A six-week online course on how barnacles, mussels, and kelp divide up a few vertical meters of coastline. Drag the tide below and watch who gets wet.
Each week pairs a 40-minute video lecture with a field task you can do on any rocky coast, or from our photo sets if you live inland.
Why a 2-meter change in elevation can matter more than 200 kilometers of latitude. You'll sketch your first transect.
How periwinkles and barnacles survive hours of sun, and the 1961 Connell experiment that moved a species line by hand.
Sea stars, whelks, and crabs. Keystone species explained with the Paine mussel-removal data.
Rockweed, sea lettuce, and kelp: holdfasts, air bladders, and how each handles wave force.
Temperature swings, oxygen crashes at noon, and the fish that live through them.
Combine your counts into a six-page report and present it in a live peer review session.
Typical of the weekly checks. Ungraded, and you can retry.
Two working marine ecologists who still spend most low tides on actual rocks.
Spent eleven summers surveying mussel beds along the Oregon and Washington coast. Her 2019 paper on heat-wave die-offs is assigned reading in Week 2.
Former harbor pilot turned phycologist. He runs the Week 4 identification clinic and answers questions in the forum before breakfast, usually.
Class size is capped at 60 so every transect report gets real feedback.