French international student and shark lover Marie Cachera cuddles a leopard shark from the MLML collection. Marie conducted a diet study on the starry skate as part of her Master’s thesis while visiting MLML for five months in 2009. Despite our location in a podunk town, the caliber of research of Moss Landing Marine Labs has attracted scientists and students from all over the world. Read an interview with MLML’s current international student Edem Mahu from Ghana.
There’s just something mouthwateringly adorable about this little butterfish, caught during a shallower NMFS trawl in Southern California. The Pacific pompano (Peprilus simillimus), is “a very-mild, good eating fish,” says the Pier Fishing in California website, “but only the largest fish have enough meat to make it worth the effort.” Still, the website goes on to call them “an attractive little fish.” I have to agree – plus, the name “pompano” is just so darn fun to say.
These brown box crabs might easily get mistaken for rocks – but the “holes” they form in the joints of their claws makes them unmistakably distinct from other crab species. These specimens of Lopholithodes foraminatus were collected aboard a NMFS groundfish survey off southern California. They would make great adornments to an underwater rock garden if they could just hold that pose…
Don’t let the gentle name of the sunflower star fool you – these giant sea stars are voracious predators of the kelp forest. Wielding 24 arms and growing to sizes of over three feet across, Pycnopodia helianthoides is a fearsome force to be reckoned with for its prey of urchins, snails, clams – even other sea stars. When you have that many arms, you don’t have to play nice.
Bold black and gold stripes with flashy pink lips – treefish certainly aren’t shy about their appearance. They even give rock greenling a run for their money. These highly distinctive rockfish are sometime visitors to Monterey Bay, though are more frequently found in Southern California waters. This Sebastes serriceps specimen completes its getup with a fetching blue spaghetti tag, courtesy of a tag-and-release survey of marine protected areas conducted by the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program. If you catch a tagged fish, call the number on it – your report can help us understand how far fish move!
The Geological Oceanography class enjoys a panoramic view at the top of Fremont Peak with professor Ivano Aiello. Geo Oce students got the opportunity to go on lots of trips in the field to experience California’s geology firsthand. See a picture from another one of their adventures here.
Students from an MLML Marine Ecology class sift through the contents of a midwater trawl aboard the R/V Point Sur. Mmm, looks lie plankton soup – who knows what you might find?
You may think the title of this post is a typo, but YOY actually stands for “young of the year,” which are age-zero fish, or those that were born within the past year. These little guys are KGB rockfish, which means that they are Kelp, Gopher, Black and Yellow, or Copper rockfish. You probably already figured it out, but KGB comes from the Kelp, Gopher, and Black part of this complex – we identify them as “KGBs” because the species are hard, if not impossible to tell apart at this age. Last year in late spring and early summer, the kelp forests were teeming with these guys. If you managed to get out on the water, you might have noticed them hanging out in the kelp forest canopies, one of the places they go for cover.
When the current Moss Landing Marine Labs facility was built in 2000, the Habitat Restoration group of the Benthic Ecology Lab restored the surrounding dunes from nonnative ice plant to native California vegetation. The lab itself seems to blend into the hillside. This photo of the MLML Library reveals a view that offers plenty of reasons for procrastination…
Beneath the waves lies the stunning world of the kelp forest. This school of blue rockfish casts a mysterious shadow among the towering kelp plants. Unlike other species of rockfish that hunker down among the rocks, blue rockfish spend more of their time in the water column where they feed on plankton and jellyfish.