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***

Okay, it's a far cry from Sandra Beasley's brilliant Unit of Measure ("Everyone is more or less a master of grasses than the capybara"), but it amused me enough to share.

And it's timely, kind of! California's devastating drought has got me feeling very twitchy about lawns. I sheet-mulched mine a few years ago and put in native plants, and even some of them are giving me an awfully parched end-of-summer look.

Perhaps a poem about a passionately aquatic rodent can be considered akin to a rain dance.

Life shoots itself in the foot . . . again.

I've sat through (heck, even instigated!) plenty of lengthy discussion about various definitions of life. But just now, I'd like to propose a brand new definition: life is anything that pollutes the environment. What do you think?

At first, it always seems like a good idea. Photosynthesis, for example. Here we are, just some simple cells swimming in water, bathed in sunlight, with plenty of carbon (mostly thanks to the volcanos*). Let's take those raw ingredients and make sugar! Incidentally, we'll produce a little oxygen on the side. Shouldn't be a big problem. Right? Wrong! It turns out that a little oxygen becomes a lot of oxygen, and oxygen is hugely reactive. Right off the bat it started oxidizing iron.

Once, iron was dissolved abundantly in the oceans, and the carefree phytoplankton probably never gave a second thought to the fact that they needed (a miniscule amount of) iron to build their photosynthetic machinery. But these days, almost all of the iron in the world has been transformed into iron oxide, rendering it virtually insoluble and therefore inaccessible to the very phytoplankton that need it. They must instead rely on oceanic fertilization by rivers and blowing sand from the Sahara. Bits of the ocean that don't have much riverine input and aren't downwind of any deserts are notoriously iron-poor. The low chlorophyll (indicative of low phytoplankton activity) in these areas was a big puzzle to oceanographers until they figured out the iron connection!

Jumping from single-celled goo to the mammals, let's consider gray whales. Our penchant for categorization compels us to divide whales in two broad ecological categories: toothed whales (think killer & sperm**) that eat seals and squid and maybe the occasional whaler, and baleen whales (think blue and humpback) that swim gently through the sea like giant Brita filters, absorbing plankton. But there are more than two ways to feed yourself from the ocean, and gray whales have gotten creative.

Gray whales are baleen whales, but rather than swim placidly through the water, filtering as they go, they've decided to dig for their meals. They're bottom feeders, foraging through the silty seafloor for crustaceans and worms. Now, if you've ever gone diving, you know what happens if you kick your fins too close to a sandy, or worse yet, a silty bottom. Clouds of dust billow into the water, obscuring your vision and taking a frustratingly long time to settle down. Now, imagine a whale deliberately rooting around in the muck! Gray whales re-suspend huge amounts of sediment, filling the ocean with dirty plumes that are easily visible from aerial surveys.

Sloppy eaters are always attended by those willing to pick up the crumbs, and gray whale mud plumes provide superb "ephemeral foraging opportunities" for seabirds (fun citation!). Millions of birds feed regularly off of gray whale plumes, making these environmental disturbances easily comparable to a human landfill or elementary school (at least from a gull's perspective).

My point is that all living things, from whales to bacteria, alter the world around them to some extent. Put a plant in a jar and it will eventually use up all the carbon and starve. Put a rat in a separate jar, and it will breathe up all the oxygen and asphyxiate. But put them in the same jar, and they can coexist for a little while--long enough for the rat to starve to death, or maybe eat the plant and then asphyxiate. Hmm.

Okay, add more plants, some insects, and eventually you'll find a balance of consumption of production, death and spawning. You'll have created an ecosystem.

So that's the game of Life: it changes its environment, pollutes it, if you will, and then some other Life jumps on the pollution as a resource. Meanwhile, we humans are the Protean player, the ecological wild card. We're something special in the sheer variety of transformations we can accomplish. Physical, check (we build dams). Chemical, check (greenhouse gases and holes in the ozone!). Biological, check (I can't even decide which species to pick--dodos? moas?--but we can eat pretty much anything out of existence). In addition to making a wide variety of changes, we also make changes very fast. We're changing things faster than we can even learn about the way they were before we started changing them.

Which is really pretty spooky.



* Yeah, so obviously this definition of life renders the Earth itself a living being. Volcanos belch ash and gas into the atmosphere and alter the global climate. Does this put me on the same page as Gaia theorists? And then there's fire . . .

** Sperm whales are weird! And not just in name. They are most definitely endowed with teeth, not baleen, but a guy named Milinkovitch proposed in 1993 that they are actually more closely allied with the baleen whales. He did some genetics to back it up, other people did genetics to contradict him, and people are still arguing about it. This should be interesting even if you don't really give a fig about genetics, because it also lets people argue about echolocation, which is undeniably cool. Toothed whales (including sperm) echolocate. Baleen whales don't. If sperm whales are truly more closely related to baleen whales, then either (1) sperm & other toothed whales evolved echolocation independently, or else (2) the first whales evolved echolocation, and baleen whales lost it somewhere on their evolutionary trajectory. Everyone agrees that (1) is extremely unlikely. It seems there's some evidence that embryonic baleen whales may actually have a residual "melon" (à la bottlenose dolphins) early in development--which would support (2).

never say never

If I had to use one word to describe all of Nature, I'd be torn between "diverse" and "unpredictable". The first adjective is a fairly obvious descriptor: after all, there's a lot of stuff out there! Antlers, peacocks, narwhals, methanotrophic bacteria . . . However, the second adjective is a more loaded term. It is obviously a reflection of the observer, the one trying to predict.

We humans like to generalize. I don't know if we even like it so much as we can't help it. It might be hard-wired into our brains. It's an extremely useful ability for coping with our surroundings. You want to be able to look at a dog, any dog, and know that it is a dog, rather than seeing every dog as a totally unrelated individual. Or seeing the same dog on different days, or from different angles, and not knowing it is the same animal. I seem to recall there's a cognitive disorder that breaks the sufferer's ability to generalize in this way. (Anyone know what it's called?)

So we look at Nature, and greedily gather her into all our little compartments, niches, species, and populations. But Nature loves to fool us, to lull us into thinking she really does come in these convenient categories, before coyly presenting us with a complete categorical conundrum.

Here's a classic example. It's useful to casually define mammals as animals that give live birth. Unfortunately, this generalization breaks in both directions: not all mammals give live birth, and not all animals that give live birth are mammals. While the egg-laying monotremes can be labelled "primitive mammals" and neatly sectioned away from marsupials and placentals, who play by the rules, it is somewhat difficult to classify viviparous sharks as anything other than fish who simply happen to give live birth. No one has been quite foolish enough to try classifying them as mammals. (And sharks are by no means the only non-mammals to figure out vivipary. My favorite viviparous animals are the lovely onychophorans, a.k.a. velvet worms.)

Another classic example is endothermy, long thought to be the sole domain of mammals and birds, until tuna were discovered to warm their blood as well.

So, what once were sensible, educated statements to make, such as "All mammals give live birth," or "Only birds and mammals are warm-blooded," must now be--not thrown out, for although the absoluteness is wrong, the guidelines are interesting and useful--but presented as tendencies. "Most mammals are viviparous," etc.

Okay, sorry to slog through that, since it's all pretty familiar these days--at least to folks who like animals. My point, however, in going over the obvious stuff, is this: we still haven't learned our lesson! Rather, I think we are actually incapable of learning this particular lesson, or at least incapable of modifying our behaviors accordingly. Two human traits are at work here:

1. We like making rules.
2. We like breaking rules.

We the members of the human race seem practically compelled to be constantly making and breaking rules. This is very Popperian! (Karl Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science in the last century. He suggested that the best way to move science forward was to make bold conjectures (the bolder the better) then try with all might and main to disprove them.)

So, I want to discuss some more current (and more obscure yet very fun) examples of rule-making and breaking. I'll start with cellulase. Cellulose is made by plants and it is really tough to digest--just imagine chewing on wood. You need a special enzyme to break it down, called cellulase*. You don't have the enzyme, trust me. Who does? Well, who eats wood? Wood rots, and rotting is just another word for "being broken into very small pieces by bacteria," so bacteria clearly produce cellulase. Who else? Termites come obviously to mind, but in fact, termites have symbiotic bacteria living in their guts to produce cellulase. So the conventional wisdom about termites is that they can only digest wood because of these prokaryotic companions. In fact, this wisdom is so conventional that I recently heard an eminent professor comment that only bacteria make cellulase. This elicited some interesting discussion in the class he was teaching (and I was attending), so I decided to go to Google Scholar and verify it.

Surprise! It turns out that quite a few eukaryotes actually do make their own cellulase, but this information has not yet percolated from obscure primary literature to textbook knowledge. Eukaryotic cellulase was actually first discovered in (get this) the defaunated guts of termites**. After people realized that termites could make their own cellulase, in addition to borrowing that of their symbionts, they started looking elsewhere. Cellulase enzyme activity, as well as cellulase genes, have since been found in parasitic nematodes, beetles, cockroaches, crayfish, and mussels. (Mussels?? Don't ask me!)

As long as we're talking about endosymbionts (I was, really) let's turn to corals. Most folk have heard of coral bleaching. That's what it's called when corals lose their endosymbionts--tiny photosynthesizing algal cells that fix carbon into sugar and share it with their coral hosts. But most of the time, happy, healthy corals can get up to 90% of their nutritional needs met by these algae. In a later session of the same class that hosted the discussion of cellulase, we started wondering how every new generation of corals gets their algae. Transmission of endosymbionts can be either vertical (passed directly from parent to child) or horizontal (every new generation has to acquire them anew from their environment). Another casual blanket statement was made at this point (admittedly, not by a coral biologist), to wit: "Corals all have horizontal transmission of symbionts."

Curiosity drove me to the primary literature again, and no one should be surprised to hear that I found exceptions to the rule, including the beautiful Seriotopora.

This discovery led me to consider the validity of yet another (more well-known) rule: Animals don't photosythesize, OR, all photosynthesizers are plants. (According to technical taxonomy, the Plantae are quite a small subset of photosynthesizers, but in the Plant Biology class I'm TAing, the professor covers plants in the broad sense, including algae and phytoplankton. This seems reasonable to me, and for the purposes of my argument, I'll be using this broad sense of plants.)

However, everything you think of as a plant doesn't really photosynthesize all by itself. Instead, plants harbor little machines called chloroplasts inside their cells, and each chloroplast is an entirely self-contained factory for harvesting the sun's energy and using it to build sugars. How self-contained? Well, it depends on which plant you're talking about, but chloroplasts are separated from the rest of the cell by at least two and up to four concentric membranes.

This was one of the clues that led scientists to figure out that chloroplasts were once independent single-celled organisms that were engulfed by larger cells, and, over time, developed into permanent endosymbionts. Their host cells began to take care of everything except photosynthesis for them, so they were slowly pared down to nothing but sugar factories***. (Fun tidbit: some chloroplasts still retain a remnant of their original nucleus, called a nucleomorph.)

The reason that the number of membranes around chloroplasts differ is that (we think) this "engulfing-->endosymbiosis" event happened more than once and in a nested fashion. Let me explain. One cell engulfs a photosynthetic bacterium, and the bacterium becomes a chloroplast. That's primary endosymbiosis and the chloroplast has two membranes. Now another cells comes along and engulfs the first cell (including its chloroplast, of course). The first cell is reduced just as the first bacterium was, until it becomes no more than a chloroplast with four membranes. This is secondary endosymbiosis. The whole thing can happen again in tertiary endosymbiosis and you'd think you'd end up with a six-membrane chloroplast, but that actually doesn't exist. A few membranes seem to have gotten misplaced in the various lineages, so some secondary endosymbionts have only three membranes, and tertiary endosymbionts actually have only four (although it is a different four than the four-membrane secondaries.) Have I thoroughly confused you? Try this; it does a much better job. With pictures!

You'll see on that page that mitochondria (little energy-producing factories in our cells) are thought to be endosymbionts too. That brings me to another fun "never say never" story. I always thought (because I'd been taught) that all eukaryotes, by definition, have mitochondria. Oh! Wrong! It turns out that a couple of our closest companions, the single-celled eukaryotes Giardia and Trichomonas (along with all their cousins), lack mitochondria. They seem to do just fine without them--much to the dismay of people suffering from giardiasis and trichomoniasis.

My apologies, that was a long digression. I was talking about corals and their endosymbionts. Corals are definitely not considered plants. However, they do host photosynthetic plants, and it ought to be interesting to compare these endosymbionts with chloroplasts.

Similarities:
- Chloroplasts and some coral endosymbionts are intracellular (live inside host cells)
- Chloroplasts and some coral endosymbionts are vertically transmitted (direct from parent to offspring)

Differences (as far as I know, but I bet I could be proved wrong, at least in some cases):
- Coral endosymbionts but not chloroplasts can live independently of the coral host
- Chloroplasts but not coral endosymbionts keep some DNA in the host cell's genome
- Coral endosymbionts but not chloroplasts retain all their ordinary cell machinery in addition to photosynthetic machinery (but remember those nucleomorphs!)

So, it seems to me that the intracellular, vertically transmitted coral endosymbionts are well on their way to becoming coral chloroplasts (which, by the way, might be a quaternary endosymbiosis event). At what stage during this process (assuming we're still around) will we decide that we might as well start classifying corals as plants (in the broad sense)?

Or maybe we should just put them on that long, long list of our favorite exceptions to our favorite rules.



* Nerd joke! Parafilm is a fun, sturdy cousin of plastic wrap. It is used in all labs and is nearly as ubiquitous as kimwipes and duct tape. Parafilm comes in a roll that can't be ripped; pieces must be cut off with scissors. However, whenever scissors are placed next to a roll of Parafilm in a prominent location, those scissors disappear. This has led some cunning scientists to rename Parafilm "scissorase".

** Wow. If defaunating a gut isn't an invasive procedure, I don't know what is. Hmmm. That's what we do to ourselves every time we take antibiotics . . .

*** Definitiely the weirdest thought I've had in a while: Some friends of mine work in Silicon Valley for a large company that shall remain nameless. This company is very keen to take care of all their needs: meals, laundry, car repair, etc. Consequently they are spending more and more time at work since they have fewer and fewer reasons to leave. Could this company be slowly turning them into little endosymbiotic organelles--code producing factories living their whole lives inside the company cytoplasm?

Hijinks on the High Seas, Part II

(Long-awaited? or long-forgotten? Anyway, here it is!)

October 18, 2006

I've accumulated a number of small cuts and abrasions on my hands from routine lab and field work. They're not noticeable normally, but squid ink is an irritant and makes them red, inflamed, and horribly itchy. Hooray. Still more exotic wound-related news: you know how giant squids leave sucker marks on whales while they're struggling not to be eaten? Well, I try to be pretty careful and stay away from the suckers, but one of the squid got me pretty good the other night, so I have a lovely double row of sucker ring marks on my left wrist. Maybe I should take a picture before it fades.

Bother the squid, all kinds of other excitement has been going on.

Yesterday we crossed the Equator, which I guess I've technically done quite a few times before while flying to the Southern Hemisphere, but it's a very different thing on a boat. The ship has already crossed once on the prior leg of the cruise, and the crossing was apparently accompanied by a grand hazing ceremony for all the "Pollywogs" (people who've never crossed on a boat before). However, that ceremony wore everyone out, so yesterday's crossing was accompanied by little more than a few cheers and the inevitable jokes over the radio. ("Flying bridge, this is the fantail. Can you see the dotted line yet?")

On to the charismatic marine mammals. When a lot of animals are sighted and sea conditions are good, the small boat (a Zodiac, for anyone who's familiar with these things) is launched to chase the creatures down. And yesterday, I got to be a member of the scientific party on the boat! There were four of us--all women--and a crew member who was driving the boat. Of the other three scientists, two were armed with crossbows and one with a camera.

We had launched in pursuit of pilot whales but ended up surrounded by what one of the crossbow-wielders refers to as "white rats"--Tursiops, bottlenose dolphins. Of course I was staring around me in utter delight, trying to keep my jaw out of the water. I was mere feet away from dolphins, wild dolphins, in the middle of the ocean! They are fast and sleek and beautiful, but these words are meaningless compared to the sheer cruising, twisting, jumping glory that is a dolphin.

What we really wanted for scientific purposes was pilot whales. But since they seemed a lot more boat-shy than the dolphins, we gave up and starting shooting the dolphins. I managed to make myself very useful--I'd be handed a used dart, then I'd unscrew the tip with the sample in it, put it in a bag, label the bag, put that on ice, screw a new tip on the dart, and hand it back to the archers.

After nearly an hour of this (though I hardly noticed the time pass) we finally spotted a group of pilot whales, headed right towards us, swimming in tight formation. They are small, dark whales, often called blackfish, and they are no less beautiful than the dolphins. We managed to get one sample, then headed back to the ship.

October 24, 2006

Today we got a bit of unexpected excitement: we found a couple of turtles entangled in fishing line, and were able to send out a party in the small boat to cut them free. They'd sustained some damage but hadn't accumulated a lot of barnacles, so they probably weren't there very long. We expect they'll do fine, as turtles are pretty sturdy; one of them was missing a flipper from a much earlier encounter, perhaps with a boat or a shark, and seemed to be managing all right.

October 28, 2006

I saw my first sperm whale yesterday evening. Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are huge, majestic, mysterious, fascinating, and many other adjectives as well. One of those adjectives is frustrating. They're boring to listen to on the acoustic array (click-click-click-click in painfully regular intervals), and disinclined to cooperate with photography or biopsy attempts. Worst of all, the sperm whale protocol calls for ninety minutes of effort by all marine mammal observers for each sighting. That means, when a sperm whale is first sighted, the call goes out: "All observers to the flying bridge" and the observers currently off-duty have to drop whatever they're doing and spend an hour and a half looking for that sperm whale. As I understand it, this protocol has been developed because sperm whales can dive for such a long time. Somebody has calculated that ninety minutes is the optimum amount of effort as far as likelihood of re-sighting, or something like that, anyway.

Last night's sperm whale sighting was cut mercifully short by the sunset. But before that happened, I borrowed some binoculars and get a pretty good look at the beast--well, at his back, anyway. He wasn't exactly jumping and frolicking the way the dolphins do. Sperm whales tend to have a lot of scars, many of them inflicted by giant squid as they're being made into a meal. I would have loved to see a really clear sucker ring scar, but no such luck.

Still, it was a thrill to see the Leviathan, in person.

After evening oceanographic operations and another no-luck squid night, I went out to the bow of the ship with the oceanographer and one of the engineers. We left the glaring, artificial lights behind, and my pupils expanded and expanded, drinking in starlight and moonlight until the shapes of my companions were nearly as clear as they would be in daylight.

The stars were bright, abundant, breathtaking. The moon was remarkable, a perfectly horizontal crescent that looked so convincingly like the grin of the Cheshire Cat that we kept expecting the rest of the animal to pop out of the clouds. We watched it sink towards the horizon, turning from white to yellow to orange, and found that a moonset can be quite as striking as a sunset.

Around midnight, as we headed back in, we stopped to lean over the side and admire the bioluminescence. The waves were breaking off the bow with explosions of light, bright enough to illuminate your face. When I looked ahead, I could see similar explosions, anticipating our arrival. I went to bed filled with awe and wonder.

I think this cruise is the first time I've experience a perfect, unbroken, 360-degree horizon. Not the slightest hint of land breaks the smooth circle around us. It makes the night sky spectacular and rainbows, well-nigh miraculous. One morning, earlier in the cruise, I went up to the flying bridge just an hour or two after sunrise. We were headed into one of those tropical squalls so common in these latitudes. In front of the ship was spread the ideal rainbow, arching perfectly from horizon to horizon, and to one side was a gorgeous sundog, a triangle of color under the clouds.

It quite took my breath away.

October 30, 2006

Well, at just about nine and a half degree north, we’ve kissed the ITCZ good-bye. It can be seen as a dark gray smear across the horizon behind us--so dark, in fact, it looks almost like land. Last night it was pouring rain (tropical rain, the kind with raindrops so big that just one will soak you) and this morning there are blue skies and sunshine ahead of us.

November 4, 2006/

After 30 days at sea, being on land again is sensory overload--leading me to realize that living on the boat must have been some form of mild sensory deprivation. I woke up early yesterday; it was still dark outside. The first thing I noticed was the smell. It was different, fuller, somehow, where the scent of the high seas had been pure, scarce, empty. The smell of land in the air was the smell of things growing and decomposing, living and dying in abundance.

The second thing I noticed was a light on the horizon. A light. Out there. It was a shock and a pleasure I can't describe to see something other than vast space.

As the sky lightened, pre-dawn, I saw the origin of the lights. Land. Mountains. Shapes and colors I hadn't seen for thirty days filled my vision. It was glorious, glorious! I was ready to get down on my knees and kiss it, or fling my arms wide and go running all over God's green earth.

But there were still many hours to wait; coming in to port and clearing customs is a slow business. I had a busy morning, packing up my samples, scientific gear, and personal gear. But I made a point of going outside often to appreciate the steadily growing number of available sensations.

Manzanillo is a tropical port, so we passed islands of lush green and smelled all the hot, humid, fruity smells associated with such a clime. I saw people on the beach, and wondered who they were. When I realized I didn't recognize them--they were strangers--I was delighted. I had been seeing the same people for so long that unknown faces were inordinately interesting.

November 5, 2006

I truly believe that in the last seventeen years, I have never seen my cat as happy as she was when I walked in the door and started petting her.

Hijinks on the High Seas, part I

I spent October on this boat, as a visiting scientist for leg 3 of this cruise. The weekly reports make pleasant reading, if you're in to that sort of thing. Progress in each of the cruise's main science pursuits (marine mammal sighting, biopsies, and photography; birding; oceanography; acoustics; dip netting and catching fish) is summarized in the reports by the scientists in charge of each task.

However, if you're interested in a less professional perspective, you can read these excerpts from the journal of a marine biologist who was till recently almost wholly ignorant of marine mammal biology.

October 9, 2006

I just saw three blue whales! They were spotted a long way off, but we chased them until they were right at our bow, and we could look down from the flying bridge at the very top of the ship and see their long, long bodies just under the surface. We could also see three scientists perched at the bow of the boat, two holding crossbows and one, a rifle.

Bizarre, yes. The weaponry is for biopsies. They shoot small darts that nick a little bit of tissue from the animal's hide. The dart doesn't get attached to the animal; it gets reeled back in to the boat, or, if the line snaps (which seems to happen more often than not) we swing around and pick it up with a dip net over the side.

This afternoon, the girl with the rifle (who's one of my roommates) got off a good shot, so we have a sample from one of the three whales. They'll take it back to the lab and analyze its genetics to learn about the population structure of these magnificent beasts.

October 11, 2006

The 9th was an extraordinary day for sightings! I've not had time to write about it until now, but the evening net tows provided a really exceptional animal that I've never seen alive before: a paper nautilus, genus Argonauta. Strange as cephalopods are, argonauts would definitely be in the running if there were a contest for the strangest. The females are quite small--this specimen was thumb-sized--and the males are an order of magnitude smaller than that. Much of the male's mass is one enormously enlarged arm that is used for sperm transfer; it actually detaches from him at the time of mating and swims into the female's body cavity. When these arms were first discovered, they were thought to be parasitic worms.

Not to be outdone as far as strange reproductive habits go, the female uses two modified arms to secrete a shell, in which she lives and broods her eggs, once they are laid. The shells look superficially similar to those of the nautilus in structure, but argonaut shells are much thinner and more delicate. While the nautilus is permanently attached to its shell (it would be difficult to say if the animal is part of the shell or the shell is part of the animal), the argonaut can crawl freely in and out. Ours did this, once we took her out of the cod end of the net tow and put her in a little dish, and I caught it on film. She was beautiful, fragile, perfect.

After the initial discovery, filming, and photography, my net tow companions left me to my evening's work: sorting the plankton tow for squid paralarvae, then processing the squid that were jigged earlier in the evening. Usually the only people I see for the rest of the night are the crew members on duty, who walk regular rounds of the ship to check for fires, drownings, what have you. On this night, word of the argonaut had been passed around, and every crew member who walked through the lab wanted to see it. It was fun to have something to show off.

After sorting the plankton tow and extracting any squid that I find, I freeze the rest; it goes to another researcher somewhere. Then I trot outside and down to the lower deck where I finish with any squid that were caught earlier in the evening. It's a much more exciting venue for dissection that I was used to on the New Horizon. Back on that June cruise, the ship was stopped, the sea was calm, the lights were on, and there were plenty of other people around. But out here everyone else is in bed, the lights have been turned off, and the ship is hurrying along through the whitecaps. On a cloudy night, which is what we've been having, there's no way to tell the sea from the sky. As I stare out I can see only white foam rising and falling at the side of the ship, and beyond that, blackness.

At that point I usually give the obligatory late-night shiver and turn back to the squid on my dissection table (long since killed, quickly and humanely). I remove the stomachs, to study what they are eating and where they fit into the local ecology, and pieces of tissue for genetics, to find out how closely related they are to the squid in Mexico and California. On the night of the 9th, I also removed the gonads of a mature male and female squid and artificially fertilized some eggs so that I can study development and behavior of baby squid.

October 12, 2006

We had an orca sighting yesterday. While I was sitting in the lounge catching a few minutes of Harry Potter, the announcement was heard: "We have killer whales right off the bow, very active, breaching!" So of course we all raced outside, and of course by then there was nothing to see.

But we waited, breathing the fresh air and watching the last colors of the sunset fade from the sky, and then there they were, off to port. They were beautiful! I didn't see any full breaches but I saw a lot of them above the water, and I saw at least one tall, narrow fin of a male orca. Our chief scientist tried a long shot with a crossbow, and didn't get a successful biopsy, but as he very correctly pointed out, "You can’t get a sample if you don't shoot."

(to be continued)