Category: Marine Biology
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Giants Among Us: Tribute to Gary Brusca
As an undergraduate student at Cal Poly (SLO) in the mid-1970s I was educated in the shadow of the giants before me, Gary and Richard Brusca. My advisor and zoology Professor Dave Montgomery never hesitated to mention the near-miraculous accomplishments of the mythical brothers that preceded us as undergraduate students before getting their PhDs: how…
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When Invertebrates Ruled the Planet: the Enigmatic Rangeomorphs
The Ediacaran period represents the earliest appearance of complex life. It’s a fascinating era with many puzzles. Chief among them are the Rangeomorphs, an enigmatic group of organisms that were ubiquitous in fossil assemblages over 580 mya, 40 million years before the “Cambrian explosion.”.
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What is a Surfer?
What is a surfer? The answer varies, depending on your perspective. Here’s mine. To some it is an art, a sport, a religion, a profession, an addiction, something you do on vacation. Maybe it;s the biggest thing in your life, maybe it’s your entire life, or just an occasional joy.
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Our Environmental Past Can’t Become Our Future…
Forty-eight years ago millions of people in 192 countries across the globe created Earth Day on April 22, 1970. The first celebration took place in 2,000 colleges and universities, 10,000 primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the US involving over 20 million Americans. That day changed the world. Lately, it seems like we are forgetting what…
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Ocean Movies you Love to Hate: Blood Surf (2000)
Combine surfing + sharks + reality TV + pirates + salt-water crocodile and you have Blood Surf, an ocean movie that goes by the taglines of “Where a surfers dream can become reality” and “Chicks dig scars.”
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Ocean Movies you Love to Hate: Tentacles (1977)
Suction cups of death threaten the tourists of a seaside resort in this cheap Italian knock-off Jaws. Fortunately, the hapless swimmers and boaters are saved by a plucky marine biologist who trains two killer whales to devour the eight-armed menace.
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SmartFin: Environmental Wave of the Future
As the world’s environmental problems expand the challenge is to keep up with the increasingly larger scale of the issues. Decades ago we worried about individual beaches, now we are focused on whole coastlines, and indeed entire oceans are at risk. To keep pace marine biologists and oceanographers have deployed huge arrays of sensors across the…
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Crush Depth: Adventures with Scientific Submersibles
“What’s your depth?” echoed down from the surface radio, unanswered for the third time in a row and sounding increasingly desperate. It was 2002 and I was riding inside the scientific submersible Delta, heading towards the seafloor off Anacapa island in an area known simply as the “footprint,” a deep-water fish, coral and sponge hot spot…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love College
College, the eternal rite of passage. It stands before us as the ultimate challenge of our lives. We go, we conquer, we go on to great things. Or at least that’s the story. But does college make a difference? It is just another institution, a step along the way, one of many things we “must”…
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Find the Kraken! The Search for Giant Squid
The idea of the Kraken appears in Melville’s Moby Dick in 1851; played a major role in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870; and appeared as the Watcher in the Water in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, lurking in a lake beneath the western walls of Moria. The truth is…
