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Jan 15, 2025 | 
kneedeeptimes.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
In 1999, regional managers vowed to restore 100,000 acres of tidal wetlands in the San Francisco Estuary by 2030. More than two decades later, over 53,000 acres have been or are in the process of being restored. But the effort to track those acres, and monitor the success of tidal marsh restoration projects, has relied on a patchwork of data collection efforts, each using different sampling methods over different time scales.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
richmondside.org | Iris Kwok |Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
King tides, the highest astronomical tides of the year, are expected along the San Francisco Bay shoreline Friday through Sunday and may cause minor flooding, according to the National Weather Service. At Richmond’s Inner Harbor, the tide surged to 7.2 feet Friday and is expected to peak again at 7.3 feet at 10:59 a.m. Saturday, according to predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The lowest tide is expected at 6:08 p.m. on Saturday.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
berkeleyside.org | Iris Kwok |Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
King tides, the highest astronomical tides of the year, are expected along the San Francisco Bay shoreline Friday through Sunday and may cause minor flooding, according to the National Weather Service. In Berkeley, the highest tides will be at 10:22 a.m. Friday and 11:02 a.m. Saturday, surging up to 7.4 feet, according to predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
baynature.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
The midnight zone begins half a mile below the surface of Monterey Bay, where sunlight can no longer reach. These dark depths are home to a menagerie of deep sea creatures, from bright red bloody-belly comb jellies (Lampocteis cruentiventer), with their strobing bioluminescence, to pale grapefruit-size pearl octopuses (Muusoctopus robustus) brooding over their eggs along warm cracks in the ocean floor.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
baynature.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
Sometimes new parents get lucky. They get “easy” babies. Young sunflower sea stars are the fussy kind—but their adoptive parents are managing. At a laboratory in the California Academy of Sciences, senior biologist Riah Evin tends to several glass candy jars of seawater in which tiny, translucent larvae twirl like flecks of snot. They must be constantly stirred, Evin and her colleagues have found, just like they would be in ocean currents.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
The Yangtze River is one of the longest rivers in the world, flowing nearly 4,000 miles from the western interior of China to the coast in Shanghai, and the surrounding valleys are home to thousands of species of woody and flowering plants, many of them rare. But throughout the river valley, temperatures are warming too fast for many native plant species to migrate or adapt in place, and hardier, non-native varieties are taking their place. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
The makeup of the dwarf planet Ceres—the biggest object in the asteroid belt—presents a riddle. Gravity and spectrographic data from a recent NASA mission suggest it is made mostly of ice. But its heavily dimpled and pockmarked surface seems to contradict this possibility: Ice is too soft to maintain such deep craters over billions of years. Now a team of researchers has found a potential answer to the riddle: dirty ice.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
baynature.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
Below looming high-rises, the new five-acre China Basin Park provides urban green space and views of San Francisco Bay in the rapidly developing Mission Bay neighborhood. A new snippet of Bay Trail wraps around the park’s edge, contributing to the vision of a greenway along San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
baynature.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
Rippling among blades of kelp or striking suddenly from sandy burrows, ribbon worms lurk through intertidal waters in search of their next target. These very thin, stretchy, and sometimes flamboyantly colorful worms are adept predators. To hunt their prey—including crustaceans, barnacles, clams, snails and annelid worms—ribbon worms shoot a mucus-slathered proboscis from their nose cavity, like a toxic lasso.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
baynature.org | Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
The Bay’s white sturgeon—huge, slow-to-reproduce “living fossils” that have hardly changed over their approximately 200 million years on Earth—are now facing such peril that the state of California has closed fishing for them under emergency regulations while it considers listing them as a threatened species. White sturgeon lurk in the murky bottom of San Francisco Bay and the Delta, stealthily making their way upriver to spawn and slurping up clams.
