Tide Bites

Tide Bites: Getting a Head with Regeneration

Invertebrates, or animals without a spine, are the masters of regeneration. Many animals are able to regrow missing or damaged body parts and some can even regrow an entirely new animal from just a small segment…

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Written by Shawn Luttrell

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Tide Bites: Avoiding High Temperatures at a Snail's Pace

Snails are the quintessential slow animals. They manage to move from place to place, but at a pace that is infamous. These animals don’t seem like ideal candidates for studying thermoregulation behavior. Thermoregulation studies traditionally involve…

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Written by Hilary Hayford, Ph.D.

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Tide Bites: FHL Researchers attend the Ascidiacea WoRMS Workshop, 15-17 February 2016 in Oostende, Belgium

As Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, said: “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.” (Linnaeus, 1751). Billie J. Swalla, Friday Harbor Labs Director, and Gretchen Lambert, a…

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Written by Gretchen Lambert and Billie J. Swalla

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Tide Bites: A re-fit for Research Vessel Centennial

Friday Harbor Labs' 58-foot research vessel was built in 1990 and worked several Alaskan fisheries until she was purchased by FHL in 2002, converted for research, and re-christened Centennial in celebration of FHL's 100th anniversary.

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Written by Meegan Corcoran, FHL's new Marine Operations Manager

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Tide Bites: An Octopus’ Garden in the Urban Underwater Environment

In 1955, Columbia Pictures released the thriller It Came From Beneath The Sea, in which an enormous octopus begins terrorizing the good citizens of San Francisco (Figure 1). Though lacking in certain factual details (for instance,…

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Written by Eliza Heery

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Tide Bites: How Can There Be So Many Skate Species ... and Why Should We Care?

Skates are cartilaginous marine fishes that are closely related to sharks. They can be considered cold-water rays since they generally replace ray species in cool temperate, boreal, and deep-water regions. Upon first inspection, skates appear to…

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Tide Bites: My, What Flat Teeth You Have!

Researchers have an intuitive understanding of the relationship between tooth shape and use: animals that eat meat have pointy teeth, and those that eat plant material have flatter teeth used for grinding. But many animals also…

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Tide Bites: Slugging it out on San Juan Island

When you say that you study banana slugs and the European brown terrestrial slugs, even people at Friday Harbor Labs often respond either, “Disgusting!” or “You can come to my garden and kill all you want.”

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Tide Bites: The Tidepool Tank in Fernald is Back!

Early this year, the pink coralline-algae and anemone-covered rocks (as well as everything else) were moved out of their decades-long home at the base of the stairs in the main Fernald lab building, and transported by…

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Tide Bites: The swimming sea anemone Stomphia

In the mid 1950s, Charles Yentsch and Donald Pierce brought some orange sea anemones back to the lab from their UW bottom trawls in Puget Sound. Anyone who has spent time poking around tide pools is…

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Tide Bites: A Risky Business? Mussel Farming in the Face of Ocean Acidification and Warming

As you walk past the Kings Market seafood aisle in Friday Harbor or browse at Costco, chances are that you will see fresh mussels harvested locally from Penn Cove Shellfish on Whidbey Island, WA. These mussels…

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Tide Bites: The FHL Marine Science Image Gallery: a New Resource for Students and Teachers at All Levels

Do you need a quality image of a sponge for your next invertebrate zoology lecture? Maybe one of your students needs an algal photo for a class report? Or, perhaps one of Friday Harbor's schoolteachers wants…

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Tide Bites: Clingy fish (or how to hold tight when it gets rough)

Years ago when I stepped into a river and experienced the strong forces of the current, I wondered how animals are able to live in such a challenging environment. This experience stayed with me, and the…

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Tide Bites: Pacific Sand Lance and the Pelagic Ecosystem in the San Juan Islands

The University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) are situated at the interface of the Salish Sea estuary and the influence of the greater Pacific Ocean. What is the influence of tides, season, and inter-annual variation…

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