Tag: Halloween
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It’s Elementary My Dear Walleye
By George Whitman, who is dressed as Dr. John Watson this Halloween While this Sherlockian mystery is fictional, it is inspired by a real event in which a Walleye was illegally introduced into Lake Cascade, Idaho. The events described below parallel the actual research conducted to uncover its origins. Looking back over the notes of…
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Got Blood? Unmasking a vampire fish
By Emily L. Mensch “They’re strong, they’re fast, and they’re out for blood…..” From the depths of a murky lake, a slimy eel-like creature emerges, slithering and writhing. With a gaping, circular mouth lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth spiraling inward, it locks in on its target prey: you! Soon this nightmarish creature is slinking…
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Dispatches From the Deep Pacific
By: Sophie R. Sanchez, Christine A. Parisek, Andrew L. Rypel Monsters are lurking… Off the coast of California, down in the chilly depths of the Pacific Ocean, there lie the most unsettling denizens that appear summoned from the nightmares of Mira Grant. Here in the inky blackness, where nature spawned these most otherworldly configurations, inhabitants…
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Watering up Halloween, California style
By Ghost Writer What better way to spook Californians this Halloween than to appear as a slobbering “Godzilla El Niño.” Or draped in a bedsheet as Godzilla’s opponent, “The Blob,” the amoeba-shaped patch of unusually warm Pacific water blocking storms in California. Too scary? Not to worry. Researchers at UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences…
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Trick or treat? Aliens at the door
By Chris Bowman Many of the alien species invading California’s lakes and streams would make for wickedly good Halloween costumes. Take the Shokihaze goby, Tridentiger barbatus (above and right), a native of Asian now common in Suisun Bay and the lower Sacramento River. Its spiky stubble of whisker-like barbels about the mouth and cheeks defines “ugly.” And…
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Halloween horrors and machetes on the Butte
By Chris Bowman Photos by Bill Husa, Chico Enterprise-Record They spook the faint-of-heart every Halloween. Ghoulish, hollow-eyed creatures stumble about like they’re half-dead. Their skin is mottled from open sores. Rotting lips peel back to reveal horrific grins. But enough about California’s spring-run Chinook salmon. Come autumn, these fish become the real-life living dead. Human…
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Halloween hydrology
By the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences staff If these 1950s ideas for solving California’s water problems don’t frighten you, we don’t know what will. Happy Halloween! The Cornell Plan Sidney Cornell, a Los Angeles construction engineer, circulated an idea for transporting Northern California water to the parched southern end of the state without…