Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre

Hey,
I did some more west coast hippy beach combing, no weed, but booze aplenty, and high school girls! yeehaw! It was a more or less all expenses paid vacation (through school) to Bamfield to visit the intertidal and see the great blue ocean. Good Christian fun. Sarah is chatting away with Dave, so I'm attaching some pictures for your viewing pleasure:



This is the view from the Centre. Yes, that's right, I woke up to this for a few days. This is the head of an inlet that goes back some ways into the island. There are lots of houses right on the water in there. Plenty of hippies and scientists, the people are all windswept and enjoy their little private area.










This is a stump... I like stumps. They're totally cool. This one is at the end of the inlet by a muddy beach. If I could I'd bring it home and set it in my living room. Sarah would love that.













If there is anything I like more than stumps, it's bashed up ships. These were not far from the aforementioned stump, so as you can rightly imagine, I was thrilled with this spot. Stumps and bashed up ships oh my!
















Let also not forget I'm a big marine biology nerd, and I happilly stick my head above tide pools for extended periods of time. This is a giant green anemone with a little purple one off to the left there. One of the guys dropped a dead fish into one of these, and it ate the little fucker right up. Rad! (they use that word out here a lot).










Shit hawks! apparently there are more than one species, either way, they flocked us when we did a bottom trawl, lots of shrimpies for them to eat. I should've tried one myself. Either way, I like this picture.











This is a sea star (no shit). Lots of these little buggers, we saw one later that was like 30-40 cm across. They're known to eat children. True story.













This is one of the beaches we sampled. Three weeks ago all the rocks were covered with sand. A storm came through and ripped it all out. For the zoology nerds (that's you Kat), there were a good number of organisms that had already colonized the area, mostly small mussels, but also limpets and other gastropods. I even found some anemones (Sarah and I call these assholes, because that's what they look like when they're closed. I'll send a picture sometime).






Another view of the same beach. Truly freaking cool. We had the whole place to ourselves. I even saw a sea lion swimming by as we were leaving. Oh yeah, and in Bamfield Inlet you (almost) get bored of seeing harbour seals swimming by.













Kelp! Kelp! Macrocystis integrifolia. I got a free poster with some of the west coast seaweeds. How cool is that? Oh yeah, there is more seaweed biodiversity here than in the tropics. That's totally wild.
You can eat this. I tried some fresh out of the water, it wasn't bad. It was even spiced with some copepods. We cooked some up later with garlic and olive oil. It tasted like egg plant. Some people tried oysters, I wanted to (I like them and lets face it: I can use some zinc!). There were some big assed ones, 20cm across. My prof calls them Crassostrea bigass, which is an amusing pun on Crassostrea gigas. Get it?




That's my story. I'm done here.

Remi