On Party Animals

As part of the ongoing effort to prove that I do indeed have a social life on this island, I present to you: pictures taken at last night's Tragically Hip concert. The Tragically Hip is a Canadian band, described to me by my roommate as the "Canadian Rolling Stones". As such, the Canadians were out in force last night; maple leaves and funny accents were everywhere (and for those of us not actually from Canada, a lot of jokes about the Great White North). The music was pretty good too, and it gave me an opportunity to work on my rock concert photography (from a bit of a distance, sadly, as I have an inexplicable fear of large numbers of overexcited Canadians).




All in all, a pretty good night.

And now back to our regularly scheduled educational material.


As a follow-up to last week's post, this is a closeup of brain coral polyps at night. During the day, brain coral looks like a bunch of squiggles - much like a human brain (inviting all sorts of fun, squishy and/or mad scientist sound effects when we tell kids about them at work). And actually, the analogy is closer than one might guess. The human brain has ridges in order to increase surface area, providing more space for the neurons to form synapses (connections), leading to more complex thought. In much the same way, brain coral forms these ridges to increase surface area so that it might expose more of its symbiotic algae to the sun. More sun means more photosynthesis from the algae, which means more food for the coral. Still, that's all daytime activity. At night, just as with the corals I showed last week, the polyps unfurl their tentacles and catch plankton for the remainder of the nutrients they need. Brain corals just look a little different.


Corals and I aren't the only party animals that come out at night. This picture is of a sponge with two brittle stars crawling across its surface. Brittle stars are so named for their habit of dropping arms when they panic, much like a lizard losing its tail. Also like overanxious lizards, the stars can regenerate any limbs they have lost. One of the coolest things to see is a brittle star in action; unlike most sea stars, brittle stars can move rather quickly. They are very responsive to changes in light (so you can bet this one made a break for it as soon as the camera flash went off), and can actually push their central body disc off the ground, then use their arms in a sort of freewheeling motion (think swimmer doing freestyle/crawl) to sprint to the nearest dark crevice - Looney Tunes does Echinodermata.