Tide Bites

Tide Bites: Fidalgo Bay Submerged: A landscape analysis perspective

Fidalgo Bay is a shallow emBayment in northwestern Skagit County, Washington. Spanning roughly 1,600 acres (6.4 km2) of sand and gravel beaches, mudflats and marshes, it is bordered by the infrastructures of the city of Anacortes,…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Soren Huber, Gary Greene, Sandy Wyllie-Echeverria, Olivia Graham, Todd Woodard, John Aschoff, and Norman Maher

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Tide Bites: Red rock crabs: the Dungeness' grouchy cousins

Native red rock crabs (Cancer productus) are important predators on protected rocky nearshore communities from Alaska to Baja California. While they are harvested recreationally, they have not been as well studied as their commercially-valuable cousin, the…

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Written by Sylvia Yamada and Scott Groth

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Tide Bites: Scanning All Fish!

Recently, FHL became home to the Karel F. Liem Bio-Imaging Center. The centerpiece of the shared research facility is a very capable micro-source CT scanner from Bruker, a model 1173. The scanner can image radio-dense tissue…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Adam Summers, with Kory Evans-Jackson and Malorie Hayes

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Tide Bites: Sketching Science in the San Juans

When you have a question about something you see in nature, a research scientist provides you with an answer in words. My explanation, on the other hand, comes in the form of an image. My name…

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Written by Andrea Dingeldein

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Tide Bites: An Intertidal Compass!

When you are trying to find your way home from a new place, you probably reach for your phone or GPS to ask for directions. Other animals don’t have the option of technology, but they do…

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Written by Julia Sigwart

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Tide Bites: Big fish, small pond: An atypical development strategy in a local fish species — no bones, all bulk!

Marine fishes usually start life with a larval phase, during which they are known as ichthyoplankton. Tiny and typically transparent, these animals experience an alien world and often bear little resemblance to their parents (Figure 1).…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Daniel Geldof

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Tide Bites: First European green crab in Washington’s Salish Sea

“Sylvia, I think we caught one!” Craig Staude shouted excitedly as he and his team of volunteers opened a baited trap in a tidal channel near the sculpture park at Roche Harbor on August 30th. Sure…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Sylvia Yamada and Craig Staude

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Tide Bites: Reading the minds of sea slugs

In 1964 Dennis Willows and his PhD advisor Graham Hoyle spent a summer at Friday Harbor Labs to work on the giant muscle fibers of barnacles. Hoyle, a well-known neurobiologist from the University of Oregon, had…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by William Frost, PhD

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Tide Bites: When the tide goes out, the table is set… for suspension feeders

The tides in the San Juan Islands are a remarkable feature of the landscape. Regularly reaching current speeds of 5 miles per hour, the twice-daily ebb and flood of water are an integral part of life…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Alex Lowe

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Tide Bites: Getting a Head with Regeneration

Invertebrates, or animals without a spine, are the masters of regeneration. Many animals are able to regrow missing or damaged body parts and some can even regrow an entirely new animal from just a small segment…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Shawn Luttrell

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Tide Bites: Avoiding High Temperatures at a Snail's Pace

Snails are the quintessential slow animals. They manage to move from place to place, but at a pace that is infamous. These animals don’t seem like ideal candidates for studying thermoregulation behavior. Thermoregulation studies traditionally involve…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Hilary Hayford, Ph.D.

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Tide Bites: FHL Researchers attend the Ascidiacea WoRMS Workshop, 15-17 February 2016 in Oostende, Belgium

As Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, said: “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.” (Linnaeus, 1751). Billie J. Swalla, Friday Harbor Labs Director, and Gretchen Lambert, a…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Gretchen Lambert and Billie J. Swalla

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Tide Bites: A re-fit for Research Vessel Centennial

Friday Harbor Labs' 58-foot research vessel was built in 1990 and worked several Alaskan fisheries until she was purchased by FHL in 2002, converted for research, and re-christened Centennial in celebration of FHL's 100th anniversary.

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Meegan Corcoran, FHL's new Marine Operations Manager

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Tide Bites: An Octopus’ Garden in the Urban Underwater Environment

In 1955, Columbia Pictures released the thriller It Came From Beneath The Sea, in which an enormous octopus begins terrorizing the good citizens of San Francisco (Figure 1). Though lacking in certain factual details (for instance,…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Eliza Heery

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