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latimes:
Kit foxes make themselves at home within Bakersfield city limits: San Joaquin kit foxes are small, cute, nocturnal, opportunistic and endangered. As many as 400 of them have burrowed beneath golf courses, subdivisions and classrooms — and into the hearts of many residents.
This photo gallery!!!
Photo: A San Joaquin kit fox — the species has been federally protected since 1967 — sizes things up before crossing a street in Bakersfield. As many as 400 of the foxes have burrowed beneath golf courses, subdivisions and classrooms — and into the hearts of many residents. Credit: Casey Christie / Bakersfield Californian
Another LA Times tumblr post here.
Hmm, CDFG’s Keep Me Wild campaign mentions “no human interaction” - seems like that might be difficult if they’re burrowing under school classrooms. They’re nocturnal though, so they’d be sleeping when the kids are around.
California Department of Fish & Game news release (Source: Los Angeles Times)
jtotheizzoe:
brooklynmutt:
Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know
Read: Smithsonian Magazine
A must-know list, but it needs more Grace Hopper (she was a firecracker).
Wouldn’t it be cool if we just celebrated them, like, all the time and didn’t wait for random commemorative days like today?
In my field, I would also add Rachel Carson, who started as a fisheries biologist, but is best known for Silent Spring, on the unintended consequences of pesticides. Reading Under the Sea Wind when I was in fourth grade was one of the things that made me decide in fifth grade that I wanted to be a marine biologist.
In addition, Frances N. Clark, who deserves much more documentation online than I can find. She was a biologist with the California Department of Fish & Game, having gotten her doctorate under Carl Hubbs. She started their fisheries library, and spearheaded most of the research on Pacific sardines, a staple of California history - if you’ve read Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, that’s what she was directly working with. She correctly predicted, beginning 15-20 years before the fact, that the sardine fishery, landing more than a million tons a year at the time, would eventually collapse, taking with it an industry and thousands of jobs. However, the powers-that-were at the time refused to listen to her, as there was a war on, soldiers to feed, and an economy to support. Sure enough, through the combination of overfishing, and what is now know as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, sardines almost completely disappeared from the West Coast. Through much careful management by the CDFG and NOAA Fisheries, they’ve recently returned enough to support a fishery, but in nowhere near the numbers they were when the fishery began. When Dr. Clark began her career, she was one of very few women in Marine Biology; at the time she spoke at the 1981 California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) conference - which she had helped found some thirty years before - she was gratified to see quite a number of women scientists in the audience, following in her footsteps. You can read her reminiscences of her work from 1914 to 1939 here.
The CDFG has an annual award named for her for excellence in Marine Science, to recognize outstanding work by their employees, and her name was in the running for NOAA Fisheries newest research vessel on the West Coast recently to replace the retired David Starr Jordan. Unfortunately, she lost out to Bell Shimada, another worthy ocean scientist.
The Gardening Damselfish
leytacle:
Stegastes nigricans
There’s actually fish that maintain their own gardens of algae. They do weeding, by pulling up indigestible algae and dropping outside of their garden patches. They also defend their gardens by fearlessly chasing off anything that comes near them, including giant human divers!
California’s state marine fish (bet you didn’t know we had one), the garibaldi (Hypsypops rubicundus) is a large damselfish, and it does this as well. It’s the male who grooms a lovely little patch of algae, entices a female to come and lay her eggs in it, then chases her off and tends them until they hatch. They are so territorial they are protected in California because they will not move from their patch, and threaten divers with thumping noises. Juvenile garibaldi are beautiful little fish, bright orange with electric blue spots and fin-edging.
Have some garibaldi…
IMG_1377 on Flickr.
Beach Evening Primrose (Camissonia cheiranthifolia)
This lovely California native spreads along the ground and grows in flat lacey patterns on sand dunes and beaches. It spreads about 3 feet wide. Its small regularly spaced gray-green leaves are enhanced by silky yellow flowers which brighten up the Sand Dunes trail in the spring and summer. - BolsaChicaLandTrust.org
From one of Angus and I’s walks at Bolsa Chica, back in October. The sun had already gone down and this flower was in the process of closing up for the the night.
bad-postcards:
WOOFY, THE WALRUS
MARINELAND OF THE PACIFIC
RANCHO PALOS VERDES - SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
WOOFY, THE WALRUS, arrived from Alaska with three other walrus babies in May, 1961. He was only two weeks old, but already he weighed 80 lbs. A diet of pure whipping cream, minced clams, brewer’s yeast and vitamins helped him and his playmates gain a pound a day for many months. He will eventually weigh at least 2,000 lbs.!
Woofy came to Marineland the year before I was born. I don’t know how long walruses live, but he may well have been there when we visited when I was little. I have fond memories of the the place - it always seem a lot less commercial than Sea World in San Diego. I think I mentioned Marineland before here, so I won’t go on about it, but I still miss it a lot.
IMG_1418 on Flickr. Via Flickr:
Garden eels @ AOP
IMG_1417 on Flickr. Garden eels, native to the Gulf of California (Baja) @ Aquarium of the Pacific.
IMG_1603 on Flickr. Vincent Thomas Bridge, San Pedro CA, on a foggy evening…
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