After delicious pie Tuesday night and some good old fashioned bonding, we started discussing the inverts Wednesday morning. After learning about the phyla Porifera, Cnidaria, and Ctenophora, we entered the laboratory for the first time. Here we cleaned and set up the tanks for organisms collected from our first two excursions. 
Our first stop yesterday afternoon was the Newport docks. The sun was out as we lay down on the docks to discover and capture some of the invertebrates that live beneath the wood. After the docks, we loaded our new friends into our vans and made our way to Boiler Bay. Even though the tide was not extremely low (only 0.11m) we were able to collect sea stars, chitons, urchins, crabs, limpets (like the keyhole limpet on the left), and many other invertebrates. Luckily, the clouds didn’t open until we were back in the vans heading to Newport to place the organisms in the laboratory tanks for observation and sketching.
