Back to College: May 14, 2010

May 2, Sunday
My main goal this week-end was to open my bee hives as they have been neglected for the past 5 weeks. That was accomplished along with some weeding. Linda and I drove up to Anacortes where we parked the car and walked aboard the ferry going to Friday Harbor. Once back at Hobbit Linda immediately started reorganizing my bachelor pad. It will probably take me days to find where she put everything. We then took the dinghy over to FHL where we had dinner and Linda got to meet most of the Zoobots.

May 3, Monday
We went to bed last night during a soaking rain and woke up to a full gale. With winds topping 40 kts, I decided to walk to FHL which takes about half an hour. Weather notwithstanding, after lunch the class took a field trip to Eagle Cove which is on the south (Strait of Juan de Fuca) side of San Juan Island and fully exposed to the wind. When we arrived surfers and kayakers were frolicking in the surf. Waves up to about 6 feet high were coming ashore.

Zoobots at Eagle Cove, San Juan Island (note surfer by the water)

Zoobots at Eagle Cove during a gale

May 4, Tuesday
This morning we had our last lecture in botany. Robin came in with a smile on her face, looked at me and announced that “PowerPoint is our enemy.”  This was in response to an editorial I sent to the instructors on the over use of PowerPoint. She then had us sit in a circle in old fashioned desk chairs in the back of the room. She has become quite effective as an instructor using this technique. The rest of the class then had their botany lab final while I continued working on my effort to develop a way to photographically quantify the amount of chlorophyll present on a surface.

May 5, Wednesday
During the morning the two botany instructors, Robin and Charley, held a review session to help the other students prepare for tomorrow’s final. As has been common place, the lecture was broken up by wild animals walking past the window. This time it was a doe with a fawn only a few days old.

A question I asked was “is the concept of kingdom obsolete?” By kingdom I’m talking about plant, animal, and mineral which is what my generation learned when we went to school, or up to 5 kingdoms which has been taught in public schools and colleges since the early 1970s. Both instructors agreed that, in their opinion, it is no longer meaningful to group plants and animals into “kingdoms.” Likewise, many of the other major groupings are inconsistent. For example, Charley thinks we should call all land plants “green algae” since they are in the same lineage. A similar analogy would be to drop the term “bird” and call all those flying feathered things we see “dinosaurs.” Another concept that has become apparent over the last few years is that evolution isn’t always a straight road from one species to the next which we normally see depicted by a tree; DNA and genes from distantly related groups of organisms have become blended on many occasions for a variety of reasons. This may well be the most interesting thing I have learned at FHL.

Since I’m not taking the final, have nothing scheduled for tomorrow, and don’t need to be here Friday, Linda and I caught the 11:00 ferry and headed home. Coincidentally, Robby was in town on business with UW in Seattle and we were able to have dinner with him.

May 8, Saturday
My grandson, Cash, has been actively involved in a school group called “Kid Calypso.” For months they have been fund raising by selling cookie dough, holding carwashes, etc. so they could have a concert tour. The tour was three stops yesterday and today. We were able to join them for about four hours in Leavenworth which is about two hours west of Snohomish and on the east side of the Cascades. The steel drum band is taught by a student teacher who is only a sophomore – she and the kids are great. The picture of Cash is during one of the pieces where the kids periodically jump as high as they can.

Cash playing steel drums in Leavenworth with Kid Calypso

May 11, Tuesday
A few years ago I made a plankton net out of a 5 gallon paint strainer bag that you buy for about $3 at a hardware store and a needle point hoop I paid about $2 for. As you might guess, I made it to show plankton to Cash and Catie. Today’s schedule for the zoology laboratory included a plankton tow off the FHL dock and then several hours examining what was caught. On a whim, I pulled out my $5 net and towed it from the midpoint of my morning commute into the FHL dock. I then put my catch in a bowl for the lab. At lab time the instructor pulled out a commercial net that cost a whole lot more and had it towed in a rowboat around the FHL dock. It caught very little and the class spent most of its time examining what came from my net. Just goes to show that expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better. Here are a couple of photomicrographs I took of animals we found in the plankton.

Crab Zoe (a crab larvae – note the long spines that help ward off predators)

Phoronid Larvae (Phoronids are a type of worm that live in a tube)

May 12, Wednesday
A truly beautiful day!! The temperature was in the mid 40s, the sun was shining, and it was totally calm. As I was crossing the harbor in my dinghy shortly before 7:00, I spotted one woman sitting on a knoll just looking out over the water. On the FHL dock was another woman who had assumed the lotus position and was facing the sun. After docking, I just had to sit down on a rock and enjoy the moment.

Most of the class was probably glad to see this day. I, however, found it somewhat melancholy. Today was the last day of formal lecture and lab. We closed out the zoology course by studying echinoderms (sea stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, etc.) and urochordates which are our closest relatives among the animals we studied at FHL. Tomorrow I will work on my research project while the rest of the class takes their zoology final and lab practical.

Wally at his lab station

May 14, Friday
Another great day in paradise! The weather was beautiful and six of us volunteered to work with 50 – 60 third graders at one of the local beaches. They came in 3 waves about 45 minutes apart; each of us had about 3 kids plus 1 or 2 parents for each of the waves. We first dug a hole approximately 1 cubic foot near the high tide line and sifted the contents. Then we moved way down the beach to the low tide line and did it again. One of the kids was a data logger – we identified each of the clams and some of the worms to species. Megan and her husband, Dave (Ph.D. Captain of the Centennial), have been collecting data on the beach for about 10 years. The kids learned that more species and more individuals are present low down on the beach and that few and different species are present at the high tide line.

Wally with 3 third graders and 2 parents at Argyle Beach

In the afternoon we packed up a school van with all our tents, sleeping bags, etc. in preparation for heading off to Canada tomorrow for a 4-day field trip.