Day 5

Friday - Tidepool/plankton/oceanography (Jules)

Again, today we had to wake up early for a special activity. This time it was a hike up to Bible Peak, which is one of the places we hiked to on Wednesday. We went up there at 6:40 in the morning to observe the sunrise and take in the view of Catalina Channel at dawn. When we went back down, we were greeted by a good final meal of pancakes, sausages, and French toast. After leaving the dining hall for the last time, we had some time to pack up and clean up our cabins. We went to our morning program at 8:30 and did a couple of interesting activities. First, we got some of our questions answered that we had about the ocean in general. Then, we conducted some experiments off the side of the pier with different scientific tools to find salinity, visibility, depth and other measurements. To our surprise, when we went to the pier, there were thousands of pyrosomes in the water just floating around. We were told this is called a “bloom” of pyrosomes. In every direction we looked, the water was full of these long and skinny pink plankton. The tools told us about many different statistics about the water, but eventually we had to go back into the lab to learn some more about plankton. We heard about zooplankton and phytoplankton and their part in the food chain. We quietly listened, awaiting the chance we were about to have of looking at microscopic plankton through a microscope and identifying them. There was a symphony of “Oh look at this!”, “Woah!” and “Wait what? It isn’t showing up in ours.” Restless as ever, we then went down to the beach and learned a bit about the tides before looking through the rocks and the tide pools, finding crabs and anemones. Despite multiple people claiming that they weren’t afraid to pick up the crabs, the guides and chaperones ended up being the only people to catch any, which is due to the fact that “The crabs were too fast”. After about half an hour, we went back to the Invert Lab to feed the octopus. Winston, the octopus, ate three out of five crabs in his tank. We were very impressed with his hunting tactics. As we finished up watching the third crab get trapped in Winston’s grip, we headed back to our cabins to move our bags out and clean up some more. We waited for a while, then loaded everything onto the ferry when it arrived.