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Clamsplaining

I'm Dan Killam. I'm a postdoc studying clams, climate and conservation.

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Recent Posts: Clamsplaining

New job! Where I’m going and how I got here

Research Explainer: How I learned to stop worrying and trust the clams

Gollum clams

Recent Science Communication!

Biosphere 2 Update!

It's been a year with this sweet potato. His favorite activities include lounging, snuggling, eating, chasing ribbon toy, finding new ways to troll me (eg. being a DJ and scratching the record when I'm listening to LPs), sitting in the window, and daily walks. Spider plant is flowering! Very proud of my sister Emily, who is walking today at USC! She is almost done with her Master's in Applied Psychology, working on a cool treatise project now! It has been great to see her pursue her passion, and hear her nerd out about human factors (a field encompassing user interfaces, psychology and engineering). It's funny how her path took her from UCSC undergrad to USC grad school, while I took the exact reverse path. Trojan slugs 4 lyfe! Bathtime for Saul Most of my job involves playing around with huge quantities of data about San Francisco Bay. Our team has over a dozen sondes (underwater data collectors/loggers) around the Bay continuously measuring temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, nitrate, pH and more. But yesterday I went out on a boat with my colleague Lilia Mourier to see some of these sondes for myself. Part of our job was cleaning out the vibrant ecosystems that were growing on our sondes. It was a truly dirty job and we were coated in mud by the end of the day. It is amazing how much grows on the sondes in a month or two. Forests of hydroids, mudskipper fish, barnacles, nudibranchs, and even clams! I couldn't take many pictures because I was usually wearing gloves covered in mud, but here were some shots. 1: isopods, 2: Atlantic ribbed mussel, 3: the mud itself was crawling with worms, amphipods and copepods, 4: shorebirds, maybe dunlins? 5: unknown juvenile bivalve, maybe a macomid, 6: eastern mudsnails. RIP to my brother Joe. He had been with us for 18 years, rescued from a fire with his litter mate Moe. He was extremely cuddly and snuggly. I have hundreds of pictures of him laying on me in various configurations. He was also obsessed with rubbing himself on freshly showered feet and my beard. He was an eclectic fellow. He aged gracefully; even last month he was chasing around that laser pointer, but a sudden aggressive cancer took him. I will miss him dearly, as he has been around since I was 14. But I also feel bad for his surviving soul mate Moe, as they were inseparable. We will find a way to keep Moe company. Thanks for everything Joey! Springtime in Berkeley Operation clam roof is a success! We needed a long-term way to protect the lights from salty water dripping from the Biosphere dome, because the umbrellas weren't cutting it. I am fairly incompetent in terms of handyman stuff, but I hope this jury-rigged solution will help the salty water slide off the side! Now I feel confident the clams and their lights will be protected. In the medium term, the clams will be moved to a smaller touch tank when a huge new lighting system is constructed, spanning the entire Biosphere 2 ocean. This structure can be adapted to hang over the side tank where they are kept. Jalapeño lime kombucha, courtesy of Wallace the scoby (or their daughter, I split them recently), made with fresh peps from the plant on my balcony. Basically the most laborious way to mace myself (yummy but not for everyone 🔥👨‍🚒🧯🎆🧨💥🌶🍹

RSS Inaturalist Observations

  • Sergiolus
    Observed on ceiling, cupped and put outside
  • Common Snakeflies
  • Monarch
    Relocated them to another milkweed that hadn't been picked clean
  • wax-leaf ligustrum
  • raintrees
  • Bacopa
  • Noble False Widow
  • Isopods
  • Eastern Mudsnail
  • Atlantic Ribbed Mussel

Past Entries

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  • July 2017 (10)
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