but now I have. This is what I do now while the CSU has a staff hiring freeze.

Putting oyster and mussel sensors out in Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. These are live at monitormywatershed.org/sites/LPLSur... as of October 2024.

Seeing a NOFX show in a the LA Harbor (San Pedro) was memorable, even if they do suck live.

An observation: the gear on the left was in Los Penasquitos Lagoon and the gear on the right was in the Tijuana River estuary. The LPL stuff was covered in fouling organisms (since scraped off). The TJ stuff was basically pristine save for a layer of bacterial scuzz.

There’s a dwindling number of VW bugs out on the road for playing Slug-a-Bug. Our family plays Whamazon instead now. If you see an Amazon delivery van/semi on the road, call out “Whamazon” first and you get to punch the other player. (Yes, this is also a sad commentary on modern life)

You want to wade in the Tijuana River these days, you probably ought to be wearing a dry suit. So here we are, gluing new wrist and neck seals on an old OS Systems suit.

The perils of field work in a harbor.

Here’s a few months of fouling organisms settling on one of our oyster/mussel racks in San Diego Bay - after some cleaning. The live data of the shells opening and closing is here: monitormywatershed.org/sites/FLUPSY... The mussel plots at the bottom of the page show the best data.

Boiler Bay Oregon from this summer.

Some intertidal zonation at Cape Disappointment, Washington this summer.

Nice to see some healthy seastars making a living on the mussels on the pilings at Crystal Pier.

Congratulations to Lauren Strope for successfully defending her master's thesis on oyster performance in a living shorelines restoration project this morning. This was the guiding cross-stitch she produced along the way.

Here's 100 years of sea surface temperatures collected in Pacific Grove, California. This was primarily the work of two generations of the Balesteri family who worked at Hopkins Marine Station, and then a bunch of graduate students who mostly missed the 8AM collection time each day (including me).