Last week I visited UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Lab for the first time. Perched on the edge of Monterey Bay and nestled against the edge of Younger Lagoon, the lab is perfectly situated for aquatic and coastal research.
I was there to talk with Eric Palkovacs and his graduate student David Fryxell about mosquitofish (a creature I’ve written about before on The Watershed), for a story that appeared in today’s Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The researchers recently published a paper on the ways in which mosquitofish populations dominated by males and females differ. Mosquitofish females grow to be about twice as big as males, and the scientists found that the females’ ecological effects are outsized, too.
The view of Monterey Bay from Long Marine Lab.
(Image by Sara Stasi via Flickr: Creative Commons license)