LastDayOfSabbatical

Last day of Sabbatical

So, just to catch you up. Two weeks ago we had a splendid “dock party” for Siwash. Here’s her cake made by the most wonderful bakers at Angel Maid in Culver City.

It was all very festive, and yet sad. We were at the dock that used to belong to my Mom and Dad, but that is now for sale. Everything is in flux. And yet somehow, all those present felt a palpable comfort in being able to gather and muse about this old boat that survives everyone.
Science is starting to ascend through all the bubbly stuff of life, as it reliably does. Unanswered questions on several fronts still titillate my students and me.

Here’s a cool one. Kind of a research update from the weeks we spent on Catalina Island last Fall.

Remember, if you will, that our hypothesis to explain the value of sensitization, the increase in defensive behaviors that we observe in sea hares following a lobster attack, is that this hypersensitivity helps protect the sea hare from future attack. By the way, we got the original research, showing sensitization after lobster attack, published in a cool, highly visible journal, the Journal of Neuroscience.

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/33/11028?etoc

To me, this paper was fairly straightforward. Entice lobsters to attack sea hares. Separate them before too much damage is done, and then test the sea hares for enhanced reflex withdrawal. No big deal, really.

But this paper has made more of splash than I ever thought possible. Lots of folks emailed me to congratulate us. The paper may get mentioned in other journals as a “hot” paper. Pretty cool. The best part is that the research was performed by so many students over several years.

Ok. But showing sensitization still doesn’t answer the question of what good it does for sea hares! Does it really help sea hares protect themselves from future attacks? Well, Dan and John and I went back out to Catalina Island a few weeks ago and actually tested this hypothesis!

We put out the same enclosure cages we used before. Then we went back to the lab and marked sea hares with little plastic tags. Then we gave half of the sea hares “standard” electric shock treatment to induce sensitization. Then we planted sensitized and naïve animals in a cage. Finally we did our usual dive protocol with bait sea hares in order to identify attacking lobsters. We planted a hungry lobster in each of the two cages, and checked back in the next day to see which sea hares the lobsters preferred. We hypothesized that the naive sea hares would be preferred because they were not pre-sensitized.

As so often happens in science, our hypothesis got roundly defeated. Every one of the 5 lobsters that ate 1 or two sea hares consumed ONLY the SENSITIZED ones. Previous sensitizing attack seems to make sea hares more, not less, vulnerable to subsequent attack.

Now dear readers, you can email me or post ideas to explain these results. Clearly this professor has no clue what good sensitization is doing these slugs!

On this note, we end the sabbatical. Perhaps I’ll continue with the Wright lab’s research adventures, but we shall see.
Thanks for reading this stuff. Writing about research and life clears my head in ways I still don’t really understand.

Two Parties 50 Years Apart

7 August 2010.

100 years old, and still kicking.

How did it happen that I’m now the custodian of a 100 year old boat? I am still trying to figure that out.

The way I see it, I may be the legal owner, but Siwash is just passing through me, like she did my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.

We celebrated her 100th anniversary at Catalina last weekend, and it was very cool.

50 years ago, Mom and Dad, much younger than I am now (33 and 38, I think), rowed all around Howland’s cove, dressed up in 1910’s garb to invite everyone. Bird and I did the same thing for last Saturday. Note the dingkitten is the same in both photos.






Here’s Dad reading his proclamation about Siwash in 1960 (note Grandad farthest to the left, drinking, and Mom right at Dad’s knees lighting a cigarette.



Here I am giving the anniversary proclamation in 2010.



Here’s Siwash, loaded to her waterline with well-wishers (photo by Fin Beven, a legend in his own right).

Here's Siwash's intrepid crew!

And, of course, just to show that Siwash is sailing as hard as ever, here’s Bird “holding her down” in hurricane gulch on the way home.

If you missed this party (or if you liked the rum and want some more), you can still come to the "docksider" party next Saturday starting at 2PM (and you are all invited).

100 years is a long time ago.

A few months longer ago than that, my dad’s dad was a snotty-nosed teenager hanging out in the cockpit of a new yacht being built right down in Wilmington harbor, the guts of the Los Angeles harbor area then, and now.

The new yacht had not yet been finished. Grandad said he could see right through from the cockpit to the bow. The yacht was launched that August. This weekend we celebrate that launching with a “cocktail party” at Howland's Landing on Catalina Island.

This yacht came by her name in a funny way. The builder, Charlie Fulton, had just attached the transom (the board that covers the aftermost part of the boat). Some disgruntled worker in the yard had had some kind of issue against Charlie, and chalked the moniker “Siwash”, which was a slang (semi-deprecatory) expression in those days for someone with native American blood.

Charlie had, indeed, some native American blood in his veins, but he also knew what every sailor does: changing the name of a boat is bad luck. So he PAINTED the name clearly on the transom.

Siwash is in my blood too.

We will be handing out rum drinks to anyone who comes aboard. Best not to wait too long after the sun is over the yard-arm. Sailors develop a might thirst by the time noon comes round.

Grandad’s dad had already given him a 28 foot sailboat when he was thirteen. Now less than 4 years later he wanted a 47 footer! He worked on his dad every day for more than a year. When Charlie Fulton went bankrupt, Grandad’s dad, Walter Savage Wright, a successful lawyer, couldn’t resist. He bought the boat and it hasn’t been outside the family since.

Here’s a challenge. I challenge anyone to identify a presently floating yacht that was built in Southern California longer ago than 100 years. I’ll give you a rum drink, and you can stay aboard for dinner!

For those of you that can’t make it to Catalina this Saturday afternoon, come instead to our dock party on the 14th of August. Contact me for details!

Memes and the celebration of life

Mom displaying the genes (but not the memes!) of her first born, Howard C.


24July2010
Death is really just like a candle coming to the end of its wick. The flame gets weaker and weaker till finally, poof, it disappears, leaving behind something new, the smoke of the extinguished flame.

When my mom died, she too left a cloud of smoke. Some of this smoke is made up of “memes.”

A meme is kind of like a gene. It is a cultural memory. Language is a repository of memes. The old memes are just the language, the new memes are slang.

Any “culturally transmitted” behavior is a meme. For example, sometime after the milk deliverers in England figured out how to put aluminum-foil lids on the milk they delivered, small birds (blue tits) figured out how to pull off the lids. Each tit didn’t employ his/her own trial and error process to learn how to remove the lid. Rather, he/she watched other birds successfully get the tops off, and then imitated them. Behavioural ecologists tracked the spread of this cool meme from its source, all over England. This is a classic meme. It is a culturally transmitted idea that works.

We all leave meme’s behind when we die. One of my favorites from Mom is what she says when things are getting intense: “Oh, gosh”.

But at Mom’s “celebration of life” (this term is a classic meme that tons of individuals picked up on and re-used) I was amazed at the richness of the meme’s attributed to her.

For example, people were uniformly impressed by Mom’s frankness. This honesty sometimes hurt, but ultimately, it gave comfort because it meant Mom wasn’t hiding anything (this is the extreme version of that meme). I kind of expected this one, and it was widely expressed by her near and dear.

But what surprised me was the apparent strength of Mom’s memes. Women referred to Mom as a role model! Really? My Mom? Mother of 3 boys? A role model for young women? Yes, indeed! Lots of women (young and old) told their stories of how Mom was their role model. You could see other women in the room involuntarily nodding their heads. Everyone saw the nodding, thereby strengthening the meme even further.

I had NO IDEA that Mom’s memes would be so strong. Pretty cool, really. From that extinguished flame came some meme smoke hardly visible (at least to me) while the flame survived.

It is kind of sad, but true, that most memes, like most genes, eventually go extinct. Virtually all memes that do survive lose the connection of the meme to its originator. Exceptions include, e.g., Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?”; Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”; Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Yet, some memes survive for a very long time. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand what I am writing.

But the fact remains that most of us will die without leaving many memes behind. Most of our memes will be unrecognizably swallowed up by the culture we live in, or perhaps just go extinct on their own.

Oh, gosh.

I don’t know how long Mom’s memes will survive. But, there are at least some of us living today, that won’t forget her crazy notions.

Trust the trail

The Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory, where I am doing research right now, is the most amazing place. Besides all the water and the diversity of sea creatures, there is this drop-dead wow beauty. It is set on a peninsula of maybe a couple of square miles of just amazing old-growth pine forest. They have a hiking trail that goes through this forest. Everywhere you look there are giant pine trees, but even more amazing are the fallen trees. No one can take anything out of the forest, so the fallen trees just get covered with moss and gradually rot.

So I’ve got my running togs on (I forgot my hoody in California, so it’s just my shoes and socks and shorts and t-shirt). First day. Jogging up the main trail. I see a sign “Shoreline trails.” Yup, that’s the one for me. I’m trying to keep a decent pace (cause I’ve been lazy recently and not run enough, so I’m trying to compensate), but the trail gets thinner and bushier, and I have to bend down low to get through the underbrush, and suddenly I realize that it is just a deer trail. Not meant for humans at all. Then I realize that this trail is not trustable, unless you are a deer. I reach the shore and turn left, go for 15 min or so, flush a bald eagle out of a tree (I’m not kidding here, the national bird, huge, beautiful). But now there is really no trail at all. So I realize I probably ought to head back. So I decide to walk through this old-growth woods without a trail (I could try to retrace my outward path but nah). It is overcast and the sun is almost down anyway. Ok, I’ll just walk back in the general thataway direction and find the trail I was on.

Man there are some stickery, beautiful, thorny, shrubs in those woods. I’m getting my legs cut up pretty bad, and I’m going pretty damn slow. Nobody anywhere. I’m not sure if I’m going the right direction. This is not going too well. And then I start looking for fallen trees aligned in the direction I want to go, and getting up on them, and avoiding the brambles that way. But some of these trees are 10 or 15 feet off the ground, and I become aware that if I fall off one and break my leg I’m in a pickle.

So I’m up on a huge tree trunk about to traverse its length. And then I stop. What the fuck are you so nervous about, Bill? You are in the most beautiful woods you’ve ever seen and you're worried cause there is no trail. What is wrong with you? Breath! Look at this place. Just look around. This is amazing.

But I can’t shake being nervous about what is going to happen to me. I get tangled up in briars and nettles, and it goes on and on. Getting up on fallen trees, balancing and testing them for rot and going very slowly along. I realize I am not as agile as I used to be. Not so much spring. Not so much balance. I’m dying. We are all dying. We trust this trail we are on, but ultimately at the end it betrays us. We just don’t know when. Maybe today is my day.

But maybe it isn’t.

Whoops. There’s the trail. Of course it is. So I turn right, heading for the main trail, which I will take back to the labs, leaving this existential crisis in the nettles. So I’m walking along expecting the main trail any time now. Then I meet a couple of students from the labs. We’re talking, and they inform me that I’m actually already on the main trail. I've been walking in the opposite direction from the labs. Oh. Oh well, I might as well continue this direction then.

Jeezus, this story is long. The point is. That even when you’re on the fucking trail, you might be going the wrong direction. So stop being so damn nervous and look around! It’s so easy. Just look around. Just absorb the scene. Breath. Your trail will end soon enough. Just breath.

The earth breathed

My mom died at 2 AM this morning.
The earth breathed, and the heavens moved over a notch.
Fare thee well, Mom.

Friday Harbor Labs.

Sitting on a bus creeping through downtown Seattle on its way to Anacortes, a port on the east side of the Puget Sound. There I will climb aboard a ferry that will take me to one of the most amazing marine labs ever.

I first fell in love with Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories (FHL) in Fall, 1985, a month after defending my Ph.D. thesis at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I had managed to finagle a 1-year FHL postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Richard Strathmann, one of the most creative larval biologists of all time.

My family (daughter, age 9; son, age 6; wife, and I) just rolled into Friday Harbor, and I started coming in every day to do research.

It was unbelievably cool. I became a part of the small family of scientists that work at FHL year round. My job was to do research there, and when summer came around, to organize the weekly seminars. Not a bad job. I was in heaven.

Summer comes to FHL, and there is a steady stream of really interesting, deeply involved scientists. The people I met that year keep popping up in the who’s who of science (is there such a thing?). Many of them have become long-term friends.

But just the place, itself, is magic. The ocean there is just teeming with wildlife. A visit to the tidepools is just enough to blow your mind. Gobs of kelp of myriad different kinds. Huge chitons, big-ass barnacles, limpets of all shapes and flavors. Our friend, David Duggins, was skippering the research vessel, and he would put down a net and bring it up with hundreds of different species. In one trawl. It was like the jewels in the dragons cave. Just grabbing a handful of a net full of marine creatures; creeping and crawling all over the place, was breath-taking.

So here I am about to go to be part of the summer scientist influx (actually I’m part of the “pre-summer” crowd).

I am meeting up with crazy Leonid again. We are returning to our research on slug brains.

Now I’ve just arrived and found my studio apartment. Here’s the view outside my window. Pretty cool, eh? Work starts tomorrow. Tonight I sleep.