Thursday, April 26, 2007

From Algae to Fish

Well, we survived algae. It was a very tough section but our professor, Annette Olson, was very passionate about all things sessile and leafy in the intertidal. Her passion helped to make the section far more interesting than we ever thought it could be. We spent a few mornings out in the sun identifying species (and then playing frisbee). We also spent many afternoons and evenings in the lab drawing specimens, while fighting our desire to play volleyball in the sun.

The end of the algae section marked the end of our time with Margot (our TA for the past few weeks). We already miss her. She was really devoted, helpful and friendly. Thank you Margot for all of your help. We look forward to seeing you again!

We've now moved onto fish. Scott Heppell (our prof for this section) took us out to the bay yesterday. We did some net trawling: one person stands on the shore holding one end of a net and the other person gets in chest deep with the other end and walks in a crescent shape line. We found many really interesting little fish (and one large staghorn sculpin that we named Gary). One of the most interesting finds was the large quantity of baby salmonoids. We probably found nearly 100 of them in one of the trawls. We were very careful with them and put them back in the water as quickly as we could. Here's hoping that large number is a good sign for the salmon population!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

who wrote this post? I think we only saw four or five salmon