Tide Bite – January 2026
Few invertebrates, terrestrial or marine, capture the human imagination as much as cephalopods, especially octopus. There’s something about those big eyes, those many arms, those remarkable behaviors…
In this essay, Willem connects the dots (the suckers?) between eyes, arms, behaviors — to explain how octopuses sense and process their world in unique ways.
Tide Bite – December 2025
Meet the Waterfront Staff
by Megan Dethier
Perhaps the two most important things for a high-functioning marine lab are an excellent seawater system and some kind of boat fleet. As any boat owner knows, boats (and places to keep them) are a handful – FHL has a small but mighty waterfront team who look after this very important facet of our operations.
Tide Bite – November 2025
At FHL we try hard to both honor our past by maintaining our core strengths and adapt to the needs of the FHL community. An example is the summer teaching program.
Read more »Tide Bite – October 2025
In the past several decades there has been an effort to enable more undergraduates to be involved in original research. Having such experience on their resumes makes students stand out and gives them a clear advantage getting into graduate school and other programs.
Read more »Tide Bite – September 2025
Those of us steeped in traditions of western science – which involves hypothesis testing and is quantitative and unemotional – generally see eelgrass beds as great habitat and sites of high primary productivity, with hopefully an overlay of admiration for gleaming green beauty amid blue water.
Read more »Tide Bite – August 2025
FHL’s “core courses” (which are partially supported by our Marine Life Endowment) include Invertebrate Zoology, Marine Botany, Fishes, and Developmental Biology – each of which is taught in various forms, with different instructors and foci.
Read more »Tide Bite – July 2025
This month’s Tide Bite has a different flavor, written by a student of the arts who spent spring quarter at FHL and has more of a poetic bent than most of our authors.
Read more »Tide Bite – June 2025
Folks who first came to Friday Harbor as students, even decades ago, can likely relate to Taylor’s description of her first experience with the amazing diversity of the local marine flora and fauna intersecting with the deep knowledge of FHL instructors and the excitement of a cohort of students.
Read more »Tide Bite – May 2025
For many of us, one pull toward a career in marine biology is the strong influence of aesthetics: the smell of salt spray on the wind during a storm, the roar and rumble of breaking waves, the colors of pink seaweeds and blue mussels in a tidepool…and nothing illustrates this aesthetic power better than nudibranchs.
Read more »Tide Bite – April 2025
This month’s Tide Bite takes us very far afield, to some near-polar research in northern Japan! The UW linkages within this essay are clear, with the two authors connected to the School of Oceanography.
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