Our students making hypertufa containers. This week, we'll plant up an indoor garden, and see what grows in our sunny window!

There's nothing like a harvest day! Our students love picking produce from our own little farm to share with friends and family. #growyourown #farmtotable #sustainable

Today, my students (Micah pictured here) had their first in-class salad of the fall semester, made entirely with crops from the garden! Salad days are back, NHSers! Merritt College #farmtotable #farmtofork #saladdays

At our NHS Open House last Friday, our wonderful students helped us get 50 native plants (donated by Friends of Sausal Creek!) in the ground at the Environmental Center at Merritt College. Looking forward to seeing our native garden grow!

The showy penstemon aka penstemon spectabilis, native to southern California, are fast and easy to grow. They attract several animals, perfect to use in a hummingbird, butterfly, and bee garden! They are drought tolerant and able to survive in dryer weather with little moisture.

Rode my bike down Leona Canyon yesterday and came across the AWESOME fence that students in our ENVMT 57 course helped deconstruct and install. Looks great! Shout out to Robbie Parry and a bunch of motivated students. East Bay Regional Parks #environmentalwork #workexperience

The California Effect npr.org/2022/09/06/112…

Is California Jump-Starting the Electric Vehicle Revolution? nytimes.com/2022/09/08/pod…

NHS students are tough; heatwaves can't stop 'em from planting seeds for a fall and winter food garden! #WorkingOutside #FoodJustice #UrbanAgroecology

The California Fuchsia aka epilobium canum is a species of willowherb native to California. Often found on dry slopes, they’re easy to spot with their bright red flowers! Sometimes also called the hummingbird flower because when in bloom, they’re very attractive to hummingbirds.

Just met with Ana Martinez of the City of Oakland's Environmental Services division, host to one of our PAID interns this Fall (proud to say all of our interns are paid!)

Nature is medicine.

So proud to be a community college program offering courses in such topics as bryophytes, lichens, tidepools, islands, and butterflies. Call us old-fashioned if you want, but this is what inspires most people who get into biology.

Lichens are amazing--we teach a course on them!

The tidal gates connecting Lake Merrit to the Bay are open. Large fish carcasses are piling up at the bars while the tide ebbs.

Mare Island, Vallejo is just covered in dead sturgeon. I’ve never seen anything like it 😭. All of the exact location data is in this project: inaturalist.org/projects/sf-ba…

#algalbloom #algaebloom #sfbayHAB2022 #fish #dieoff #sturgeon

So many questions and potential research projects with this Lake Merritt situation--Heterosigma akashiwo has been fingered as the prime suspect, but do we know this is the culprit, and if so, the mechanism for killing all these poor fish?

The fish die-off at Lake Merritt has been attributed to 'algae,' but what is algae anyway? The answer is--get this--algae aren't real. The term has been slapped on photosynthetic water-living organisms, but algae are not an actual clade--they have no exclusive characteristics.

Sometimes the smallest things can have the biggest effect. A single-celled protist is wreaking havoc at Lake Merritt, killing hundreds of bat rays and striped bass.

Have y'all seen the dead fish at Lake Merritt? To think, this is all the work of a single-celled organism that makes its own food and gathers with its friends to release toxins in the water called a 'red tide.' The culprit's name is Heterosigma akashiwo.