It’s hard to believe Winter quarter is over, and I am back at OIMB after an eventful, yet relaxing spring break in California’s Bay Area. I enjoyed spending time with my parents, my best friend from back home, visiting my sister and her husband in their new house in Southern California, rock climbing with my older brother, and going to San Francisco with a few of my friends from Oregon. Now it’s back to work!

Returning to OIMB on Sunday and seeing friends from fall quarter as well as meeting new friends was great. We even got Easter baskets with our dinner! :)

This quarter I am taking Invertebrate Zoology and Deep Sea Ecology as well as a class in preparation for a 2 week trip to Panama in the summer (I’ve never been out of the country before!). I’ll also be working on my honors thesis. This will be a busy quarter, but I am looking forward to the work and learning.

Tethya california. A cross section looks like an orange, with spicules radiating from the center.

Tuesday was our first class of inverts, and we learned all about sponges. I’ve seen sponges before. I’ve touched sponges before. I thought I knew a bit about sponges. I also thought they were not very exciting…but I was wrong! Sponges are pretty cool little creatures, especially considering their sessile life. Essentially, two cell types are responsible for the circulation of water, capturing and digestion of food, excrement of waste/foreign particles, and capturing or dispersal of sperm/egg. It’s crazy that four processes that require four different organ systems in humans can be carried out by two cell types in a sponge!

In the lab, we looked at sponges under microscopes, which we then had to draw in our lab books. Some people’s drawings are amazing! (and I’m not talking about my own…) Besides going out to the tide pool to look for sponges, my favorite part was looking at the spicules that form the skeleton of the sponge, especially the spicules of Leucilla nuttingi. 

Thursday in inverts was part 1 of Cnidaria: Anthozoa. After lecture we walked down to the docks to look for sea anemones as well as collect jellies for later on. We found so many cool organisms! There were a lot of lion’s man jellies (Cyanea capillita), which are rare to see in the boat basin, the shaggy rug nudibranch (Aeolidia papillosa), ctenophores, and of course sea anemones! While we were out, it was pouring rain with strong winds, making it for a wet, but fun adventure. To top it off, we came back to grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch! I also learned that sea anemones are much easier to draw than sponges.

The adventure of going out in stormy weather continued on friday in Deep Sea Ecology. After lunch, we went out in the bay for some otter trawls to study species richness. This was only my 4th time out on a boat and my first time doing this type of trawl, so it was really fun, even in sideways rain, choppy water, and crazy wind. We found a lot of cool organisms in the trawl, and since we just learned about sea anenomes the day before, we were able to identify Metridium senile to species! A tiny Pycnopodia (~4 cm in diameter) came up in one of the trawls. It was really cute, but right after we threw it back in the water, a gull came and ate it. That was a sad moment for all of us in our cruise.

Apparently we can’t get enough of the rain because we went out tide pooling on Saturday, in our free time, in a down pour… If the rain keeps going as hard as it has this week, I will definitely get my money’s worth out of my rain pants. I sure hope that the sun pokes out sometime this week to say hello.