Some poor schmuck at the Aquarium has been sorting through sea turtle poop.

Really.

It turns out that the sea turtles won’t be returning to the Outer Bay exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium just yet.

The back of the giant, almost two-million gallon tank is covered in tiny tiles. Almost impossible for the public to see, but the turtles discovered them a while ago.

I don’t know if they were just bored, or hungry, or acting out. It’s not unusual for sea turtles to nibble algae, so that may have been it as well, although great efforts are made to keep those walls very clean.

Or maybe the turtles had an artistic vision—a kind of abstract, negative mosaic—in mind. Maybe they were spelling out a message.

Regardless, tiles began disappearing from the wall. And appearing (seems they’re not digestible) in turtle poop.

So some poor schmuck got assigned the task of collecting and sorting through the turtle poop and counting the tiles they found.

The good news is, careful turtle poop sorting was successful: they recovered exactly the number of tiles that had gone missing.

This is dedicated science in action.

The bad news is, that until the aquarists come up with a way to keep the tile-tasting-turtles from tasting tiles, the turtles will remain behind the scenes, in off-exhibit tanks not visible to the public.

Too bad. The turtles are a big crowd-pleaser, and a personal favorite. It would be nice if there were somewhere else they could be exhibited safely, without the dangers of them tasting tiles, or the occasional Great White shark tasting them.

The people at the Aquarium are the best in the world at what they do. I’m sure they’re already working on it.

And I’m still holding out for a mola.

Ceramic ArtTiles and Ornaments in Progress

Here are some of the things I've been working on instead of blogging (or figuring out how to lay out the pictures in a blog) for the past few weeks.

After working on them for so long, I get so attached to some of the tiles at this stage that I almost don't want to fire them! They're in the kiln now. For the most part the colors will get MUCH deeper, darker, more vibrant. And shiny, of course!


These are some of the ArtTiles from the Sea Life collection:

Here are some of the ornaments:


And here, some baby ArtTile sea turtles, hatching from their shells!



Thank you all for your MUCH-appreciated suggestions on how to edit/format my blog posts & pictures. I'll be checking your suggestion this week as soon as I get some orders out of the kiln and in the mail. (This time I couldn't even get the photos to display next to one another! And now, instead of ADDING random line breaks, I can't even get the ones I put in to show....lol Even some of my old posts have re-arranged themeselves, darn it!) The 'compose' display looks great, the 'preview' display looks great, and then I hit 'publish' and it all goes >kersplat!<

Photo Wrangling (and failing, for the moment...)

On a whole separate note, I still haven't sat down and puzzled out all the ins-and-outs of blogger. Haven't figured out how to put pictures where & how I want them, or how to keep random extra lines breaks from being added each time I post. Any advice / hints / tips would be appreciated! In the meantime, scattered willy-nilly and completely randomly below, are a couple of pictures of some of the tiles and ornaments I've made in the last few days, in various stages of drying & cleaning.