Matt Bracken

@brackenlab.bsky.social

6162 Followers 2934 Following

Marine biodiversity - https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/biodiversity/ - he/him/his

I’m holding a small, red-brown crab between my thumb and finger, with a blurry marker cone, quadrat, and transect tape in the background.
A purple shore crab (*Hemigrapsus nudus*) is being sassy in the seaweed.
A selfie of four happy scientists who have just finished surveying their final study site on the Northern California coast.
A giant green anemone, a purple urchin, & a shiny mussel shell in a tidepool.
The map illustrates how the military expansion and trade networks of the Mongol Empire facilitated the trans-Eurasian spread of stuffed, boiled dumplings. It highlights the culinary link between the original Chinese dumplings (like jiaozi or mantou) and their subsequent regional adaptations across Asia and Europe (such as Central Asian mantu, Russian pelmeni, and Polish pierogi), as these concepts traveled alongside merchants, missionaries, and armies.
A calico cat & an orange tabby cat, siblings, cuddle with their legs intertwined.
Photo of my hand holding a clump of the deep-red, bumpy seaweed *Mastocarpus papillatus*
A coast paintbrush plant blooms orangely.
Salt sacs - *Halosaccion glandiforme* glow in the morning sun, with ocean, cliffs, and sky in the background. These seaweeds store saltwater when the tide is high, releasing it slowly during low tide to keep themselves cool and damp.
A kelp phylogeny from Starko et al. (2019) showing (among many things) the close relationship between *Postelsia* and *Nereocystis*.
A quadrat (surveying frame made of PVC and string for counting critters), clipboards, marker cone, and temperature data logger on a rocky intertidal reef, with the sea-palm kelp *Postelsia* in the immediate background.
A spotted cucumber beetle - yellow with black spots - crawls across the rock and encrusting algae in one of our intertidal study plots.
A bunch of purple urchins (*Strongylocentrotus purpuratus*) in their concave, circular niches, along with one sea anemone (*Anthopleura sola*) taking advantage of an otherwise unoccupied niche. They are surrounded by pink, encrusting coralline algae.
A picture of a gumboot chiton - *Cryptochiton stelleri*, the world’s largest chiton species, whose thick, red-brown skin completely covers its plates (hence, “*Crypto*”) - with my hand for scale. It is bigger than my hand.
A kid-drawn map of our 20 rockweed plots, illustrated in pencil in a Rite-in-the-Rain notebook. A transect line connects the plots in order.
Bedrock boulders covered with seaweed protrude from a gravel beach, with ocean, hills, and overcast skies in the background.
A tidepool in Sitka, Alaska, filled with ochre seastars (*Pisaster ochraceus*) and giant green sea anemones (*Anthopleura xanthogrammica*).
A “sea lemon” (family Dorididae) - a bright yellow nudibranch - clings to the low-tide rocks amidst seaweeds and sponges.
A shore crab on a gravel beach, with shells and bits of seaweed around.
Small, herbivorous littorine snails are important species in intertidal habitats, and some species can be pretty tricky to tell apart. The photo is of a survey sheet on an aluminum clipboard on which I’ve placed a bunch of snails that I’m trying to identify. They are in three piles: *Littorina sitkana*, *Littorina scutulata/plena*, & *Littorina* spp. because I’m not sure.
Mt. Rainier seen from a jet en route from SEA to SNA. It is near sunset, and the mountain’s shadow stretches behind it to the east.
View of rocky intertidal reefs covered with mussels (*Mytilus trossulus*), barnacles (*Semibalanus cariosus*), and seaweeds (*Leathesia marina*, *Fucus distichus*, etc.), with calm ocean, forested hills, clouds, and patchy blue sky in the background.
A selfie of two happy PIs & three happy grad students after a successful day of fieldwork.
A selfie of me on a rocky shore, smiling and holding a kelp.
~24 whelks - predatory snails - are gathered around a hex-head metal screw with a blue cable tie around it.
Photo of my hand, holding a shore crab (*Hemigrapsus nudus*) with a blurry transect tape, marker cone, clipboard, and intertidal rockweed bed in the background.
Lupines and buttercups in an Alaskan alpine meadow
Streptopus lanceolatus grows from a rhizome or seed, the stem having a zigzag shape, branched or sometimes unbranched. Up to 30 cm (12 in) tall with alternate wide lanced oval-shaped leaves with pointed tips and a rounded base, without leaf-stalks. The leaves are often finely toothed having fine hairs on the underside veins. Flowers appear as solitary individuals opposite each leaf in early summer (May to July) and are bell-shaped on 1–3 cm (0.4–1.2 in) long stalks bent midway, with 6 rose or white recurved petals with purple streaks.
An ochre star (*Pisaster ochraceus*) is surrounded by rockweed (*Fucus distichus*) on an Alaskan rocky shore.
Sunset reflections at ANB Harbor in Sitka, Alaska. Boats & their masts & stabie poles are silhouetted against the sky.
The space shuttle Endeavour on display at the California Science Center in 2022.
Looking down the riprap breakwater toward Mt. Edgecumbe.
Most of the 50-ml conical sample / centrifuge tubes I’ve used have blue caps, so I was happy to see these in an array of colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) sitting on a benchtop at the field station where I’m working right now. They are in a styrofoam rack in front of a window, with buildings, a tree-clad hill, and blue sky visible outside.
A huge thatched barnacle is surrounded by and festooned with very small barnacles.
In this image, I’m using a Hilti hammer drill to install lag screws into a rocky intertidal reef. The screws mark plots so we’ll be able to find & resurvey them over the next few years. Mussels are growing on the rock, and a mud / gravel beach, ocean, mountains, & blue sky are in the background.
A transect tape winds across a rocky reef, meandering through the rockweed, with orange cones marking plots for surveys and experiments. In the background is a gravel beach with a colorful kayak (not mine!), blue ocean, green & forested hills, and blue sky.
Mottled seastar - *Evasterias troschelii* - big & chonky w/ 5 long arms.
The anterior end of a decorated prickleback (*Chirolophus decoratus*), highlighting its branched cirri: the “decorations” referred to in both common and scientific names that could help camouflage it.
A calico cat and her sibling orange tabby cat nap on a purple quilt with her rear paws resting against him.
A striking, purple-and-white flower on the passion fruit vine that twines along our backyard fence.
An orange tabby cat is curled in a round hammock sling, perfectly conforming to the shape and demonstrating the fluid nature of cat matter.
Low-tide seaweeds in the Bodega Marine Reserve (Sonoma County, California) are illuminated by the rising sun.
A selfie of my t-shirt, which has an image of a snail and reads: “EASILY DISTRACTED BY SNAILS”
An orgy of frilled dogwinkles (*Nucella lamellosa*) - lots of predatory snails and their egg capsules on a rocky shore.
A beautiful, yellow mariposa lily, viewed from above.
An arch rock with the ocean visible through the arch.
The southern sea palm kelp, *Eisenia arborea*
“Giant” kelp - *Macrocystis pyrifera* - nestled in red algal turf at low tide
A “dark unicorn” whelk (*Mexacanthina lugubris*) - a large predatory snail - is drilling the shell of a California mussel.
A sunburst anemone (*Anthopleura sola*) basks in a tidepool. This individual has a creamy-white oral disc with radiating linear patterns and tentacles in hues of green and olive.
A tiny (~5mm long) chiton (maybe *Nuttallina fluxa* but super hard to tell when this small) is well-camouflaged against the pink crustose coralline algae on the rock.
Selfie of a group of happy marine ecologists on a rocky shore.
An orange tabby cat has burrowed under the covers, so only his tail is showing.
A tiny shore crab - red spots on the chelipeds - suggest the purple shore crab *Hemigrapsus nudus* - is held gently between my thumb and forefinger.
Power next created some prototype pots made from kelp cellulose and tested them in gardens. By one kind of tomato meter, the results were encouraging. “Not only does this not kill a plant, but we saw them outperform those that were grown in peat pots,” Power said. “We had twice as many tomatoes on our pots as the ones that we grew in plastic.”
Students survey a quadrat on a rocky shore to quantify marine biodiversity patterns.
A sunburst sea anemone (*Anthopleura sola*) devours a spiny lobster (*Panulirus interruptus*) on a Southern California rocky shore.
A sign from a National Park outhouse with two panels. On the left, labeled “NO!” is an image of someone standing atop the toilet and squatting. On the right, labeled “YES!” is an image of a person sitting on a toilet.
Fronds of the feather-boa kelp, *Egregia menziesii*, showing the tough, central rachis & attached, thin bladelets.
Graphic featuring three awesome algal logo designs: Check out our RedBubble store PSAalgaeStore for merch with this year’s conference logos!!