the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

Well yes, if you didn't know yet, corals ARE animals. And what's more, they're CARNIVOROUS, meaning they eat other animals. And they have harpoon thingies that they shoot out at night to reel in their prey. However, this one here is the soft coral Xenia , which probably just filters the water for nutrients instead of actively catching tiny animals (called "zooplankton") with stinging cells (called "nematocysts"), the way the hard corals do. And I just found out now from Google that they're actually popular with aquarium enthusiasts because of their "pulsing". I just thought it was cool how they look like flowers opening and closing :D And I thought you'd find it cool, too, so I took a video of them in action. Taken off Pulaobato, Balabac, Palawan (near Malaysia) last April.

So okay, by now you'll really think I'm a nerd (and I even have a video of my Spirulina oscillating under the microscope to show for it =P). But really, I think it's just a matter of opening our minds to see the fascinating in the boring. Joy for me now is wading through calf-deep mud to get a scoop of slime and discovering that it's a rare species of algae sought-after for its high protein properties.And then being able to isolate them from the diatoms and other blue-green algae through moist culture. Who would have thought I'd find an affinity with microscopic algae? Welcome to the mind-twisting world of the marine botany lab....

December 8, 2006. For the first time, my Powershot A540 went to school to with me so I could take pictures of tissue slides under the microscope, to help my students review for their lab exam. To my delight, and even with many instances of poor focusing, my A540 still came through =D Never before did I think it possible that I could shoot cells through an ordinary compound microscope (sunlight and mirrors still the best!) with an ordinary digital camera. And so allow me to share my excitement over my first microscope shots (aren't they cute??). And my joy at actually recognizing the types and parts of the tissues based on the textbook description hehe. Next time, will shoot corals under the stereoscope--something I saw for the first time the day before this. It's an even more fascinating landscape! I'm finding more and more reasons to love biology =D