Yesterday we headed out to Bird Island. Like my fellow classmates have posted, there are many sea lions that live here. It is amazing to see all of them and then get to go and swim with them is even more awesome. I was able to go SCUBA diving and it was amazing. There are so many things to see.
This is a picture of me that Glenn took while we were down at the bottom. I was surprised to see how close the sea lions would come to me. There were moments when I really wanted to reach out and touch one but since they are wild animals I didn't want anything bad to happen so I kept my hands to myself! At one part I thought that I got my flipper stuck on something and I turned around to see what it was and it was a sea lion playing with me. It was so cool. So I stopped right there and played with her. We also saw some other really interesting sea life.
This is a picture that Dr. C took of a Chocolate Chip Sea Star. Last year when I was here I didn't get to see one of these and ever since I saw the picture he took I really wanted to see one this year. And I did! I was so excited. They really were all over the place. The sea stars are in the phylum Echinodermata. An interesting fact about this phylum is that they all have spines or bumps from a endoskeleton. On this particular sea star, where you see the black spots they have little spines. They aren't sharp but they are a little pointy.
To the right is a picture of a few tube worms. They are the purply color, at first I thought they were anemones, but I was wrong. I had a fun time playing with these, while my dive buddy was taking pictures of something else. When I put my hand down to touch them they immediately dropped back down into their tube. I didn't even have to touch them, then they would come back out rather quickly and I would reach down again to touch them and they would got right back in again. It was actually pretty funny. I learned that they are filter feeders meaning that they feed from substances/ particles in the water. It was interesting to see them.
Today we went to Cholla Bay, which is a mud flat. It was a lot of fun to see the different way the animals survive in this area as opposed to the rocky intertidal. I remember from last year being at Cholla bay and the tide coming in really fast and washing our buckets away and it was like we didn't have enough time. This year we got there at the low tide, and I was thinking to myself that the water will be here in no time at all but it wasn't. It seemed to come in really slowly this year giving us a lot more time to dig around and try to find different types of animal life. It was a different experience.
Then this afternoon the class was divided into 3 different groups and each group had to do a presentation. It was fun to see what each other have learned about the different phylums this week. My group was assigned to the echinodermata phylum. I really enjoyed learning more about them, this includes the sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sand dollars. We have been very lucky this year and have been able to see all of the animals.
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