Monthly Archive for July, 2008

What the Shell #6: Mangrove Periwinkles

Published
by
Jason
on July 31, 2008
in What The Shell?
. 2 Comments
Close up of a small, brown tree snail [180x240, 24K]
Mangrove periwinkle (Littoraria angulifera)

I try to take a walk during lunch whenever possible. Sometimes it is just too dang hot, but today it was pleasant enough to make it down to the boardwalk. I came through at high tide and could not help but notice all the snails bunched up around the prop roots of the red mangroves. These were the coffee bean snails (Melampus sp.), and just as you might expect from the name, they are small, brown gastropods about the size of a bean. I watched what looked like a stone crab scuttle up one of the roots and dislodge a number of the snails. Then he dropped back down, presumably to be feast on the jetsam.

Higher up on one of the branches, almost at eye-level, was a mangrove periwinkle (Littoraria angulifera). I brought my iPhone with me and managed to get this marginal picture of it. I have a technique for getting macro shots with the crummy 2 megapixel camera which I will share with you in the near future.

I also learned today about the Life Photo meme via the Other 95% blog. Every Thursday the folks at Life Photo ask that one “post a photo of something that either lives, or is a product of life.” Eric Heupel contributed a post on the hard little crustaceans called ostracods (seed shrimp). I thought I would try this meme too and share my periwinkle picture from this afternoon.
 

A Shark’s Guide to Idiots

Published
by
Jason
on July 30, 2008
in Life Oddquatic
. 1 Comment
Close-up, underwater shot of an Epaulette Shark resting on the bottom, its barbels and brown markings clearly visible [240x180, 17K]

Flickr photo: Epaulette Shark by richard ling
Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Recent research suggests that when faced with suffocation, epaulette sharks are able to “turn off” electrical impulses to the eye and other parts of their nervous system to conserve energy.

The Life Oddquatic

There are a lot of weird things in the ocean. The Life Oddquatic is a feature about some of them. This week’s topic also satisfies my compulsory contribution to Shark Week.

A Monument to Their Ego and Ignorance

There is a short piece in the New Yorker about a psychiatrist and his second-story shark tank. The story brought back memories of many things I hated about working in a fish store. As a friend pointed out, many men who get a shark tank think they are getting it for the fish, but what they end up with is usually a monument to their ego and ignorance. Some choice excerpts from the article confirm my bias.

  • » The pet shark may be the new pit bull—the mascot of the outsized ego, the Hummer of the living room.
  • » The fish, a blacktip reef shark, was caught in Indonesia six months ago and supplied to Saul by his longtime fish guy (“I found him through my stereo-system guy”).
  • » The shrimp were for three eels, hidden among rocks on the tank’s floor. “Do you see where the eel has a scar?” Lynn asked. “The shark is biting it.”
  • » It’s going to be awesome when we get another two sharks in there

Based on these details, I have serious doubts about the future of these animals. When I worked in a fish store we would not sell requiem sharks (Family Carcharhinidae). I wish I could say it was a decision motivated by conscience instead of economics. But the fact of the matter is, requiems like the blacktip reef shark rarely do well in a store or in a hobby home. They require hundreds of gallons of swimming space, eat expensive food (or expensive tank mates) and are especially skittish, slamming themselves to death against tank walls when spooked.

Today, if someone insists on keeping a shark, I insist that they first read Aquarium Sharks and Rays by Michael W. Scott. Scott does a pretty thorough job of describing which species do better in captivity, recommending the bamboo and epaulette sharks (Family Hemiscylliidae) as the more suitable. But the Hemiscylliids are not your classic looking shark. They are elongated, almost serpetine, resting on the bottom and “walking” around on the sea floor. They are also comparatively small (107 cm or 3’ 6”) and their natural habitat is the confined crannies of tidepools and coral reefs. A knowledgeable hobbyist would recognize that these characteristics of a Hemiscylliids are better for acclimating to a life in captivity than the free-swimming, streamlined lifestyle of a Carcharhinid.

Another recent and amazing adaptation detailed on the Discovery Channel’s Web site is the ability of some Hemiscylliids to “turn off the electricity” to avoid suffocation. Since these animals live in shallow waters, they often encounter hypoxic conditions (low oxygen levels). Researchers determined that under these conditions, the sharks turn off electrical activity to their eyes, effectively going blind. It is probable that the sharks also shut down other parts of their central nervous system as well.

Despite all of these remarkable adaptations of the Hemiscylliid, I would still counsel against owning a shark as a pet. Perhaps the carelessness and callousness that I witnessed in my fish store daze has jaded me. But I’d rather see these creatures in the sea than on the streets of the Greenwich Village.

More Shark Week in the Blogosphere

Toonsday: Super Happy Funtopus

Published
by
Jason
on July 29, 2008
in Pucker and Bloat
. 0 Comments
[400x400, 24K]
Super Happy Funtopus


I came across a short Illustrator tutorial at Vectortuts.com that shows the steps for making a Super Happy Octopus Character. Some of the steps were missing, but it was a fun tutorial and I finally learned how to make one of those ubiquitous starburst effects. Expect me to abuse that technique liberally in the future. :D

The original vector file I made is more vivid than the the image reproduced here. I still need to figure out why the gamma changes when moving from Illustrator to Photoshop to the Web. I expect there are difference between Mac and PC displays too.

Pucker and Bloat

This marks the return of my Pucker and Bloat feature where I will share some of my Illustrator and Photoshop doodlings. The feature derives its name from one of the distortion filters in these programs. Pucker and Bloat are also the names of two sea creatures appearing in a Web comic I am starting.

Unfortunately, the external hard drive that housed my original art work for those characters decided to die. :( I don’t mind recreating them, but having those files would have made it easier to turn out some new panels sooner.
 

The Bioluminescent Fungal Infection of My Life

Published
by
Jason
on July 28, 2008
in Under the Bridge
. 0 Comments
Unknown species of red-capped mushroom [240x180, 24K]
Unknown species of red-capped mushroom, Mountain City, GA.

I thought I would be headed home today, but instead we ended up with an unexpected extra day in the mountains. It gave us an opportunity to finally visit the Foxfire Museum.

Starting in the late 1960s, students in this rural Southern Appalachian area produced a magazine containing interviews with the elders of their community. The stories ranged from country herbals, to ghost stories and legends, to what life was like growing up in a pioneer era. The magazine was a pioneering effort itself and has grown over the years into its own franchise of sorts, including the museum.

I’d forgotten how deep the hyphae* of the Foxfire had penetrated into the substratum of my own life. As a kid, my parents regularly took us on camping trips to this area and for as long as I can remember, we had all the books sitting on the shelves of our modest Florida home. But it is interesting returning to this place and seeing its fruit with more mature eyes. As an educator, I am especially interested in the “Foxfire method of classroom instruction.”

“Foxfire” is a method of classroom instruction—not a step-by-step checklist, but an over-arching approach that incorporates the original Foxfire classroom’s building blocks of giving students the opportunity to make decisions about how they learn required material, using the community around them as a resource to aid that learning, and giving the students an audience beyond the teacher and the classroom for their work.

A more thorough introduction is available in this brochure (PDF). But I wonder if this approach would lend itself to some of the new media methods of content creation that interest me, especially student-created podcasts and blogs. Expect to see more on my explorations into that topic here in the future. Sadly, I missed the teacher courses for this year, but I hope next year will be a possibility.

*From the Web site: “The term ‘foxfire’ is a name commonly applied to several species of bioluminescent fungi that grow on rotting wood in damp forests.”
 

Three Steps Forward

Published
by
Jason
on July 27, 2008
in Meta
. 1 Comment

I’ve been taking short day hikes along a leg of the Appalachian Trail this weekend. I hope to share some photos and videos of my salamander and crayfish hunts soon. But there are other buggers I’ve been dealing with in the evenings, and most of them live underneath this old blog.

Climbing K2

In the past I’ve used one of the default templates that comes with every Wordpress install called Kubrick. Despite the lure of fancier templates, the clean lines and spartan markup of Kubrick have kept me from wandering. But lately some of the theme’s limitations were beginning to chafe. So I was happy to come across a suitable replacement that adds a lot of razzmatazz without altering the overall look and feel. It is called K2, and no surprise, it has its origins in the same place as Kubrick.

Please feel free to kick the tires of this new template and let me know if anything breaks or looks off. I still have some work to do under the dashboard, but I am ever so much happier with the way it is turning out.

Tags vs. Categories in Wordpress

Another nagging details that has bothered me is the proliferation of categories and tags in my blog. Tags are a recent option in Wordpress and I am afraid my whole blog taxonomy has gotten messy. Fortunately, I came across this post over at Lorelle on Wordpress and it cleared the difference up for me instantly:

A category is a table of contents for your blog posts, segregating your posts with grouped like-content.

A tag is an index word that helps you micro-categorize your blog posts.

I just published the 300th post and am not relishing the idea of going back to sort this matter out. But I’ve got one more day of vacation and the OCD in me really does enjoy making things tidy.

Other than that, most of the work is done and now I hope to get back to my goal of focused features. As a teaser, here’s a delightful photo of my family’s dog making a funny face. He seems to be wildly pleased with the 12 ft burrow he dug into the mountain side.

Dog laying before its burrow [300x225, 24K]
 

Two steps back

Published
by
Jason
on July 26, 2008
in Meta
. 1 Comment

I made the mistake of upgrading the Cephaloblog this afternoon. It usually goes well, but I hit a little bump along the way while working with one of the sidebar widgets. I expect to get it sorted out tomorrow, but it got me thinking about the whole foundation this site is built upon.

I wonder at folks who use Blogger, Wordpress and other services to host their blogs. On the one hand it is free (or nearly so), but on the other hand they are entrusting all of their content to a another party. If those services die, or are compromised, then what happens to their content? It was enough of a concern that I decided early on to host my own blogging platform. There haven’t been too many glitches in the past. But this latest one made me realize that I am not much better off than the folks who don’t host their own. I don’t have a deep and daily understanding of the PHP code that underpins this blog. I can’t make it sing.

At our NMEA presentation, Rick repeated the notion that blogging is software. It is not the content, it is the medium that delivers the message. How we blog is not the same as what we blog.

So I got to a point where I am thinking about starting over. Maybe take this site two steps back before taking another step forward. I’ll still be here. But the floor I am standing on might be a different color.

Updating Cephaloblog

Published
by
Jason
on July 26, 2008
in Meta
. 0 Comments

cephalostandby.gif

Another round of Cephaloblog maintenance today. Please pardon our sediment.

Live-ish, from my iPhone

Published
by
Jason
on July 25, 2008
in Meta
. 0 Comments

This is a test. This is only a test. This is a test of the new mobile blogging Wordpress app for the iPhone. Had this been an actual post it would have been followed by more interesting information, news or conversation.

I would also like to note that this is the 300th post to the Cephaloblog. Please consider celebrating by hugging someone you love.

Managed Blogs for Teachers and Students

Published
by
Jason
on July 25, 2008
in Under the Bridge
. 0 Comments

After our Ocean Blogging session at NMEA, a couple of folks asked about solutions that would work for teachers, students or for closed teams. What I recommended verbally has coincidentally just been written up nicely by Wesley Fryer. It is an extensive post that introduces the options for hosting your own blog or using a service like Wordpress or Blogger.

Sciday: Ocean Blogging…from Underwater?!

Published
by
Jason
on July 25, 2008
in Sciday
. 2 Comments

[via Engadget]

Welcome to the first installment of what I hope to make a weekly feature: Scidays. Inspired by Ira Flato (among others), I’ve decided to devote a post at the end of the week to science and technology news.

Underwater Blogging

I told my wife that someday I will be able to blog while underwater. She replied that I was already all wet. But the day of my dream might ever be so nearer with the xTablet T8700 from Mobile Demand.

The T8700 is actually billed as water-proof and not really for use at depth. But it is a nice counter-example of something I’ll be writing a bit more about tomorrow, which is the fragility of electronic devices as a barrier to their wider use in environmental education.

Also, if you know of devices that are rated for scuba and that could really be used for underwater blogging, let me know.

Under the Bridge

Published
by
Jason
on July 24, 2008
in Under the Bridge
. 0 Comments
Picture of Talmadge Memorial Bridge [240x180, 24K]
Talmadge Memorial Bridge, Savannah, GA

I spent the last week in Savannah, GA, attending the 2008 National Marine Educators Association conference. In addition to doing a presentation for work, I also co-presented a session on ocean blogging with Rick MacPherson. It was a well-attended event, and I want to thank all the participants and Rick for making it a success.

I hope to post the audio and images from the presentation later this week when I get into an area with better bandwidth. We structured the presentation around the interrogatives. We both spoke about what is ocean blogging. Then Rick covered the who and why while I talked about the how, when and where. Regarding the latter, I noted that one place where you won’t find much information on ocean blogging is NMEA’s own ocean portal site, The Bridge.

The Bridge is a growing collection of the best marine education resources available on-line. It provides educators with a convenient source of accurate and useful information on global, national, and regional marine science topics, and gives researchers a contact point for educational outreach.

The Bridge is billed as: “An ocean of free teacher-approved marine education resources.” Given the protean nature of blogs, I understand why they might largely be absent from the site’s attention. But in the future I hope there will be a way of vetting blogs and other social networking sites for inclusion on some level.

Trolling Under the Bridge

Sites are added to The Bridge by moderators called TROLLS. This stands for Teacher Reviewer of On-Line Learning. It’s an odd acronym, and I suspect the folks at NMEA were thinking more about the piscatorial sense of the word than the more recent, negative connotation that has gained currency on the Internet. There is also the third meaning of the word, the legendary creatures that live under bridges and prevent passage of unsuspecting travelers. Again, usually a negative connotation, but I could see how it works.

So the other day I was looking for a catchy name for my Thursday feature, the one that covers the confluences of science education, environmental education and education technology. I’ve decided for now to call this section, Under the Bridge. It’s a cheeky reference to NMEA’s Web site. I hope to cover resources that might not otherwise make the cut on the official site*. It is also an incredibly oblique homage to another group of educators I work with, the ones at Worldbridges. They are an informal group that regularly webcast about many issues, especially those related to education technology. And they too have a habit of referring to their collective efforts as -bridges.

*I am a member of NMEA but not directly involved in The Bridge. This feature is my own effort and not affiliated with NMEA’s awesome outreach program.

Naval Gazing

Published
by
Jason
on July 23, 2008
in Blog and Meta
. 5 Comments

Maybe you noticed I’ve been gone. Or judging from the empty inbox, maybe not. I’ve been doing a little sole searching (fish pun intended), figuring out the future of this Web site. And I realized that it is something I want to stick with and I hope you will rejoin me on the journey. Or at least wait until we are far enough away from the dock that it’s too late to swim back (or scream).

100 days of 100 words

Today I am embarking on something that is ambitious for me. I call it 100 days of 100 words. The idea is to write at least a 100-word post once a day, every day, for 100 days*. That’s not a lot of letters, but even eking out that much can be difficult for someone who is more introverted than a peanut worm.

Also, I previously felt like I was merely regurgitating ocean news that is better covered by folks with deeper knowledge. So instead I want to focus more on original content that is better suited to my talents and depth rating. To that end, I’ve created a publishing pattern to guide me. I just hope it won’t seem like spaghetti dinners ever Sunday.

Sunday: Book Snook
There are a lot of adult and children’s science books out there that I have an over developed opinion about and I will be sharing it with you on Sundays. I am also interested in discovering new works, so if you have titles to recommend, let me know. Better yet, if you have review copies available, please consider sending me one. After reviewing them, I will generally donate keepers to the science library at work, so it’s a good thing all around.

Monday: What the Shell?
Photos and notes from the littoral zones of Florida (and beyond). I hope to be combing the wrack lines on weekends, keeping a weather eye out for unfamiliar flotsam and then sharing my discoveries with you on Mondays.

Tuesday: Toonsday
Tuesdays will see a return of my nascent Web comic about an optimistic octopus and a curmudgeonly sea cucumber. They are my little oddquatic couple called Pucker and Bloat. I will also be using this day to share other doodles I make while working with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Wednesdays: The Life Oddquatic
I used to work in a local fish store. There are stories I could tell you about those days. And I will, each Wednesday. There are also a lot of weird creatures beneath the waves. They may make an appearance in this section too.

Thursdays: [Insert Catchy Name]
By day I wade knee deep in the confluences of science education, environmental education and education technology. On Thursdays you can watch as I get in over my head in these murky waters. I still need a catchy title for this feature. Suggestions?

Fridays: TGI Scidays
Ira Flato does a nice job of ending each week with science and he’s made it something of a meme. I can’t resist his public radio charm, so I will be contributing my own thoughts about topical science on this day.

Saturdays: All Wild Right Outside
Every day is Earth Day, but I will be sharing my environmental stories mostly on Saturdays. I completed a Florida Master Naturalist course last year, so these features will naturally have a Florida focus.

Putting the Podcast Back in Cephalopodcast.com

I need to make some changes to the frequency of the podcasts too. My goal is to release a new episode every 8th, 16th and 24th of each month. Get it? They are on days divisible by eight; octopus have eight arms. Hope that mnemonic isn’t too obtuse. But you can just subscribe to the podcast feed and let iTunes figure it out. My hope is that it will be frequent enough to capture a wider audience’s attention but long enough between shows to keep my sanity and not blow my monthly bandwidth.

Tune of Fish
I like to close each episode of the podcasts with some ocean-inspired music. I am calling this segment the Tune of Fish and I need your help. If you know of any podsafe music that is at all aquatic, please let me know. I’d prefer lyrics that are PG, but am not necessarily looking for children’s music. I might devote an entire future show to kids’ song if there is interest, but in general I am looking for tunes with the broadest appeal. Tanks!

Cephalovlog
And if that above is not enough to get me in deep, I hope to get out a new episode of the Cephalovlog (video podcast) once a month.

*A little disclaimer here: I am going to try writing every day, but may be prevented from posting if the technology fails me. That’s my excuse and I am sticking with it.

Happy Birthday Snooty, World’s Oldest Known Manatee

Published
by
Jason
on July 20, 2008
in All Wild Right Outside and Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Snooty the manatee turns 60 this weekend. Born in captivity in 1948, he is thought to be one of the oldest known West Indian Manatees in the world. He lives just up the street from me, in the 60,000 gallon South Florida Museum Parker Manatee Aquarium.

Manatees and their relatives, the dugongs, are in the family Sirenia, which in turn is a distant relative of the elephants. In addition to sharing the characteristic of longevity, manatees and elephants are some of the largest and heaviest vertebrates. Snooty weighs in at nearly 1300 pounds and is over 9 feet long.

To celebrate, keepers gave Snooty a treat of pineapples and strawberries.

NMEA 2008, Savannah, GA

Published
by
Jason
on July 20, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Welcome back to the cephaloblog. This week I’ll be restarting this thing with a trip to the National Marine Educators Association annual conference in Savannah, GA. There I will be giving a presentation on ocean blogging with Rick MacPherson from Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Live and Sunsets. More details to follow.