Coral Nerd, Ph.D.

@coralnerd.bsky.social

201 Followers 282 Following

Deep-sea biologist and Southerner living in the North

Back in 2014, when I was debilitatingly sick, I found myself doubting my illness at times. I'd wonder if I was somehow making the fevers up in my mind and secretly manipulating my friends and loved ones into feeling sorry for me. Even my doctor doubted I was as sick as I said I was. He made me record my temperature every evening, in a little journal that I brought to his office. We both discovered I'd been running a fever of 103 degrees nearly every evening. Even then, I still felt guilty about being such a bother. I couldn't understand why willpower wasn't enough to make me well.
A dog sleeps upside down with its head nearly under its back.
Large stapelia yellow flower with black lines
White dogwood flowers with 4 petals and green centers.
A dog sits on a landing while a woman holding a blue leash tries to get the dog up the stairs with her
Pink flowers with white centers and yellow shirt stamens
A lilac purple worm with rosy center and golden spiky edges is partially buried in deep sea beige mud
An orange deep sea octocoral is centered in the image. In the middle of the coral a bright yellow zoanthid is growing over the coral. A pink anemone is seen on the same rock the coral sits on at the edge of a drop off.
A crab with thin red legs and a large white claw has a red and tan zoanthid on its back instead of a shell
An orange colored crab on the left, a dark red crab in the middle, and a brown crab with white legs look to be fighting for a squid in between them. They are on a sea floor of brown mud.
A dark orange and light yellow fan coral on a rock in the foreground with a red-brown squid eating a dark gray fish in the mid-ground
A dense cluster of small green flowers with 9 petals and a dark red base hang from gray-brown branches
An overhead picture of small white five petal flowers densely covering dark brown tree branches. Light blue sky in the background
A dog laying on his back on a couch with his head falling off the couch
A handwritten note that says “you are loved!”
Two seasoned buttermilk biscuit fried chicken sandwiches on a clear plate on a white tablecloth
A black and white dog is wrapped up in a colorful blanket
A purple acorn worn that is quite phallic looking in beige sand
Pink blossoms on a short tree near a telephone pole
Text reading “the flow had to remain consistent to sustain us all. We needed the human race. How our fates became hinged on the shoulders of the dumbest and greediest of all our species was beyond me, but it was.”