Category: Journal
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More field sampling in Sitka
The process of sampling all of our experimental tide pools in Sitka is slowly coming to an end for this trip. We carried out several rounds of water sampling for water chemistry during the daytime and nighttime, along with surveying diversity in the pools and prepping the pools for the future summer experiment. Taking water…
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Alaska in January
In collaboration with Cascade Sorte and Matt Bracken from UC Irvine, and Kristy Kroeker from UC Santa Cruz, we are currently up in Sitka Alaska carrying out seasonal sampling for our NSF-funded project “Collaborative Research: Effects of Multiple Aspects of Climate Change on Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning”. Much of the current trip’s work centers…
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Tidepool nutrient cycling manipulations
Summer number 1 of our collaborative research project with the Bracken and Martiny lab groups at UC Irvine is proceeding nicely. Our teams have been manipulating mobile grazers, such as limpets, littorine snails, chitons, and hermit crabs, in experimental tidepools in order to measure the growth responses of the photosynthetic algae in these pools (among…
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We’ve moved
As of August 2018, I relocated my lab, and everything else in my life, to San Diego. I have joined the San Diego State University Biology Department as an Assistant Professor. If you are a student interested in undergraduate, masters, or Ph.D. research opportunities in marine ecophysiology, biomechanics, and climate change impacts on rocky shore…
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Field work at Bodega Marine Lab
Last week was the kickoff a new project looking at diversity and productivity effects of nutrient and temperature alterations in high intertidal pools. This work is being done in collaboration with Matt Bracken’s Marine Biodiversity Lab group at UC Irvine. Pictured below are Dylan Projansky from SJSU, Matt Bracken (center), Genevieve Bernatchez (UCI), and Samuel…
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Conference live tweets revisited
Having just returned from the 100th Anniversary meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in Monterey, it seems like a fine time to generate some new summary data of trends in live-tweeting meetings. I originally addressed this some time last year in this original post: https://lukemiller.org/index.php/2016/01/is-live-tweeting-meetings-losing-steam-scicomm/. Since that time, there’s been new iterations of…
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Student poster presentation at WSN 2016
It was the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Western Society of Naturalists this year. While WSN was originally a society with fairly broad interests in the terrestrial and marine realms, in the last few decades it has very much become focused on marine habitats, with the occasional estuarine or terrestrial presentations popping up.…
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“Robomussels” in the New York Times
For several years, starting first at UC Santa Barbara around 1999/2000, and then in the mid 2000’s and early teens at Hopkins Marine Station, I would spend one or two low tides per year going out to the seashore and gluing fake plastic mussels into the middle of real mussel beds (as shown above). These…
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My work as a snail whisperer and professional killjoy
The New York Times online Science section published a short piece earlier this month by Joanna Klein about humming to periwinkles. Joanna contacted me for some background on this story, which has a simple premise: People who grew up in coastal New England know this trick: To coax a periwinkle snail out of its shell,…
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Tidal datums and shifting baselines
I recently dredged up an old poster on tide heights and tidal datums that several of us put together back in graduate school and presented at the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in either 2003 or 2004. This was a hot topic (for 5 or so people) at the time, since the national tidal datums…