Tide Bites

Tide Bites: Hydrogen Sulfide: Bad actor behind seagrass decline?

Zostera marina, commonly known as “eelgrass,” is a submerged flowering plant that grows in many estuarine and coastal regions of the Northern Hemisphere and forms extensive meadows which in turn increase productivity and biodiversity. Eelgrass is…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Soren Huber, Fredrick Dooley, and Sandy Wyllie-Echeverria

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Tide Bites: Exposure History Determines the Response of the Orange Cup Coral (Balanophyllia elegans) to Ocean Acidification

Humans are drastically changing the planet by burning fossil fuels that release CO2 into the atmosphere, which comes into equilibrium with the ocean and lowers the pH — this phenomenon is known as ocean acidification. As…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Joanna Griffiths

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Tide Bites: What Happens to San Juan Sea Urchins in the Absence of Predatory Sea Stars?

- Investigating the Relationships Between Baby Green Urchins, Coralline Algae, and Crabs Sea urchins (Figure 1) are an important component of nearshore marine food webs. As grazers, they prevent seaweeds from becoming overabundant. They provide an…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by Dara Yiu

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Tide Bites: Providing undergraduate students with the thrill of discovery: FHL Blinks/NSF REU/BEACON Summer Internships

The young students finished their talks in the FHL Commons, and the room cheered. Another successful conclusion of the FHL Blinks/NSF REU/BEACON Summer Internships, ending with polished presentations of their mentored research experiences. Tomorrow the students…

Published in Tide Bites
Written by UW Friday Harbor Laboratories staff

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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…

Published in Tide Bites
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…

Published in Tide Bites
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…

Published in Tide Bites
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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