Zoea, sea butterflies, and amphipods, oh my!

They are built: PVC cylinders, roughly 15 centimeters in height, with hunks of AC filter that look like an under-mowed putting green rubber-banded around them. These awkward contraptions are meant to catch blue crab megalopae. I've deployed them off the pier two nights in a row, hoping to entice the little larva's settling instinct... and caught one (1) Callinectus sapidus megalopae. Not exactly a propitious commencement to this project, but I haven't given up hope on my little crablets yet.

And the fact that I've only caught one blue crab doesn't mean that I haven't rinsed a wealth of amazing and entirely ridiculous life from my briny air-conditioning filters. Since I know practically nothing about zooplankton, the grad student that's been helping me identify the critters my "artificial substrates" have yielded invariably stifles outbursts of laughter at my descriptions of the ocean-bugs. "It looks like a clear tube of toothpaste with a gross worm inside," I'll say, or, "I found a chicken fetus with three huge horns!" I could spend forever perusing my petri dish, just finding shapes in the bodies of these alien organisms.

Below I've provided a petite potpourri of the barely-macroscopic menagerie that has become my domain. The pictures are of a crab zoea, a "sea butterfly," and an amphipod, in that order:

Today I tagged along on a sampling mission in the Mission-Aransas Estuary. For five hours the motorboat jolted across green water, huge blooms of cabbage-head jellies left shivering in our wake. There was a thunderstorm brewing over the western horizon, and I watched bolts of lightning hopscotch between nebula-esque thunderheads. From zooplankton to the ocean to the endless starry skies revealed by the waning moon... in that instant I saw the universe spread before me like a fabulous set of Russian dolls.

Ah, it is 9:00 and I must retire--I'm going to try to snatch up some of these elusive blue crab megalopae in a plankton net, and it just so happens that they only come out during the nocturnal flood tide. Thus I, a slave to the lunar calendar, have set my alarm clock for 4:19 a.m.