Guananí Gómez–Van Cortright is a writer and science educator and was Bay Nature’s first editorial fellow from 2022 to 2023. She graduated from the UC Santa Cruz science communication master’s program and currently performs puppet shows about singing arthropods, among other things, at the California Academy of Sciences. She enjoys foggy walks, sculpting ceramic skulls, and romping around at the tidepools.
"The landscape is riddled with risk out there right now, but we don’t want to vilify the carriers,” says one expert. “They’re just doing their thing. They’re being ducks.” So, where did this virus come from?
Seals, dolphins and foxes have all gotten sick. How likely is it to spread to people?
At Point Pinole, 21 sturgeon carcasses––some more than seven feet long––lay strewn along a mile-long stretch of beach in late August 2022, baking in the relentless heat. It was the peak of the largest harmful algal bloom on record in … Read more
The city of Oakland just made history by giving over five acres in Joaquin Miller Park to an Indigenous land trust's stewardship. But the backstory was decades in the making.
Researchers are investigating the secrets of our two resident sturgeon species, which have razor-sharp armor and shlorp up clams with their vacuum-shaped mouths.
Eucalyptus trees on Albany Hill are wasting away from blight. Some people may cheer—but these trees are also home to endangered monarchs.
The piddock clam makes its mark on the world at the rate of one millimeter per month.
Anchovies sparkled and seawater sprayed from the crusty maws of gray whales as they burst through the surface, again and again, off the coast near Pacifica, fifteen miles south of San Francisco. Groups of up to six gray whales devoured … Read more
Two landscapes stand divided by the hundred-year-old Yolo Bypass West Levee in Solano County. To the south of the levee’s U shape, canals tangle toward the sprawling Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, which teems with wildlife. North of the levee, former … Read more
Big Basin State Park is not the lush, shady ancient forest it once was. In August 2020, 97 percent of the old-growth forest nestled in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains burned in the devastating CZU Lightning Complex fire. … Read more
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
