So I went to Lighthouse park (in West Vancouver on Saturday). Pretty good day, considering we live on the WET (I think we should just officially drop the ‘s’ in west) coast and Saturday was rather sunny. This is only the second time I have ever (in memories short reaches) been to Lighthouse Park, and this time was considerably better than the last! Saw all kinds of interesting things in the tidal pools, most of which I know far more about than I would like to admit. I think that I am forever brainwashed into the biology thing – I cannot look at a hermit crab or something without thinking that I should not have forgotten the scientific name. I used to know these things. What I did see, that I could name, included a number of sea grasses, snails (Nucella emarginata, Littorina sitkana – but, alas, no Littorina scutulata!!! ), isopods (Idothea wosnozenskii – strangely named after someone called Wosnozenski!!!!!), blue mussels ( Mytilus edulis, and lots of other stuff of which I won’t bore you with the names of. I could have gone on about these things with the people that I was there with, but I decided to keep my yap shut, at least some of the time. I still want to know why ALL of the dungeness crabs (Cancer magister) were DEAD!!! It could have been a coincidence but, I think that that part of the ocean is probably just FUCKED from all of the runoff and toxins ( Im taking toxicology II this semester) from those swanky west van housing developments. When was the last time you heard swanky in a sentence?
I was good to be there on a good day. The tide was lower than last time (you can then see more of the stuff in the intertidal zone…), it wasn’t raining, no one was complaining (even ME!), and there was no makeup running down someones rain poncho (truth really IS stranger than fiction – and is also a long story). Actually last time was about two years ago, and since I have gone to west vancouver a lot lately, I’ll probably end up at LP a lot more now that I really know what is there. Last time was actually quite funny – everybody got completely soaked. This in itself was not exceptional, even for a January in Vancouver, however the aftermath seemed typical of the period. I wore these gigantic hiking boots, jeans, and stuff. As I mentioned I got completely soaked, muddy to the knees, etc. So what do we do later? Everybody seems to have a change of clothes (not me….) and we go out to dinner in Vancouver!! So I walk into this restaurant in downtown on Robson and something or other, with soaked jeans and muddy hicking boots with these two who look more like they should be going out to eat. Oh well. It was fun – and my feet dried out sometime in March I think.