Shipping in tasty treats

By  Nicole Webster

One of the downsides of Bamfield’s islation is the lack of food availability and choice. Sure there are two grocery stores, but sometimes that’s just not enough. On top of that, they have to cover the cost of getting the groceries to Bamfield, and thus things are a bit more expensive than you can find in Port Alberni. As a result, it is common for people to offer to pick up things from the store if they are coming in to Bamfield, saving the gas a time of the ride to Port for groceries.

We experimented with another alternative this week: Online shopping.

Quality foods has a complete online invertory, which, after you’ve created an account, you can shop from the convinience of home. For our large order ($300+), they charged a flat $9.95 shopping fee, which is pretty cheap when you split it between people.

Once you have set up your order, you specify if you want to allow replacements or not if they don’t have quite what you ordered. So I got different chocolate bars than I wanted, but no real harm done.

How do they get it to us you ask? The boat. The Francis Barkley travels down from Port Alberni 3x/week (in the summer). Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Specify that your order will be going on the boat, and will be picked up at the East Government Dock (unless you live on the west side). It will arrive on the next boat. Head down to the East Dock (past the motel/pub at the 4-way stop) around 1pm, or when you see the boat leave the West Govy Dock, and bring money to pay the delivery charge. For our 7 boxes of food we were charged $18.40. Wait your turn on the dock, load up and presto! Your food delivered.(but you’ll have to order at least the morning before to give them enough time to shop and deliver it to the boat).

You will have to order in advance. The boat leave Port early in the morning, so you need to make your order at least the morning before to give them time to shop and deliver it to the boat.

If you have questions about timing or delivery fees, call Lady Rose Marine Services at (250) 723-8313.

Cons:

1. I’m unsure how they deliver frozen food, I’ll test it with frozen veggies and see how they survive the ~5h trip. They do have a cooler for refridgerated goods.
2. The food is jostled and packed: My bananas were a little worse for wear.
3. Uncertain due date: Other have told me to double check the due date on food when it arrives, as they may just give you the soonest to expire food.

Pros:

1. Cheaper than a trip to Port Alberni.
2. All packed up and delivered to your door.
3. Easy to shop all together online and share the fees.

I thought it was well worth it for such a large order, but I think I wouldn’t bother for less than $100 of food. Let us know about any other tips or thoughts, and please ask around station if anyone wants to order with you, making it cheaper all around!

Looking for contributors

Deadly Nereis vexillosa jaws from Ross. Credit: N Webster

Hi!

Do you like this blog? You may have noticed that we haven’t been as consistent updating as we have in the past, and we’re sorry. We are looking for new authors!

Are you in Bamfield? Are you coming this summer/fall? As a student, researcher, employee, or local?
We want your photos, videos, insight, news, and research.

Do you hate how we focus on slimy wormy things and ignore the majesty of marine mammals, or even the tasty fish of Bamfield? We know we are a bit biased, and would love for you to help us with that.

We will accept a broad range of topics that relate to marine biology, Bamfield, the Pacific Northwest, and the tools we use for science. Tell us what you are up to here, tell us how many bears were up Grappler at that 5am low tide, how long it took you to get here from Port. You can become a regular author, or just a one-time-author to show off your diving photos.

We are a new blog, and are hoping to keep going strong into our second year.

Have I convinced you? Great! send us an email at bmscblog(a)gmail.com with your text and photographs, and we’ll post it for you, or you can sign up to wordpress, write and format for yourself, and we’ll schedule your posts.

Any questions or suggestions? Comment below.

Nereis shining in the tide pool. Credit: N Webster

Modelling: Conway’s Game of Life Implemented in R

Figure 1. Several iterations of the algorithm, beginning from a randomly determined initial position.

The R script provided below implements J.H. Conway’s “Game of Life” algorithm on an 8 by 8 grid. In this model, cells persist and propagate according to how many neighbours they have (including perpendicular and diagonal neighbours). A cell persists if it has either  2 or 3 neighbours, and empty cells become occupied if they have exactly 3 neighbours. This set of rules might be thought of as mimicking a single species population with density-related effects. Note that, in the final stable distribution shown in Figure 1, each green square is adjacent to either 2 or 3 other green squares.

Reference

Game of Life. Wolfram Mathworld:  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GameofLife.html

R Script

#An implementation of J.H. Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ algorithm.
#Implemented by A. Roberts, May 2013

Life.Example = function(){
neighbours = function(M){
if (!is.matrix(M)) return(NULL);
m = dim(M)[1];
n = dim(M)[2];
left = cbind( rep(0,m), M[ ,1:(n-1)]);
right = cbind(M[ ,2:n], rep(0,m));
up = rbind( rep(0,n), M[1:(m-1),]);
down = rbind( M[2:m,], rep(0,n));
upper.right = M[1:(m-1),2:n];
upper.right = rbind(rep(0,n-1),upper.right);
upper.right = cbind(upper.right,rep(0,m));
lower.right = M[2:m,2:n];
lower.right = rbind(lower.right, rep(0,n-1));
lower.right = cbind(lower.right, rep(0,m));
lower.left = M[2:m,1:(n-1)];
lower.left = cbind(rep(0,n-1),lower.left);
lower.left = rbind(lower.left, rep(0,m));
upper.left = M[1:(m-1),1:(n-1)];
upper.left = rbind(rep(0,n-1),upper.left);
upper.left = cbind(rep(0,m),upper.left);

N =up+down+right+left+upper.right+lower.right+lower.left+upper.left;return(N);
}

N2 = function(M){
m = dim(M)[1];
n = dim(M)[2];
N2 = (neighbours(M)==2);
N2 = as.numeric(N2);
dim(N2) = c(m,n);
return(N2);
}

N3 = function(M){
m = dim(M)[1];
n = dim(M)[2];
N3 = (neighbours(M)==3);
N3 = as.numeric(N3);
dim(N3) = c(m,n);
return(N3);
}

update = function(M){
return( N3(M) + N2(M)*M);
}

random.setup = function(n){
M = matrix(sample(c(0,1),n*n,replace=TRUE),n,n);
return(M);
}

M = random.setup(8);
plot.new();
par( mfrow=c(4,4),mar=c(1,1,2,2));
for (i in 1:16){
M=update(M);
image(M,col=c(rgb(1,1,1),rgb(0,0.5,0)),axes=FALSE,frame=TRUE);mtext(side=3,paste(quote(iteration),i-1));
}
}
Life.Example();

Sandy Mussel Beds

By  Nicole Webster

While out at Ross last weekend, we noticed a strange phenomenon of a mussel (Myletus) bed in the sand. The whole beach up to a certain point was covered in small (~2cm) mussels. Normally mussels are attached to a hard substrate, to give them support against being washed out with the waves.

Mussels invading the beach. Credit: N Webster

Mussels in the sand up close. Credit: N Webster

The same patch of mussles easily lifted up to display to loose substrate beneath. Credit: N Webster

Nearby mussels more safely attached to a rock. Credit. N Webster

Last year, in July, there were no mussels in the same place. So either the mussels did not grow there last year. Or I think more likely, the mussels will all get detached and/or eaten by July, and just had the poor luck to settle in such an unfortunate place.

Same beach July 2012. Credit N Webster

Do you have any information or insight on this? I’ll keep my eye on them next time I return to Ross so see for myself.

Blue Icosahedron Planet

Figure 1. A blue icosahedron.

To construct an icosahedron, I began with the following premises: all edges have the same length, all faces are triangles, and five faces meet at every vertex. I then calculated the coordinates for twelve vertices equidistant from the origin. The script given below will produce an image like Figure 1. For brevity, I have simply given the vertex coordinates and shades of the faces rather than providing the underlying calculations. Do the x, y and z coordinates provided indeed describe an approximate icosahedron? If you want to, you can verify this by computing the distances between points.

R Script

#Blue planet icosahedron.
#Script written by Allan Roberts, April 2013.

X = c(1, 0.309, -0.809, -0.809,  0.309,  0.809, -0.309, -1.000, -0.309,  0.809,  0,  0);
Y = c(0,  0.951,  0.588, -0.588, -0.951,  0.588,  0.951,  0, -0.951, -0.588,  0,  0);
Z = c(0.5,  0.5,  0.5,  0.5,  0.5, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5,  1.118, -1.118);

Vertices = data.frame(X,Y,Z);

par(bg=gray(0));
plot.new();
par(usr=c(-3,3,-3,3));
shade = c(0.67, 0.89, 0.66, 0.30, 0.30, 0.30, 0.66, 0.30, 0, 0);

F1 = Vertices[c(1,2,12), ];
F2 = Vertices[c(2,3,12), ];
F3 = Vertices[c(3,4,12), ];
F4 = Vertices[c(4,5,12), ];
F5 = Vertices[c(5,1,12), ];
F6 = Vertices[c(1,2,6), ];
F7 = Vertices[c(2,3,7),];
F8 = Vertices[c(3,4,8),];
F9 = Vertices[c(4,5,9),];
F10 = Vertices[c(5,1,10),];

Faces = list(F1,F2,F3,F4,F5,F6,F7,F8,F9,F10);
for (i in 1:10) names(Faces[[i]]) = c(quote(X),quote(Y),quote(Z) );
for (i in 1:10) polygon(Faces[[i]]$X,Faces[[i]]$Y, col=rgb(0,0,0.2 + 0.8*shade[i]) );

Another sea star carpet!

by Amanda Kahn

Hi all!  Short post today–I just wanted to share this awesome photo of yet another occurrence of a carpet of sea stars (check out the Vancouver Island occurrence in this previous blog post).  This photo was taken in 2009 in Melbourne, Australia.  All credit goes to the photographer Saspotato at Flickr.

A carpet of Asterias amurensis. Image credit: Saspotato via Flickr.

Kunstformen der Nature – Art forms of Nature

By  Nicole Webster

Ernst Haeckel is famous in biology for many reasons. A German biologist and contemporary of Darwin, he coined many biological terms like ecology, and phylogeny (albeit in German). He is also famous for the phrase and concept of ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, with the illustrations of various vertebrate embryo stages to support his theory.

Page from Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The history of creation), contrasting embyos of a human  (Mensch) with a dog (Hund), chicken (Huhn), and a turtle (Schildkröte)  - Wikimedia Commons

This last is very controversial, with both contemporary and modern accusations of fraud being thrown at him. I will not get into the details, but papers by Richardson and Richards and coauthors will give you a good idea if you want to know more (see below).

I want to talk about the third main reason that Haeckel is a biology household name (and a German one). He made gorgeous figures of the animals he studied. You can find scanned plates online (his copyrights have expired), or buy a poster. Recently I was directed to a site where you can get the .pdf itself (Thanks Dave!). The most famous is his Kunstformen der Nature – Art forms of Nature, with 100 colour plates of mostly marine organisms. It is fascinating to see, mostly accurate biological drawings with bright colours and flowing shapes.
Kurt Stüber, at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research has scanned over 100 000 pages of old and rare biology books, many with OCR (text recognition) or manually typed out transcripts! Included are also the gorgeous plates. All is sorted by year, author, or organism, and the main pages are available in English and German. Check it out here!

There are a number of Haeckel works present:

1. Kunstformen der Nature (Art forms of Nature) with 100 plates, in the approximate phylogenetic order of the time. There is a  list of species that are illustrated with page numbers.
   

   The ever beloved Nudibranchia

2. Die Radiolarien (The Radiolarians) – Part of the breathtaking world of unicellular skeletons.
   

   Mindboggling Radiolaria

3. Die Natur als Künstlerin (Nature as artist) with several colour or black and white plates of radiolarians and cnidarians.
   

   Flamboyant diversity

4. Kristallseelen (Crystal souls) – some neat crystal figures, looks like only the one page in in colour.
   

   OK abiotic is pretty too.

5. Natürliche Schöpfungsgechichte (Natural History of Creation)- This deals with his ideas on evolution and ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, and contains some figures (depending on the edition) that are controversial in that it is unclear to what degree they have been modified. It also contains some classification systems for various organisms. This is a link to the figures and tables, click the index for the full document.
   

   Systemmatic overview of the animal kingdom – Can you figure out the names?

6. Anthropogenie 

   Oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Mensche

   (Anthropogeny OR Development history of the people) – An Embryology textbook, also with controversial and famous figures.

   

   The famous plates (tafel) 5 and 6, not yet copied in the incomplete version available -From Wikimedia commons

This is only the tip of the iceberg, there are plenty of other amazing texts scanned by Kurt Stüber. Google translate is an amazing resource, so don’t be afraid to poke around and see some really amazing things even if they are in German.

References

Richards, R.J. (2009) “Haeckel’s embryos: fraud not proven“,Biology and Philosophy 24(1):147–154

Richardson, M.K., Hanke, J., Selwood, L., Wright, G.M., Richards, R.J., Pieau, C., Raynaud, A. (1998) “Haeckel, Embryos and Evolution“, Science280(5366): 983, 985-6

Richardson, M.K., Keuck, G. (2002) “Haeckel’s ABC of evolution and development“, Biological Reviews, 77: 495-528

Stueber, Kurt. Kurt Stueber’s online library. http://www.biolib.de/ Accessed April 25, 2013.

Wikipedia, Ernst Haeckel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel Accessed April 25, 2013.