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Getting to Know Gapers
Everybody loves collecting seashells on the beach and I’ve collected a few myself. Sandy beaches are great for finding beautiful shells because scouring sands keep them clean and round off jagged...
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Close Quarters: Redtail and Silver Surfperch Share the Surf
Redtail surfperch, Amphistichus rhodoterus Redtail surfperch, Amphistichus rhodoterus, and silver surfperch, Hyperprosopon ellipticum, can be found year round on almost any exposed sandy beach between...
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Aequorea and Other Tennessee Jellies
Jellies are so mysterious and beautiful – maybe kind of scary too – they fascinate just about everybody and you can find jellyfish articles and art just about everywhere. Last week I attended the Joint...
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Exploring the Highest Intertidal Fringes
I plan weeks or even months ahead for low tide explorations on the outer shores. The lowest tides, those below 2.0′ below mean lower low water on my home beaches, reveal rocks and sand we hardly ever...
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Coming Full Circle with Hermissenda crassicornis
Last winter I made the decision to get in touch with nudibranchs. I decided one of the easiest for me to find might be the little red one known as Rostanga pulchra. They feed on a common encrusting red...
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Walk on a Sandy Beach
What’s a walk on the beach to you? I turned myself loose to explore the question and here’s what I found out. Birds, live and dead; stumps and logs in the wrack – one resistant old timer; my attitudes...
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“Beach” Wins 2014 TOS Word Cloud Challenge
During the previous two fall seasons I have produced word clouds from the 20 most recent TOS posts. You can see the 2012 version at Choices, Choices…Everywhere, and the 2013 version at TOS Word Clouds....
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Surfperch Camouflage Meets its Match with Terns
Elegant tern with catch The first thing I thought about when I cam across Dave Morro Bay Keeling’s photo of an elegant tern with its catch was visual predation in the surf zone. On my home beaches, I...
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Bull Kelp Drift: A Subtidal-to-Surf Zone Connection
Bull kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana What do you call a tangled mass of bull kelp on the beach? I’m not sure what you call a great spaghetti-like tangle of floats, stipes, and holdfasts, but after a long...
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Using surfperches to help understand the genomic basis of divergence and...
Gary Longo is a graduate student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, in the Bernardi lab, at UC Santa Cruz. Gary introduces his work on the Embiotocidae in the guest post below. I became interested in...
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Common Marine Algae in the Northern Oregon Drift Line: A Gallery of Images
My post about bull kelp drift masses, back in early December, got me thinking about other algae people might find washed up in the drift line. On my home beaches, bull kelp is certainly the most...
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Favorite TOS Posts and Photos, 2014
2014 was theoutershores’ second full year in business. I published 23 new posts and uploaded 361 images. Last year I enjoyed looking back on the year’s most popular posts and sharing some thoughts...
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Enjoying Embiotocids at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
I was lucky enough to get a couple hours at the Monterey Bay Aquarium recently – spent the whole time staring at embiotocids. It was a great opportunity to connect with surfperches I don’t often get to...
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Northern Feather-Duster Worm
Northern feather-duster, Eudistylia vancouveri, Oregon Balancing precariously on the edge of a crevice above a rarely exposed and kind of spooky low tidepool, I came eyeball to photosensitive eyespot...
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My 2015 King Tide Project – Swell Matters
I have a fascination with very high and very low tides. Who doesn’t – they’re rare events and when they occur, things happen. Low tides are great for the naturalist; everybody’s out digging clams and...
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Keyhole Limpets on the Beach
Rough keyhole limpet, Diadora aspera I took the photo shown above in dim early morning light on February 21, 2015. Keyhole limpet shells on the beach is not an unusual thing. Rough keyhole limpets,...
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Spongy Cushion, Codium setchellii
Spongy cushion, Codium setchellii, exposed in the low intertidal Every time I come across a patch of Codium setchellii I have to pause and take a closer look. The marvelous convolutions of...
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The Drift Line’s Getting Slippery on the Northern Oregon Coast: By-the-Wind...
By-the-wind sailors, Velella velella Free-floating hydroids, by-the-wind sailors, Velella velella, have been washing ashore in great numbers, for weeks. It’s a fairly common event on Oregon beaches,...
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A Peek at Pisaster After Two Years of Sea Star Wasting Syndrome
It’s a good time to check in on the rocky intertidal. All along the west coast, sea star wasting syndrome has, to varying degrees, reduced Pisaster ochraceus, a potent predator and organizing force in...
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Surfperch Clades Partition by Habitat, Suggesting Adaptive Radiation
Gary Longo and Giacomo Bernardi just published a paper on the evolutionary history of surfperch (embiotocidae) in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. They used RAD sequence data to describe the...
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