My Brains! My Brains!

They're melting out my ears D:


Goodness, but I'm tired! I spent this evening at the Monterey Bay Aquarium at my apprentice guide training class. I am going to be an apprentice guide :D It shall be awesome. Tonight we got to play with the touch pools. I think I enjoyed petting the urchin the most, but I also learned about handling the animals, kelp defenses, and plankton. Additionally, one of the epic level manager types gave a talk, in character, about working at the canneries back in the day.

I spent a bit more time with one of my group members who is quite young and significantly less jaded than I am. It was kind of a weird backwards mirror. It makes me think I need to be less cantankerous, but it also makes me think of how I was naive in so many places (and still am really) before I went to school o.O
More on this later.

BugsAndMonsters:
I have put a couple of Valentine's Day cards up on my Etsy. Check them out!

More designs to follow.


Beware the thrall of science:
I went to LiveScience yesterday to look at an article about photosynthesizing nudibranchs (sea slugs). While I was there, I became interested in articles about how the particular areas where fat accumulates can have serious health effects, and how cell phones may save us from Alzheimer's among other things.

But back to the nudibranchs (or nudie brancs if you like ;). These are wacky creatures. Many nudibranchs contain stinging cells as a defense mechanism, but they do not produce the cells. They eat anemones and somehow conscript the cells into their own tissues intact! This article describes a new kind of sea slug which scientist have found to conscript chloroplasts (those are photosynthesizing cells from plants and algae). Even more, these slugs have taken the genes to make chlorophyll (the pigment plants use to photosynthesize), and put them in their own DNA. They don't need to eat if they get enough sunlight. All they have to do is get themselves a bunch of chloroplasts and go. They've become the terminators of the ocean!