Royal West - Day 3

This morning armed with buckets and shovels the students headed out to Pottery Creek, a muddy intertidal zone, in search of the marine worms that live in the sediments.  The students were intrigued and amazed to hear that some of the worms they could encounter have teeth and can bite!  They found a good diversity of worms including blood worms, milky ribbon worms, and red lined worms.  Some of the groups even found burrowing anemones.

As the tide came in we abandoned the worm hunt and went on a crab hunt on the neighbouring beach.  The students were looking for the European green crab which is an invasive (non-native) species.  When a crab was found the students measured the carapace size, sexed the crab, and then marked it with a spot of nail polish.  They worked hard and found a number of crabs, some of which were tiny measuring in at only 5mm in size!

This afternoon the students conducted their invertebrate behaviour experiments. The different experiments were testing the effect of temperature change on the barnacle feeding rate, determining how different arthropods react to light, studying the effect of salinity change in crabs, sea stars, and seaweed, and seeing if size affects the flipping rate of sea stars and urchins.  For the remainder of the afternoon and evening the students will be working on posters and presentations based on their experiments.

Tomorrow is presentation day!

Digging for worms at Pottery Creek.

Found a blood worm!

Hunting for the invasive green crab.

Waiting to be measured and marked.

How do different arthropods react to light?

Animals in the salinity experiment in their 'rest' period.

Flipping sea stars.

Waiting for the temperature of the seawater to change.