The Inter Tidal

The inter tidal is almost like a nursery for small fish. The fish stay in the tide pools and leave to be eaten by the bigger fish in the sea. This makes the inter tidal a big part of our aquatic food chain. From my studies, i have learned what the zones are and what kind of animals live in them. The zones are splash zone, upper intertidal, lower intertidal, subtidal, and tidepools. Some animals that i have personaly found out in the field were octopus, crabs, hermit crabs, fish, sea cucumber, urchins, star fish, and vana. The tide is very important to our tide pools because they affect our high tides and low tides. The tide is affected from a thing called centrifugal force, that is when the earth and the moon's gravitational pull, pulls in unison to make extreme tides. Spring tide is when the tide are super high in one place and super low in another place, this occurs when the earth, moon and sun are all lined up. Neap tides is when high tides are not so high and when low tides are weaker, in other words it weakens the tides, this occurs when the earth, sun and the moon is not in line.

My studies took place in the tidepools, this is where i collected my data. In my group we took recordings of three groups with a one meter by one meter square called a quadric. For each quadric, we counted the number of animals that were in them, we then took the salinity with a refractometer, then we found the temperature of the water in celcius with a digital thermometer. after we got all of our information, we would look for interesting fish to catch to show to the class. After we have recoreded our findings in our notebooks, we headed back to the van to drive back to school.

Out in the field, i would say the most interesting things we found would be the two octopi our class found. One octopus was still a little baby, and the other one was almost fully grown. My research concluded that if you would go into deeper water, you will most likly find more fish. The most abundent animal i recorded in my reseach would be the crabs, you can find a lot of crabs underneath the rocks if you move them slowly, but remember, you always have to leave it the way you found it. The quadric i found that had the most animals also had the coldest water of a temperature of 25.9C, the other temperatures were 29C and 28.4C. The salinity were the same for each test area. We compared the upper intertidal and the lower intertidal, and the lower intertidal was occupied with more sea critters.

Plankton Lab

Plankton is very important to all life on Earth. Plankton are the very bottom of the food chain as the primary consumer. Plankton get there energy through a process called photosynthesis, this is where they get there food from the sun. Energy is transferred from them by bigger fish eating the plankton, then bigger fish eating the fish that just ate the plankton and so on and so fourth. Without plankton, all life in the ocean would not exist.



To study plankton, we had to go out in the field and collect our own plankton. My class of about 25 all gotten into groups of 5 or less, then each team member would have a certain task he or she would have to accomplish. After we found out what we were going to do, we headed to the Kihei Boat Ramp in South Kihei to collect our plankton samples along with other data including the temperature, the salinity, and the turbidity. To collect the plankton, we used a special plankton net made from fine mesh, and then we would put the plankton into the water bottle. To get the turbidity we used the turbidity tube, how you use this tube is by looking through it with water in it, and if you can see the little disc in the bottom, the disc is called a Suki disc, then you measure how much water you have in the tube. To find the salinity, you use a little thing called a refactometer, what you do is you put a drop of water onto the blue part of the refractometer, then you look through the scope to see what the results from the graph gives you. We measured the temperature with a digital thermometer in Celsius, we recorded the temperature of the air and the water.



After we gathered all of our data at the Kihei Boat Ramp, we brought it back to the class room to find the number of plankton in our samples. To find the plankton, we needed to use a microscope to find all the plankton in our sample. While using the microscope, we had a cool program on the computer that allows to see what we see through the microscope on the computer screen. This program is called Proscope. With the help of the telescope, we were able to count our plankton samples in our pitri grids to record our findings in our notebook.



After i have completed my study of plankton, I have found out that plankton are usually more abundant in warmer water because plankton need sun light to live. I have also found from the research of plankton experts that you can find more species of plankton in warmer water rather than cooler water. The last thing i found was that, in our samples, the most abundant type of plankton was the copepod.