Students in the intertidal near CEDO
MCC students hit the “beach” running this morning for an early low tide and were rewarded with a variety of cool intertidal invertebrates!
Octopus! 🐙
Tide pooling and Phyla Fun
Yesterday we all headed down to the rocky intertidal shore at Vina Del Mar to go tide pooling. The rocks were massive and considerably difficult to traverse. I think everybody fell at least once. No major injuries though! We worked our way to the rocks just in front of the water first, in order to get a chance of seeing that area before the tide started to come in and cover it up. We found a wide array of organisms, including swimming crabs, porcelain crabs, hermit crabs, turban snails, blennies, brittle stars, sunstars, sea urchins, two-spotted octopus, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, anemones, isopods, chiton, etc. My personal favorites were the brittle stars and the marine isopod. Brittle stars are in the Phylum Echinodermata, which also includes sea stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sand dollars. Some characteristics of Echinoderms are their radial symmetry (except in larval stages), water vascular system, and calcium carbonate endoskeleton. This brittle star in particular was a s...
Nice!!! That's a great find to come across right off the bat! So cool!!!
ReplyDeleteIs it a Octopus bimaculoides??? ...which are my favorite cephalopod found in that area!
Yes! All two-spotted octopus so far. Hopefully we will see some other octopus species tomorrow.
DeleteI am guessing Whitney's cephalopod seeking super powers are in action!
ReplyDeleteI’ve found four so far, and most of them have greeted me with ink!
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