Rusty Ring

Over the past eight years I've posted regular reports on the welfare of local starfish as they endured (and some populations beca...

This graphic illustrates the grandfather paradox, a secular koan demonstrating the inability of the human mind to grasp reality. A...

(Pisaster ochraceus.) Appearing also on My Corner of the World .

Healthy adult P. ochreceus. I conducted my informal annual survey of a local beach a few weeks ago and found the wasting-syndrome si...

Salal (Gaultheria shallon) Western red cedar ( Thuja plicata ) (A particularly disturbing consequence of ...

( Evasterias troschelli. Note that the tip of one ray has apparently been gnawed off by the starfish plague , but the organism's immu...

Maimed P. ochraceus with a replacement ray coming. So here we are again , back at the usual beach, counting starfish. (On a -5 tide!...

( Same beach , different starfish. Individual from another five-rayed species [ Dermasterias imbricata ] , randomly turning up with six...

I had the good fortune to be raised on the coast, and have spent a good deal of my life beside, on, and in the sea. The incredible diversi...

Will the real Pisaster brevispinus please stand up? Looking again at the photo I published at the top of last week's post , purport...

Not Pisaster brevispinus, unfortunately. (Update, 15 September 2021: my report of a mature Pisaster brevispinus in this survey was sa...

(Well, here we are again, on the same beach as last year . This summer I had difficulty finding many Evasterias ; total count was on...

(This is good old Henricia leviuscula , the blood star, but with an experimental enhancement. Happens sometimes. Reminds you how elem...

Last week I trolled a few beaches in Whatcom County with two droogies from college. We were taking advantage of passably low tides and t...

Evasterias troscheli We had a minus-4 tide the other day and I got in an epic mile-long wade along the tidelands. The biological di...

(I took this photo on the beach in front of my house in 2009. Pretty much every subtidal rock on the North Coast looked like this then;...

(Evasterias troscheli. These were among the worst-hit in the recent virus strike that decimated starfish here on the North Coast. Thus ...

(Dermasterias imbricata)

"I do not say there is no Chàn. Just no teachers."                             Huangbo (Photo of Evasterias trosch...