MICRO-TOURISM: An expedition to the South end of San Francisco Bay to the Alviso Weep to collect and identify bacteria and protoctists living in the salt marshes of San Jose.
We are fortunate to have as our guide Dr. Wayne Lanier, a geneticist and microbiologist who has spent three years studying the salt marsh. The Alviso Weep has extremely diverse microorganisms due to the extreme ranges of its saline content. What this means, is there are intense, short lived populations of microorganisms that produce brilliant colors as they mine the resources and minerals around them. Bacteria, having no nuclei, are life at the simplest level; The First Kingdom, neither plant or animal. The interactions they have with air, and the minerals (and other micro-organisms) around them produce their vivid colors, and are fundamental to the formation of our precious atmosphere.
Learning how to read a puddle Is learning how to read another culture Is learning from another culture Where we find cooperation is not as unnatural as we have been led to believe
Humans have been extracting salt from the marshes at the south end of the San Francisco for at least a thousand years. We will visit the salt marshes not to mine salt, but to investigate other modes of human/bacteria symbiosis. As part of our expedition, we will attempt to identify our specimens and draw, or otherwise document our specimens.
More on the research of Dr. Wayne Lanier