acorn barnacle ~ 06/17/10 ~ Coast Guard Pier

red-striped acorn barnacle
Balanus pacificus

Amazingly, this is an arthropod. Can you believe? This is a big specimen at 32mm along its base. I admit to bringing it home from the commercial boat loading dock parking lot and am not sure what to do with it now. Is it still alive? I'm tempted to get a bucket of ocean water to see if it'll open up. I'm making a huge guess as to its ID since there's not a lot of online information for barnacle species. Mainly, because of its size, I'm thinking it must be a Megabalanus. I did find a wonderful marine blog from across the pond while searching for the ID: Jessica's Nature Blog.

ps 11/30/13 - I originally posted this as Megabalanus californicus, but the variation of reported sizes, 30 mm to 60 mm, has continued to bother me.  So, I'm going with the smaller locally found Balanus pacificus as listed in The Beachcomber's Guide to Seashore Life of California.  Part of my problem for tracking an ID is that a couple of my favorite sites (like Walla Walla University and Washington State University) are too far north to include this pretty barnacle, which reportedly ranges from Chile and Peru to Monterey Bay.

wordless Wednesday

grunion greeting, 2010 #4

grunion greeting
new moon cycle, 10:40-11:35pm, clear skies

No grunion, but it was an interesting time, nonetheless. There were a lot of cars on the lower part of the pier with very few obvious fishermen... maybe because it was Saturday night, or the hot weather kept people out on the beach with bonfires, or a delayed airing of the World Cup was playing at the pub on the other side of the pier. With all the lights and no Charlie sighting this year, we didn't expect to see much grunion activity. We did see a couple fancy schmancy, lighted, remote-controlled flying toys and hundreds of small sand crabs in the surf.

habitat ~ 06/09/10 ~ Mt. Madonna County Park

Mount Madonna County Park
June 9, 2010

This was a lovely local place to camp less than an hour away from home. Our very friendly ranger told us it can get out of hand with drunken weekend revelers from the S.F. Bay area. We had the entire camp area to ourselves in the middle of the week, which was perfect for some private outdoor activities. The trails are in great condition and meander through cool redwood groves to hot manzanita and madrone areas.

Interestingly enough, there's an extensive archery course throughout - by this, I mean a true hiking and shooting course - not a static range - with targets of paper boar and bear nestled among the trees and complete with bow rests and benches. It reminded me a little of disc golf courses in our area. The poor, lone ranger said he hasn't brought his young son over since it'd be a hard time to find stray arrows. Apparently, the bowman's association designed the course so that any stray arrows don't land near the trails. Um, okay, I'll try to trust this information.

ps 01/06/10 - Having reviewed my pictures from our recent excursion to Mt. Madonna, I should mention the last picture above is looking east towards Gilroy.