Catching up!

It has been a stretch since the last blog because this last week was the end up our first section: Invertebrates. Mostly, this week was a lot of preparation for our first exam and our lab practical. But between all of the Latin and take-out food we did manage to still see a few cool things!

On Monday we attended a guest lecture by researcher, Sylvia Yamada. Sylvia took us all out to Yaquina Bay where we collected the crab traps for her current research on the European Green Crab, an invasive species that starting to show up in Pacific Northwest estuaries. This first picture is one of the other crabs that was in the pot. It is difficult to see the anatomy in this picture, but I think it is a Red Rock Crab, Cancer productus.

This is Sylvia with a male crab from the trap. You can tell which crabs are male and which are female by the shape of the plate between the legs. Long and thin is a male, squat and triangle shaped is a female. Unfortunately, (or fortunately I guess) we only got two European Green Crabs because of the storm we had over the weekend!

On Wednesday night we had our Invertebrate and Dessert Extravaganza. Everyone had to do a presentation on a certain invertebrate, the more entertaining the better. My group did a "build your own nudibranch workshop". The photo below is my roommate Kristen with one of the edible "nudis".


The other skits were fantastic too. Mike wrote a song about sea urchin to the Tenecious D tune "Kickapoo" and played it on his guitar. Dan and Robbie dressed up as a sea anemone and a zooxanthelle. Lotti and Skylar performed "Eat It", their version of Michael Jackson's "Beat It", about the feeding behavior of the sunflower seastar.

After all of our study sessions the exams felt like they went pretty well, but we don't have the results yet. We finished the week with a crab bake hosted by our professor, Sally.

I hope you all enjoyed this week's blog! Tune in next week for our new topic: Phycology!