Word: kelp
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What I am able to see on this chunk of the Pacific is a minute fraction of what there is to see. At Point Lobos in Carmel, the mist creates false mountains over the water. The waves are humped like porpoises. Kelp, giant forests of seaweed by which Darwin was enthralled, shows only at the top. These plants, which can grow at a rate of 20 in. a day, reach down 100 ft. to granite reefs. The kelp is tethered by stipes-stems, structures that connect the base, or holdfast, to the leaflike blades. Gas-filled floats at the base...
Surrounding the kelp is a dense and delicate garden of tentacled plants that sway in unison, like backup singers. Pink, orange, rose, green, lavender. Plants with Einstein's hair, plants with Don King's and Phyllis Diller's--all kept graceful by the water. The garden is vertical as well as horizontal. On its floor sea stars crawl on their bellies like fat recruits in basic training. Above them swim the gulping bells of the jellies. In the intertidal zone limpets and other mollusks graze on algae in the rocks. Cancer crabs attack hermit crabs. An anemone divides to reproduce...
...around the world's oceans, past sharks, bluefish, wreckfish and more. Along the way they pass through naturalistic-looking coastal exhibits that represent four major littoral ecologies: rocky North Atlantic cliffs with cavorting razorbills and murres; subpolar grassy banks populated by nesting Magellanic penguins; Pacific-coast pools with a kelp forest, frolicking sea otters and flying oyster catchers; and an Indian Ocean coral reef with pygmy angelfish and giant clams...
Once upon a time, a 153-lb. chemistry teacher named Julius Kelp wanted to grow big and strong, or anyway be smooth and cool--sort of like Frank Sinatra on a bad ego day--and in his lab he concocted a formula that permitted him to realize that dubious dream. Thus was The Nutty Professor, central work in the Jerry Lewis oeuvre, born...
...Ring -- not surprisingly, since Catalans in the 1880s were crazy for Wagner, the newest of new composers. Gaudi's Casa Mila, on Passeig de Gracia, known to Barcelonans as La Pedrera -- the Stone Quarry -- was intended to suggest a seaworn cliff, and its iron balconies fringe it like kelp...