Natural History Journal

More commonly known as "starfish," sea stars truly are shining stars of the tidepool.  Last week while exploring one of my favorite places, the coast and tidepools around Point Pinos, I was delighted to come across a couple dozen bat stars of all colors and sizes.   Though I still slip up and refer to these beautiful creatures as "starfish" on occasion, sea stars are not fish at all.  Having neither fins, scales, gills, or even blood, sea stars are echinoderms (members of the phylum Echinodermata), related to sand dollars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Residents of kelp forests and the rocky intertidal zone, bat stars are found from Sitka Alaska to Baja California, from tidepools to depths of 950 feet. Though sea stars appear quite sessile, or fixed to one spot, they are actually quite mobile, moving along the sea floor and tidepool substrates on hundreds of tiny little suction cup-tipped tube feet.  (Check out the photo below for a look at the underside of a bat s...

Easily the coolest mollusk I have ever seen, the jeweled top snail ( Calliostoma annulatum ) is aptly-named, with its spiraled shell of iridescent orange and purple.  Contrasting with dark sea weeds and black turban snails, it almost doesn't even look real!  I found this guy while exploring the tide pools around Point Pinos the other day, and was blown away by its amazing colors.  Photos don't really do justice to this amazing animal. Jeweled top snails live in kelp forests from southeastern Alaska to Baja California.  Their preferred niche is in the middle of the forest, mid-stipe ("stipe" is marine biology-speak for what basically amounts to a seaweed stem), while related species prefer either higher or lower parts of the forest.  According to Monterey Bay Aquarium, each species knows its niche, and will climb back to its precise level in the forest after being knocked off. Like other marine snails, jeweled top snails graze on algae, hydroids and bryozoans....

There are a lot of reasons to love California, particularly as a naturalist. The world's six major biomes, represented in California: Top row: Forest (Redwood State Park); Freshwater (Sword Lake); Desert (Joshua Tree National Park) Bottom row: Marine (Monterey Bay); Grassland (Stanislaus County prairie); Alpine tundra (Yosemite high country) California is a land of extremes, from submarine canyons to alpine peaks, from high heat and aridity to remarkable snow pack.  It boasts the tallest trees, the most massive trees, and the oldest [non-clonal] trees.  Within its borders, one can stand on the tallest point in the conterminous United States (Mount Whitney, 14,500 feet above sea level) as well as the lowest (Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level). In addition to the greatest difference in elevation, California also has the greatest range of latitude, the highest soil diversity, the largest range of average annual rainfall and the greatest range of average annua...

Throughout South Carolina's Low Country, winding tendrils of water wend their way through a sea of grass, rising and falling with each new tide.  Low-lying intertidal areas immediately inland from the coast, salt marshes and tidal creeks form the interface between upland forests and urban areas, and brackish estuaries where freshwater and saltwater mix.   Tidal creeks are, to a first-time visitor to the South Carolina coast like myself, absolutely beautiful, mysterious, enthralling places where silvery ribbons of water meander seemingly aimlessly through a vivid green matrix.  They give the impression that there is water everywhere , a foreign concept to someone from arid, drought-stricken Mediterranean California.  And that was my first impression of South Carolina: there was water everywhere I looked!  Water in the ocean, lakes, rivers, creeks and wetlands, water covering the ground, falling from the sky, in the air itself!   Is there any la...

Ah, the swamp.  A stinky, mucky, oozy, icky, bug-infested no-man's land, brimming with creepy crawlies and things you'd never want to run into at night.  A place no one wants to visit; a land without use or purpose.  Right? Wrong. Entirely wrong. (Except for the part about being bug-infested.  That part might be true.*) Eric and I recently returned home from visiting friends, family and a slew of historic sites in the Carolinas and Virginia.  We hiked in gloriously verdant forests, birded in exceedingly productive wetlands, swam in the balmy Atlantic, and toured a plethora of places brimming with history: two plantations, five Revolutionary War battlefields, four Civil War battlefields, two forts, and two historic Colonial settlements.  (Aside: I cannot recommend a visit to Colonial Williamsburg and Historic Jamestowne highly enough!!) Perhaps most significantly (for me), we experienced South Carolina's swamps. Swamps, like all other wetlands...