Biologicos Ambulantes

The Western Society of Naturalists is driven by a kind of unstated credo, personified by the students of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, where I started graduate school one million years ago.  Biologicos ambulantes is what we used to call it (I first heard this term from a forever biologist named Mark Silberstein).  The idea is that you are hooked.  You will always do marine biology, so don't pretend.  You will move to wherever you can support yourself doing science.  Graduate students at Moss Landing sleep in the backs of trucks.  On old professors' floors, wherever they can.  They party hard all night, and then get up the next day in time for the first lecture at 8AM. 

Saturday night was the "auction".  A raucous, hilarious affair, with drag queens and a noted scientist (unnoted here) with a killer stand-up routine.  This guy egged the assembled nerds on and on, till the audience had coughed up literally thousands of dollars, all of which goes to next year's student travel fund.

Our research was well received.  Although my reputation is as a cross-disciplinary neuroethologist (no relation to the previous paragraph), my buddies are mostly community ecologists of one sort or another.  Greg Cailliet, Dan Reed, Jim Barry, Jim Estes, Mark Carr, Jim Harvey, John Oliver, Pete Slattery, and on and on.  These guys are all excellent, established scientists, who do community ecology for a living.  So I was a bit nervous that our "discovery", that a scavenger can be transformed into a raging predator inside a marine reserve, would either be rejected, or trivialized.

Neither happened.  They were almost as stoked as I am about our data.

Here's a movie we showed next to the poster.  Note the failure of the ink to deter the attacking lobster. 

So Saturday night was pure celebration.  The wine flowed, the bids flew.  I finally dragged my ass to bed at 12:30, but the party was just getting going.  Moss Landing Marine labs just missed winning the Tequila Trophy, but they readily helped the winners (was it San Diego State University?) swig down the tequila, as I was walking out the door.  I heard later that the party spiraled up the ten floors of the hotel into the wee hours until "security" finally put the thing to rest. 

But they were ALL there at 8AM for Jim Estes' lecture on the importance of top predators for the global carbon budget.  I saw my ex-technician and undergraduate apprentice, Brian Hoover.  This guy has the invaluable combination of smarts, off-kilter perspective, and rebel that will make him famous.  He is almost already there.  Well done, Brian.  I see John going down that slippery slope into the briny, but we shall see.