Marine Mammal Symposium

 The University of British Columbia has been conducting an annual Marine Mammals Symposium for the past 22 years and this was the 2nd year that we attended. Its a pretty excellent gathering of the west coast minds for all things cetacean and pinniped, with presentations by grad students, professors, artists, and photographers along with representation from the whale watching industry.

 Each presenter is limited to a 5 minute slot which most people stick to out of 'fear' of the Call of the Rooster, which is a rubber chicken squawk signaling that your time is up. This creates a very intense but rapid volley of presentations with 44 different topics this year. There are several breaks throughout the day for lunch and stretches, and the lobby of the building has some pretty awesome articulated skeletons like the minke whale below.

 This trio of dolphin skeletons graces a nearby stairway, and one of the highlights for me this year was a brief presentation by the fellow who not only articulated all the skeletons in the building, but also the blue whale skeleton at the Beatty Biodiversity Museum, as well as some of the larger specimens at the Whale Interpretive Centre.

 

All in all an amazing but mentally draining day learning about some amazing animals from some pretty incredible people. If this sounds like your sort of thing, I would strongly recommend it, even as an outsider to the industry and a bit of a layman myself I find the whole day stimulating and eventful.

Scholarships

 I got a few emails last month stating that I had won two scholarships for the previous school year and there would be an awards ceremony on November 5th. When we got there I felt very underdressed and outclassed by a room full of academic and business top brass in fancy suits, but I managed to bumble my way through the experience all the same. Below is a picture from one corner of the room to show the layout of the room and density of formal people.

 Being a giant nerd last year, I apparently had the top mark in my program which earned me the "BCIT Foundations Scholarship" from the faculty of BCIT. Below is a picture of me receiving my cheque from a representative of the school.

 I was also one of two recipients of the "KPMG Award" (for those outside the industry, KPMG is one of the four large accounting firms in the world, so catching their attention is pretty humbling and exciting). The gentleman on the left was the presenter on behalf of KPMG and the young lady in the middle was the other winner of the award.

 

I feel very honored to be recognized for my efforts and it certainly reinforced that doing something else with my time was a good idea overall. Congratulations to the other award recipients and thanks to all the donors and attendees.

Seasonal Mushrooms

 Amidse the panic and frenzy that was my midterms week came a moment of calm when Kathryn insisted I come out (and bring my macro lens) to see a secret she had to share. After a short walk we came to a frequently trod corner of Stanley Park which had become home to an astonishing variety of mushrooms in a very small area. The brown woody one below is the outlier which we are unable to identify, but any amateur mycologists are welcome to chime in via the comments.

 We looked this one up in our mushroom guide and believe it is a Fragile Russula which are apparently inedible, not that we'd really want to be cooking anything that turned up a few meters from the parking lot in the first place.

 Fans of Super Mario Brothers and the Grateful Dead alike can probably recognize this Fly Amanita mushroom, famous for both giving you an extra hitpoint against flying turtles and being a hallucinogen. Although it has a proud history amongst Siberian shamans and is apparently quite popular at rural Lithuanian wedding feasts, we decided to only enjoy it through our camera.

While it is supposed to be good for killing flies (hence Fly Amanita), it is potentially very dangerous as well and was a favorite poison during the Roman era.