Of turtles, amphipods and bytes
TONY AMOS

It was one of life's genuinely funny moments. It had been a long day. Near day's end the team from Texas A&MGalveston 's sea turtle group finished the lengthy job of attaching a satellite transmitter to "Hook", the 130-pound loggerhead sea turtle that had been hooked a month earlier off Cole Park in Corpus Christi.

Now the turtle had been loaded into my truck along with a handful of students to hold her down, and driven to Mustang Island Gulf Beach where she would be released. She was ready to go; rearing to go, literally, would be more apt a description of Hook's demeanor.

Dr. Tasha Metz, leader of the tag team, needed to make one final test to assure us that the $2,000 transmitter was working.

"Magnet!" she called out peremptorily. But no magnet was forthcoming. In fact no magnet was to be found out there on the beach at Marker 21. A crowd gathered around the truck, marveling at the turtle that reared even more when the smell of the sea increased its desire to go home. I said something like "I have just about everything else in this truck, but not a magnet".

Homeless Hermit crabs normally live in discarded shells of gastropods, but this one is so big it had trouble finding a home.

Someone was sent to a souvenir shop to get a magnet. Their truck immediately got stuck in the sand, and it took several Aggies and one T-Sip to push it out.

Minutes went by, the sun sank lower, the evening light mellowed the crowd but not Hook, who reared some more. A magnetic ornament came back but had no affect on the switch it was supposed to test.

Get a refrigerator magnet, some suggested. Another Aggie went off to a souvenir shop. Minutes went by, the sun sank lower, the crowd got antsy, and Hook reared again. A pitiful magnet came back that also had no affect on the transmitter test. The crowd muttered and suddenly my mind clicked in.

"I've got a magnet!" I declared and reached down in the secret place where my spare truck key is kept in a little metal box with a big magnetic attached.

Everyone looked at me as if I were bonkers (why did he not say that earlier, they must have wondered). The test worked, the Tommy Gate was lowered with Hook still rearing, and she was carried a few yards from the Gulf's edge, placed on the sand and immediately lunged towards the sea. It did not take long for her to disappear into the waves, the short antenna of the satellite tag the last thing to be seen. In a few days, Hook's travels will be available for all to follow by going to www.seaturtle.org and clicking on "Tracking".

Taped Script shows the relative size of an amphipod that found a swimmer this week on a Mustang Island beach.

Remember this, but forget if you saw where I retrieved my secret magnet from.

Having used computers since the 1960s, when one machine occupied a whole room, I'm fascinated by the technological advances made over the years. This was well illustrated when I bought a new flashcard memory the other day for my digital camera. Its capacity is 2 Gigabytes: that's 2,000,000,000 bytes of memory. This is graphically illustrated by the picture that shows me holding a memory disk (the big yellow thing) from an IBM 1130 mainframe computer I used in 1965 at Columbia University. It weighs nearly 4lb and has a capacity of one Megabyte. I'm pointing to the new flashcard that doesn't even register its weight on our postal scale. It can hold as much memory as two thousand of the big yellow things!

Memories Amos holds a large disk that holds 1 megabyte (1 million bytes) of computer memory from back in 1965, compared to a 2-gigabyte (2 billion bytes) disk he bought just this month.

Another size contrast to wow you this week was found in different crustaceans found here. The first were tiny "bugs" that an unfortunate swimmer found himself covered in at the I.B. Magee Park last week. UTMSI's Dr. Ed Buskey identified them as amphipods that feed among the Sargassum weed. The park attendant cleverly preserved them using Scotch tape (see picture).

Contrast this with the huge hermit crab that was left high and dry as a tanker plied the Ship Channel near the new erosion control construction site in Charlie's Pasture. This unfortunate animal was looking for a new home. They are so large that the only shell they can use is a Florida horse conch, scarce here at the best of times.

Tony Amos is a research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas and director of the Animal Rehabilitation Keep (ARK).