Kaitlyn Tonra

View of tidepools, hills, and a partly cloudy sky shortly after sunrise

Very tiny baby sea star (Pisaster) on a blue glove

Purple and orange Pisaster side-by-side in a barnacle/mussel bed with transect tape and tidepools in the background

Several Pisaster on a rocky bench, surrounded by mussels, barnacles, and anemones.

It's star season!

They’re animals! Those are encrusting bryozoans from the genus Membranipora that grow on kelp blades!

More info:
inverts.wallawalla.edu/Bryozoa/Clas...

An album of over 200 pressed seaweeds collected by an anonymous Victorian collector. A transcribed poem is pasted as title page, it begins: "Oh call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea."

I saw this at UW-Madison Special Collections 🌊📚
CA 19285

#seaweed #herbarium #naturalhistory

A young *Macrocystis* is nestled in the red algal turf in the low intertidal zone. This brown seaweed, known as giant kelp, can grow to be more than 45 meters long. Here, golden gas-filled bulbs emerge from a central stipe, each one tipped with a leaf-like brown blade.

A baby giant. 🌊💙 #PhycologyFriday

Reject norms, embrace chaos, liberate science from the structures that wish to control it. Citation Anarchy.

Warming Seawater Temperature and Nutrient Depletion Alters Microbial Community Composition on a Foundational Canopy Kelp Species Microbiome composition on the canopy kelp Nereocystis luetkeana in the northeast Pacific Ocean is affected by warming temperatures and nitrogen limitation. Following experimental manipulation of temp...

Warming Seawater Temperature and Nutrient Depletion Alters Microbial Community Composition on a Foundational Canopy Kelp Species enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #jcampubs

When fishermen harvested seaweed: Beaufort's agar industry | Coastal Review The curiosity that sparked when historian David Cecelski came across photos taken in 1944 of fishermen harvesting seaweed near Beaufort inspired a “bit of a deep dive" into topics he never imagined st...

Historian David Cecelski's discovery of photos taken in 1944 of fishermen harvesting seaweed by Beaufort led to a “bit of a deep dive” into the history of agar, seaweed ecology, the wartime crisis that led to seaweed harvesting and the Beaufort agar factory.
coastalreview.org/2025/03/when...

A tangle of the thick, branching, green coenocytic green seaweed *Codium fragile* - commonly referred to as “dead man’s fingers” - is resting in my hand.

Dead man’s fingers & live man’s fingers. This seaweed is rad because it is “coenocytic;” the entire individual is one, single, multinucleate cell. #Codium #Seaweed #MarineLife 🦑🌊

Good turnout for the Stand Up for Science March in Woods Hole, MA. While a small town on Cape Code, Woods Hole hosts 6 premier science institutions that include @mblscience.bsky.social, @whoi.edu, @noaa.gov fisheries, @woodwellclimate.bsky.social, USGS, and @sea1971.bsky.social

#standupforscience

A reproductive Mazzaella splendens

My early submission for #phycologyfriday, a reproductive Mazzaella splendens found in the intertidal this afternoon.

Spring has hardly sprung and the seaweed is already getting busy!

Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants Studies that touch on LGBT+ health, gender identity and DEI in the biomedical workforce could be terminated, according to documents obtained by Nature.

“It’s extremely alarming that grants that have been vetted by the scientific community and deemed important and impactful to understand the world are now being cancelled because of political ideology,” says @lkfazio.bsky.social.

“This is direct censorship of scientific research.”

Jonny and Liv prepping to deploy an anchor

Checking on baby bull kelp growth!

View of the kelp farm and mountains in the background

Doing my best as a novice deckhand

Yes things are bad but kelp farms are SO amazing!

This is SeaQuester kelp farm in Juneau, Alaska! They're growing super tasty kelp! Supporting local and sustainable food systems! Doing research! Saving the oceans!

Learn more about them (and support their work!) at seaquesterfarms.com!

Once again I am suggesting that you break some rules for practice. Get comfortable with breaking rules. When the rules are hurting other people, the right thing to do is break them. We need people who follow their moral code over the rules of their society, university, employer, and government.

For what it's worth: someone I know just got a request to review for the NSF ocean sciences postdoc fellowships! The website says "Archived" but it seems like postdoc fellowships are at least going out for review!

(Alt text: GIF of Alexandra Elbakyan from Sci-Hub waving at the camera)

View from the visitor center parking lot—this is approximately the same perspective as the past photos above

Me, standing on ice and pointing at the glacier!

Set of (relatively famous? at least in PowerPoint presentations that mention climate change) photos of Mendenhall Glacier from 1958, 1985, 2003, and 2010. It has gotten much smaller since 1958 :(

Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau! Famous for being smaller than it used to be :(

View of snowy mountains from downtown Sitka, AK.

(Relatively) blue skies in Sitka! Alaska Mariculture Conference is off to a good start ⛅️

Varied thrushes

Only 5 days left to submit an application to this summer's #REU - BLINKS program! We're excited to have so many awesome projects lined up 🎉
🦊🦀🪸🐠🌕🌱♻️🌏🌊🤖🐚☁️

Please pass this along and check out our website for project descriptions and application info: fhl.uw.edu/research/sum... @fishguy.bsky.social

Cover of the February 2025 issue of Ecology

Ecology's February cover is here — with a refreshing shot by Olivia J. Graham from a study examining herbivores' roles in seagrass disease dynamics

Find the issue here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/19399170...

Come join us for an exciting deep dive into the world of seaweeds. Priority applications are due February 14, applications submitted after this date will be considered on a rolling basis. #kelp #seaweed #biodiversity #botany

Female kelp gametophyte with small sporophytes growing from it

Male and female kelp gametophytes!

The good news is: kelp gametophytes‼️

These are pretty minimal but layers are there! The black lines are watershed basins and Ellicott Creek (hopefully) is bold blue

I'll work on it!

*Depending on the scale you're working with! This method doesn't handle high-resolution coastlines super well, but it's pretty easy over a relatively large area.

If you have site names and GPS coordinates I could probably make it work in about an hour! This didn't require any other input files :)

I have (easy to edit) R code for this kind of map if you wanted something similar!