Ok hear me out… There are many resources for new students to figure out academics, their programs, etc., and I’m certainly not the best source for those. Sure every program and university in San Diego are different but you know what all the students have in common? they’re moving to a whole new city during a pandemic! I created this guide with the help of my friends— The Gradstudent’s ultimate Guide to San Diego… for FUN. This is in PDF form with a little video with some of the highlights of it. Please share if you think someone can find this useful!
You know I love my Jeep, you know I love adventures, you know I love the coast, and nerding out about plants and animals!!! … so if you want to join me on my car adventures, follow my YouTube channel! (don’t forget to hit the thumbs up, sucka!)
As you can imagine, the Marine Ecology and Biology Student Association cannot host Marine Science Day at the Coastal Marine Institute this year… Dang it, pandemic! But fear not! We’ve got you covered! We have been working extra hard to put this short film together so we can show you what we have been up to! Please watch and share!
Please consider donating to the Marine Ecology and Biology Student Association. Our entire budget is funded by donations and grants from people like you. If you would like to make a contribution to marine science outreach in San Diego, CA, please click here to make a donation through PayPal or @MEBSA-CMIL on Venmo. MEBSA Tax ID: 45-4172955
Check out this news clip about how my advisor at SDSU, Dr. Jeremy Long, with the help of the lab tech superstar Wendi White, saved our experiment! If you know me, you know i’m always talking about bringing science to da hood, well, my advisor literally brought it to his! It was great seeing this and it actually gave me this boost of energy and excitement that I needed! I am ready to get back to business! LONG LAB!!!
Mira este clip de noticias sobre cómo mi professor de SDSU, el Dr. Jeremy Long, con la ayuda de la superestrella Wendi White, salvó nuestro experimento! Si me conoces, sabes que siempre hablo de llevar la ciencia a barrio, bueno, mi mentor lo trajo (literalmente) al suyo! ¡Fue genial ver esto y en realidad me dio el impulso de energía y emoción que necesitaba! ¡Estoy listo para volver a los negocios de la ciencia en mi barrio!!
Woohoo! We are officially online! You can now get some DaHoodScientist swag! As many of you know, I always print tons of stickers and love to pass them out at different events or anytime I see you lovely people! Well, that’s not going to change! I will continue to print them and pass them out.
However, as you can imagine… IT AIN’T CHEAP (especially for a graduate student). So, in order to continue doing this, I decided to open up an online merch shop with all of my art. You can order just about ANYTHING you want with my doodles on it. I am not even kidding… they have everything from stickers to socks, shirts, coffee mugs, phone cases, leggings, heck, they even have shower curtains haha.
Please feel free to browse and see if there is anything you like! You can even message me if you’d like the art moved around on a product or the size adjusted or something.
Last favor, I promise. Could you do me a solid and share the page or this post? I’m sure the store will get going but you would do me a huge favor by spreading the word. THANK YOU!!!
So, my friend Tali dropped the hottest quarantine track of 2020! Needless to say, I am READY to go back home to San Diego (and will soon) but now I’ve gotten to this point where I, for sure, will miss some people. Tali Caspi is one of those people. Tali is a super talented scientist who studies that novel, but ever increasing, ecosystem that exists between urban environments and nature. Outside of science, Tali is an incredibly talented musician, singer/songwriter, and dancer! She wrote this awesome song after some inspiration from being quarantined due to this dreadful virus and having to resort to virtual socializing. A person with such an incredible voice and so much creativity just NEEDS to be heard! Enjoy.
https://youtu.be/H7I_dqfrVrQ
I have a ton of things I should be doing but needed a mental Break! So, put together this little compilation of videos from Summer 2018 at Bahia de Los Angeles. I am really missing the ocean right now. Can’t wait to be back near the big blue!
Enjoy!
The Long Lab had a great research trip this past month! We successfully deployed two big experiments and conducted a lot of surveys! Big ups to my advisor, Jeremy Long, for coming out with us. That definitely gave me a huge boost in confidence as a leader and a scientist. My lab tech, Wendi White, worked her butt off to get us all prepared for the trip but had to leave early. We missed her but she set up for success, even in her absence.
Props to everyone who came out:
Dr. Jeremy Long (Kick-ass adviser, mentor, rolemodel)
Jan “I taught you everything you know” Walker (Senior PhD student in my labs)
Wendi White (the greatest lab tech ever, looking for a PI so HOLLLAAAA)
Sam Folger (an amazing Long Lab undergraduate researcher)
Anthony “Big T” Truong (goofball, newest Long Lab MS student completing a thesis in sarcasm)
Darbi Berry (My good friend, a geomorphologist, check her out at dirtbabe.com)
Austin Wayne (recent SDSU graduate and newest Long Lab researcher)
William Hoyer (US Navy resource manager at SNI, kick ass collaborator, human wikipedia)
Ooh! that reminds me!
Good News! Long Lab friend and collaborator Bill Hoyer got us permission to film and photograph on the San Nicolas Island. I’m currently combing through footage and putting a story together. My tentative goal is to have a finished video in six-eight weeks, have it approved by the Navy and share with you all! I have not started a script but depending on how it goes this may be a longer video or a series of shorter ones, we’ll see!
more soon!
for now, enjoy this beautiful picture of a tide pool. There are not many things more beautiful than the rocky intertidal.
As promised, here is my first SciCom video! I’m hoping to make more of these videos based on my research, the research of my lab, colleagues, and just cool science in general. Once I have enough subscribers I can make custom links etc. For now, help ya boy get some clout, aight?
Thanks yall! please share!!
Hi Y’all!!!
So, It’s almost been three months since I moved up to Davis for the second year of my Doctoral Program. Here’s my review:
The Science: 5/5 Holy cow, UC Davis has some BADASS ecologists. That goes for faculty AND students. Inevitably, conversations always turn into science talk and I have no complaints about that. Also, getting to talk to the researchers whose work I admire is such a cool experience.
The Price: 5/5 Other than tuition, everything is so much cheaper than San Diego (especially rent)!!!
The Scenery: 2.5/5 What’s autumn?? if You’re into trees, leafs, turkeys, and flat land, this is your spot! Unfortunately, I prefer the coast and not a huge fan of seasons, so….
The Food: 0/5 I’m not gonna get into this one. Just know this, there is no good Mexican food at all. People here claim that Thai food is great but I don’t have much of a reference point there.
The People: 8/5 Everyone here is so incredibly nice. No really, like, “why the heck is everyone so nice"? this is kinda sus…” type of nice. The only downside for me is that I don’t have much in common with anybody in terms of hobbies and interests outside of science.
Which leads me to my next point. For as adaptable as I am, I’ve had a difficult time finding my niche in Davis. My first month was super difficult. More culture shock than moving between cities/states/countries before. I’m used to the hood, graffiti, music, lowriders, motorcycles, etc. It took me a while to catch some traction but thanks to my lab mate and friend, Jan, I was able to push through and found my place.
Like always, art was the common ground. The one true universal language. I seek it out, I make it, I find others who love it too. Mixing science and art is the greatest and nothing brings me more joy! Whether art is in the form of music, dance, painting, drawing, or whatever, It always makes me happy.
Fast-forward to now: When people find out I am also a tattoo artist, our fascination with tattoos always makes for good conversation. I recently hosted a few new friends at my house for a “tattoo on fruit” party. It was a great time! I got to show them how to tattoo using fruit and nobody accidentally tattooed themselves (or others). Shoutout to Nick, Nina, Victoria, Tali, Maddie, Sam, Alice and Darien for their awesome work! Heres some pics for your viewing pleasure.
Peace!
Maddie, our only lefty!
Don’t let Nick’s confused face fool you, he’s a natural.
Tali was happy with her results, despite only being able to tattoo THICC lines.
Nick loves his momma.
Victoria tattooed an entire Italian brunch on a tiny orange.
Nina naturally decided to tattoo a forest!
Sam forgot what coast he is on, I guess. hahah.
Darien tattooed her mom’s perfume bottle. aww.
Jeez Maddie, way to make a mess hahaha
FOCUS!
me and snek will haunt your dreams!
I decided to take a class taught by Eric Sanford this fall quarter at UC Davis, and I gotta say, this might be one of my top 5 classes ever taken. The class is called “Science communication through film” which gives me an excuse to use my affinity for art in a different form. I have been working on a short film about the work I am doing in the Long Lab. Basically, if you have visited my projects section, I have turned all of that (plus some results) into a short 3 minute film.
Aside from all the fun i’ve had learning video techniques and video editing, this class made me want to do this more often. I realize there was a big learning curve but as I get better at the technical stuff, I can see it being a much quicker process. I hope to keep it going! first video will be released on December 5th and from then on I will make more as time permits. For now, enjoy this video of a whale shark over a really awesome beat by my homie Tyler of Ty Tunez.
I like to take my days off back-to-back….to-back-to-back-to-back. I know we all do work/life balancing a bit differently but i think what works for me is working nonstop for a while and follow that with a mini vacation. I agree that a work and life balance is necessary to keep our sanity but lately I’ve been chatting with friends and colleagues about their ways of managing busy work lives. Chatting with my buddy Brian yesterday, he mentioned he regrets not picking up a hobby when he was in grad school because he thinks it would have helped with stress management.
What’s the point of all this? I wan’t to draw more! I’d like to get back into tattooing and will make it a point to allocate some time for this! My good friend Thiago wants a copepod tattoo so I think thats the next one I’ll do, once i get the drawing right. I also want to draw more ocean cartoons! do you have any ideas or requests for flora or fauna you’d like to see cartoonified? send them my way.
below is a copepod that needs to be unsquishyfied for a tattoo
Just finished the first year of my PhD program! I sort of underestimated how busy I would be (which explains my lack of blog entries), but I’m happy with everything I’ve accomplished over the last two semesters.
Year one, in a nutshell, consisted of four classes (fundamentals of Ecology 1 & 2, univariate and multivariate stats), three experiment deployments, and lots of experimental design/redesign. I am extremely excited that my team and I have developed a really awesome method of measuring grazing rates in the rocky intertidal and are gearing up for a big deployment this fall (more on that later). We are also pairing some really cool lab assays with the field work; I plan on posting photos and videos of this in the research section of this site. Oh yeah! My lab is also starting to develop a new project looking at human impacts on sea-to-land nutrient subsidies, too early to give you the scoop now but keep an eye out for that project.
As I keep saying in other posts— I will try to update much more often and include some awesome multimedia stuff for your viewing pleasure!
For now, I will be taking a couple weeks off of work/school and everything else! Just need a mental health break (those are important)… I love the hustle, I love staying busy, I loooove the pressure required to get our stuff done (pressure is how you make diamonds, after all ;) haha). With that said, I’m a firm believer that if you don’t let off the throttle every now and then, you run out of gas! It’s all about balance! See you soon, nerds!
ric
Hey everyone!
I’ve had a few people ask me when i’m going to update this page and I promise I will do so ASAP. I’m currently working on adding a new section with past and present research projects—just a fun way to communicate our results and an excuse to share fun pictures. I also plan to add a, sort of, central repository where I will write very short (and hopefully entertaining) summaries of the hundreds of papers I read for my work. I’d like to think I can pull out the most important bits, share why I think they are interesting, and of course, link the original authors here.
For now, I have spent so much time in the field that i’ve become kind of obsessed with the functionality, durability, and practicality of my gear, so, I will copy my mentor Drew’s post “What’s in my (field) bag". In the next few days I will give ya’ll some suggestions for gear I find to be useful for rocky intertidal work. Speaking of my mentor, check out his blog! he does a much better job at keeping it up and posting interesting stuff (and was what inspired me to make my own blog). www.fundulus.net
Oh yeah, while you’re at it, peep this, Drew gave ya boy another shoutout on the latest edition of the USD Faculty Newsnotes for the paper we published this past December: http://catcher.sandiego.edu/items/usd/fnn-02-19.pdf (paper reference at the bottom).
Oh yeah, check out this dirt babe’s page! Darbi Berry is a colleague and a good friend of mine. She just recently got her page going and I promised I would make her a fun logo as soon as I finish Drew’s. So stay tuned for some new art! www.dirtbabe.com
Peace!
DeSantiago, R. and D.M. Talley. 2018. Foraging Strategy May Predict Anthropogenic Debris Consumption in Wetland Fishes. In: Proceedings of The National Conference On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2018, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, Oklahoma April 5-7, 2018.
So grad school is on full blast and showing no signs of slowing down! I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up, though. I’m happy to say that my research project is already moving at a decent pace even though it’s only my second month in the Joint Doctoral Program in Ecology. My first field days on San Clemente Island are coming up in a week and I can’t wait to share my adventures with everyone. We will be getting to know our system and trying out some preliminary experimental designs to measure herbivore grazing rates in black abalone habitats. Should be pretty fun! I will have an awesome crew out there with me. I’ll tell you a little bit about them:
My advisor, Dr. Jeremy Long, is community ecologist who studies the relationship between plants and their herbivores, and how their interactions shape communities and ecosystems. He is an expert in chemical signaling and a boss at both lab and field experiments. Also, just a great man and a hell of a dude to chill with. Jo joke, my advisor is a beast on the dance floor and the mic.
My lab tech, Wendi White, was my lab mate when I was an undergrad here at SDSU. Through some awesome peeps at the Navy, we were able to hire her, full time. Wendi graduated with a BS in Biology (2018) and wants to get more research experience before she applies to a graduate program. Her interests in community ecology overlap very well with everyone else at the lab. Although she is mainly working on the Abalone Project, Wendi is a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to ecology. Wendi’s main interest is ecosystem subsidies and in her spare time she is working on a wrack project with Jeremy and Dr. Rulon Clark.
Luke Miller, the new professor in the Department of Biology at SDSU. Luke seems like a great guy, very approachable and incredibly talented. He is interested in ecophysiology, biomechanics and programming (R, C++, MatLab, LabVIEW). I recently attended his talk where he shared some awesome work he did with electronics—this guy attached sensors to mussels that allowed him to record movement, temperature, and heart rate. How cool is that?? Anyway, Luke is getting his lab going next to mine and I assume he is going to need students soon! go find him! lukemiller.org
Last but not least, we will be joining forces with NMEC, a collaboration of the Navy’s SPAWAR and NAVFAC people who monitor wildlife on the Channel Islands. They are amazing people, I am lucky to work with Suzie Graham, Paul Wade, Brian Hong, Brendan Saunders, Christiana Salles, Jessica Bredvik, Dana Schrimpf, Sabrina Mashburn, and Greg Clune.
Last night the BAHIA students presented their research projects at the San Diego Natural History Museum. I must say, those 21 high school students far surpass the skill level of many college students when it comes to presenting. Although they were justifiably nervous about presenting in front of hundreds of people-- they walked up to the stage with the confidence the poise of an experienced scientist.
In the few weeks that I worked with these students, I saw tremendous growth, not only as scientists but as people in general. While adhering to the rigid and arduous schedule of the program they learned to rely on each other to complete tasks, and in the process, built strong bonds and friendships that will last a lifetime. I cannot wait to see where life takes these students, I have no doubt they have bright future ahead.
The photobiology team, missing one student
If you know me in person, you know Drew Talley (USD, fundulus.net) is my favorite person. I can confidently say that much of my success is owed to this man’s mentorship. I won’t get too mushy, but Drew selflessly cares about people, loves to make others laugh and is an amazing friend and scientist. Drew is the head scientist for the Spatial Subsidies group in the BAHIA program. I don’t want to misrepresent their research, so I won’t go into detail, but I can say they are testing out different methods to survey the islands.
If you know Drew in person, you know he is the gadget king! He always has the coolest tech toys and this time he brought down a couple of drones. I’m obsessed with this little DJI Spark drone he has been using. It looks like tons of fun to operate and now it has got me thinking of potential projects where I can use it as a tool. Hmmm.
By the way, the picture above was taken by Drew’s drone, how cool is that?
The Adaptive Management Team, as we rightfully renamed the Photobiology Team, has had it rough out here. I will spare you the details, but I will say that despite the many things outside of our control, that have gone wrong, these students far surpass my expectations. For one, they have no problem learning the material and conducting the work. More importantly, though, they are just amazing human beings! I have been fortunate to have gotten to know them pretty well over the last few weeks. We have a lot more in common than any of us expected and this allows me to use my story to help them through theirs.
Ok, but what about the little hand in the picture?
Stacy Prater-Vigil, a friend of Ocean Discovery and just all-around awesome human, randomly pulled this little rubber hand out of her pocket, put it on her finder and rested it on my shoulder. This was hilarious, don’t ask why because I do not know, it just brought so much joy to me. Stacy noticed I had a rough day and let me keep the tiny hand since it brought me to tears in laughter. HAHA! This thing is so cool!
Despite all the craziness going on in our country right now, I couldn't think of a place I'd rather live in. We celebrated USA's birthday in Mexico. Thank you Mexicans for not yelling "go back to your country! this is Mexico, speak Spanish!" or anything like that. HAHA
The project is moving at slug speed (how appropriate). Without a collection permit from CONANP we have been unable to move forward. To make it even more frustrating, we finally received a permit but are NOT allowed to collect Elysia diomedea or any type of green algae. It has been rough but somehow Dave Sandstrom has kept us moving forward. This man is great at improvising, adapting and managing. By the way, Dave also has a great sense of humor—him and Dr. Drew Talley in one room almost guarantees someone will fall off their chair in laughter. Anyway, Dave and I have used our seemingly limitless time to help our students understand concepts of molecular bio. Today, during our lesson on the building blocks of DNA, Dave asked if anybody knew how many bases are in one megabase. Diana, a brilliant student (and as hood as ya boy) shouted out “hellabases!” PRICELESS! So, if you didn’t know, now you know, 1 Megabase=Hellabases