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| Seaside Home | We wake up at 2 am in Sunset
Beach State Park. It is surprisingly cold, and our legs and minds do not work
too well.
Kelly and Morgan are the only enthusiastic
ones, and the rest of us curse them as we guzzle coffee and hot
chocolate.
We arrive at Lover's Point at 4 am, the only ones crazy enough
to be there at that hour. We have come at low tide and a large amount of rocks are
visible. Most are
covered with Red, Brown or Green Algae, but after picking through the layers of
algae we are able to locate small snails and starfish.
Next, we set up a transect study. We run a rope
from the edge of the water up over the rocks and up onto the beach. We split into groups and each
takes a section along the rope to document the plants and animals found. We find some
small crabs and several species of sea
anemones. We finish up the transect
just as the tide began to come in. Piling into the van we leave for Hopkins Marine Station. After a short snooze and several loaves of friendship bread we arrive at Hopkins Marine Lab. The lab, which is run by Stanford University, is located on Monterey Bay. Our contact, Dr. Stuart Thompson, gave us a tour of the lab and introduced us to all of the staff. We hauled out are notebooks and listened to a history of the area as well as its current animal inhabitants. At this point the members of the group that are going to dive leave to work with the DSO. The rest of us walk over to the intertidal area to look firsthand at the organisms we saw in the lab. We split up into several groups of two and we set out with cameras and computers to photograph the organisms that we found. The most prevalent were the Nudibranchs and Sculpins. We also found plenty of barnacles and mussels. We classified all the organisms as well as measured them. While some of the members were out diving for pictures, we set up another transect study in order to quantify organism distribution. We finished up in an hour and ate lunch while waiting for our comrades to return from their diving trip. As we were eating one of the scientists came by to show us what they found while poking around in the intertidal areas. Some of us thought it was the funniest looking fish that we had ever seen, but others realized it was your standard hedge hog. Nevertheless, it was very cool. |