Learning My Species

First, I need to talk about yesterday, because I forgot to post last night. Yesterday, we went out on a bought and went trawling. This is when you through a net off the back of a boat, let the boat drive for a certain amount of time, and then pull the net back onto the boat. Then you sift through all the algae to see what you caught. We did this process twice. By the end, when had seen a lot of comb jellies, 2 sea robins, 2 flounders, 6 blue crabs (2 of which were carrying eggs), about 51 lady crabs, 2 speckled crabs, a channeled whelk, some shrimp of different species, and a brief squid! We were able to put most of them back into the water, because we were able to identify them in the field. The squid we had to put back because they don't cope well in tanks, and the whelk had to go back because it was huge.

Now, today, we went kayaking. It was a lot of fun, except for the fact that the current was against us the entire time. It was really wind, due to the approaching storm, and so the current was stronger than normal too. But nevertheless, it was fun and we got to see some really cool things on this trip too. We saw more speckled crabs and a sea cucumber. We also found a really tiny fish, but he is waiting in our live well to be identified after our exam tomorrow.

Having this hands on experience is amazing and fun. I am learning to identify species here a lot quicker than I ever did in a classroom at home. Probably because I have to be able to identify them in order to pass the class. But working with the specimens makes it a lot easier than looking at a picture and memorizing a description.

Meals were great today! Breakfast was french toast, lunch was hot dogs, and dinner was SPAGHETTI!!!!!. I definitely had a second helping at dinner.

After dinner the plan was to go back to the lab and work on my review sheet for my final, but during dinner, that approaching storm I mentioned earlier, decided to make an appearances. So, I decided to just stay in my dorm and study from here.

That's all for now. Be sure to check out the pictures I will be posting tonight.