Best field trip EVER!!

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore: Ronald MacDonald lives!

Saturday was my Marine Science field trip. Frankly, that course has been, well, boring. Terrible lecturer, obvious content, early morning. We have a new lecturer now who's a lot better. But that's beside the point. The point is that we had a field excursion to make observations on vertical zonation of the rocky intertidal zone. Assignment aside (and I still have the option of doing one of two other things if I don't like this one), it was sooooo cool. That's the only adjective I can come up with. I mean, I spent so many hours cramming Invertebrate Zoology into my head, staring at dead, preserved organisms, memorising how to recognise them, learning about their natural habitats. I spent considerably fewer hours learning about population ecology, and biotic and abiotic factors that drive the structure of a community. But I never actually got to SEE it.

Saturday afternoon at Fairlight Beach in Manly, a marine reserve, I saw it. I was in the ocean up to my waist staring at the side of a concrete wharf as the tide went out, examing a band of mussels with limpets and barnacles and littorines and some predatory gastropods (snails), followed by a band of polychaete worms drawn into their calcareous tubes because the tide was going out, and anemones with bright red tentacles that quickly withdrew to become little blobs of jelly when I, or anyone else, brushed a finger over them. Being the sole zoology student, and apparently the only one to have done any research into what we should except to find, I managed to attract some blank stares from the people in the little group I was in by pointing out the presence of a couple of chitons hiding amongst the mussels(I'd been looking for them specifically since they're just cool and different). I have a suspicion that not one single person who wrote that down after I pointed to them spelled it correctly. I think I surprised the grad student who was the group leader until I mentioned that I was majoring in zoology. Really cool were the Ascidians in the next band. It's way too much fun to poke them and make them hide in their tunics. Must remind yourself that you're bothering them. Ascidians are more commonly known as sea squirts and are actually our distant cousins since their larvae have primitive notochords. You'd never know it to look at the adults though.

We finished with the man made vertical surface and headed back to Fairlight beach to take a look at the natural horizontal surface. I will be returning to that beach because there was way too much to see and I was forced to concentrate on just getting the observations needed for the assignment. Probably the most exciting thing, for me, in the tide pools was the tiny sea star Patriella exigua. We were observing the development of P. exigua embryos in my Cells and Development lab, which is the only reason I'm actually referring to it by the scientific name rather than a common name. I can't even remember the common name. I've never been able to sit down at a tide pool and pick up a sea star before.

I'm going to have to continue this later, I promised the internet to Varun (Bunny decided he wanted to go by his real name).