Patrick Duffy

It's so weird that when I ask AI about subjects I have zero understanding in, I get great help. Yet, when I ask about subjects I'm familiar with the answers are dogshit. /s

Hyping up one of my favorite plants I keep, the Yaupon holly. It is the only native NA plant to contain caffeine (tea plant) and grows densely on the SE-USA coastline. The strong and fibrous root systems are an under-appreciated guard against soil erosion.

Really, really tired of trying to tune out the neon-flashing signs of "fascism is here, now" so I can finish a dissertation. Thankful for therapy.

I think I lived an entire lifetime the past decade, honestly.

Saxsquatch, the only sasquatch playing sax and mixing with EDM, is playing 1 & 1/2 hours from me in a few weeks. Genuinely my favorite artist to have on playlists, hear people like, then be able to state, "Yea, that's a dude in a Sasquatch costume".

@oceanemily.bsky.social found a color-image of this Doliolida nurse 'morph' (taxa?) captured by a blackwater dive photographer. I wish it answered any of my questions!!! Absolutely stunning photo that creates more questions.

"Consider the influence of two tropical systems on each other's trajectories" is a crazy final exam hypothetical that I'm enjoying watch play out in the model-predictions. Either hitting Florida or east of Bermuda, beautiful uncertainty.

Had some fun "getting as far up-river as possible in 30 minutes one-way" today with my senior undergrads.

I wish I had the ability to sit back and just observe. Maybe with more age it will come.

I would like to stop living in interesting times, please.

Some senior MARS undergrads are in for my big (little?) invert-energy tomorrow; I get to give a mini Zooplankton-Phyla lecture and lead an image-data lab (with R-coding)! I'm curious to see how many of them prefer the Tidyverse way of life.

The chiltepin pepper is the only Capsicum native to the USA, and has become one of my favorite backyard crops. Good heat, fruity flavor, easily dries into peppercorns that look pretty and are useful.

There are far too many 35+ year old dudes who are trying to re-live their high school glory days in recreational sport leagues.

The large number of "clickbait weathermen" is something I never (was algorithm fed) noticed until recently. There are clearly many 'normal' people who cannot tell these pages are sensationalist, and use cherry-picked individual model runs.

Nobody warned me about the variety of emotions that follow clicking "submit" on a manuscript yourself for the first time.

"Let's make every show/movie as dark as possible, as often as possible, to save on our budgets".

It blew my mind to meet (seemingly) every single person that wrote a manuscript I found inspirational.

The 7th Zooplankton Production Symposium was the best experience possible for an early career researcher. We are keeping in touch, and we are motivated.

"...to move vehicle between depths of approximately 3 m from the surface, to avoid bubbles generated by the ship propeller, to approximately 4 m from the bottom, to give plenty of error room so we don't crash the instrument into the sediments when crew fail to answer the walkie."
(I'm joking...)

Contacted a few 'doliolid/image experts' and they are also perplexed. A cordycep-like fungus, because doliolid is still moving (in the water column) but also has long filaments, is my fun hypothesis that conveniently is not my problem to investigate further via molecular methods.

A doliolid nurse with a cadophore. On the cadophore-chain there are only feeding trophozooids. The feeding trophozooids appear elongated and have long strands sticking out of them

I don't think I've seen a doliolid nurse like this before... what is hanging out from the trophozooids? My gut is saying fungus?... Could be 'stuck diatom chains', but the strands bend; could be fecal material, but it looks too solid and long. Sticking from every trophozooid, so not image-artifact.

After >10 years as a Google/Chrome system user, the continued push to remove ad-blocking plug-ins (such as uBlock) is the straw that sends me back to Firefox.

Ensembled evaluations of habitat suitability for prioritizing lesser prairie‐chicken conservation Populations of lesser prairie-chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus, hereafter “prairie-chickens”) in the Mixed-Grass Prairie Ecoregion of the southern Great Plains have been projected to go extinct i....

My favorite part of the zooplankton-imaging 'niche' is that I get to read ecology papers from across the land-sea interface. Turns out, nets really hamstring your ability to meet statistical assumptions and make inferences.

Such as this cool research on prairie chicken possible habitat.

Oh hey, that's a Siphonophore that I encounter frequently using shadowgraph imaging in the South Atlantic Bight off the SE, USA coast. They aren't the only "oddly geometic" gelatinous zooplankton I've noticed. I added another image of a different species I don't have time (in my PhD) to identify.

Surreal to see people proudly wearing concentration camp merchandise. I am not proud to be an American today.

It's kind of fun telling undergraduate interns, "You literally already have more experience with R than I did when I was in your spot." It's the little things in life that I'm holding onto while watching my future plans become defunded.

"Doliolids look like hand grenades" oh great, now I'm researching why hand grenade shapes influence trajectory

I love how much energy some larval/juvenile fishes invest early into eyes and jaws. Pictured here are some young eels (Leptocephalus) from the South Atlantic Bight during August 2022. Look at that jaw on the smaller ~2cm individual! #FishLarvae

Sometimes it feels like I'm being told to "Draw the owl" but keep getting told the owl species I drew isn't the correct one.

Stratification intensity structures zooplankton functional trait composition in a continental shelf system Abstract. Zooplankton composition and distribution influence prey quality and availability for higher trophic levels, yet ecological forces structuring com

New research authored by the Zero-C lab's 1st MSc student: "Trait diversity was less variable in mixed waters due to the dominance of low carbon content zooplankton or passive swimmers....Stratification and mixing generate distinct environments and consistent trait assemblages"