Deep Dive
I had the privilege of doing a deep dive into two incredible collections at Scripps Institution of Oceanography while visiting California last week. The Marine Vertebrate Collection contains two million preserved fish specimens representing 5,600 species. The benthic invertebrates include 800,000 specimens and 7,600 species. These have been collected over decades from diverse marine habitats, including coral reefs, seamounts, hydrothermal vents, hydrocarbon seeps, the abyssal plain, and deep trenches. If you don’t mind dead creatures in glass jars, it’s awesome. The curators of both collections gave me time to wander through the… Read More
Otherworldly Stars
I’m back in the basement collection of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Benthic Invertebrate Collection this week. Not literally, alas, but channeling row upon row of jars filled with bottom-dwelling spineless creatures from the world’s oceans and drawing upon photos from my visit earlier this year. I’m not striving to bring these brittle stars and sea stars back to life on the page, but rather to highlight their beauty and understand their complexity. Even though they have been “living” in jars for fifty years or more, I like thinking about how they… Read More
King Tide
While visiting southern California last month we took time to explore the tide pools at Cabrillo National Monument. This is one of the best protected rocky intertidal areas in California and our timing was perfect. Sun, moon, and Earth aligned during our visit to create a King Tide, a twice-yearly occurrence in which the low tide is nearly two feet lower than normal. This exposes far more of the rocky shore and reveals a greater diversity of the fascinating creatures that live at the edge of the sea. Tips and Techniques– I… Read More
It’s Complicated
Consider the brittle star – a simple marine creature comprised of a central disk with five arms extending outward to gather bits of food. Now multiply each arm by two, and two again, and again, and again…and you have a magnificent basket star. I saw this one, Gorgoncephalus eucnemis, on my recent visit to Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Benthic Invertebrate Collection in La Jolla, California, and I was entranced. These creatures live in deeper ocean waters so, unless I take up scuba diving, I will never see one alive. I think it… Read More
Jean Mackay
The Nature Explorer’s Sketchbook
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Drawn In 