Saturday Observations - Steve Yang

Observations of diversity in Boston's inner harbor habitat.

Locations: many locations from Marriot long wharf harbor walls, the Barking Crab docks

Method: Examine the plants and animals under the dock and make identification

Tools: My hands & eyes, a pocket notebook, pens, magnifying glass borrowed from Prof. Berman, a guidebook from Carman

Observations:

Mussells were most easily found. They vary in sizes, tiny mussells were often attached to the big ones. By looking into the guide book that I bought after class, I agree those are Blue mussels.

The most interesting thing happend at the Barking Crab docks where I pulled out mass-combination of mussels, seaweeds, mud, orange stuff , and many different types of shrimps and insects. My guess on orange stuff was that, mussels might feed themselves from it since it came attached to others and never have been found by itself. After looking into the guide book, we concluded it as the Orange Sheath Tunicate. The center of attention for me and Carman was a long skinny shrimp getting real agressive when we poked, and pulled out of seaweeds. I think it is a Long-horn Skeleton Shrimp, although the color of shrimp I saw was different from that in the book.

Seaweeds vary in colors, color differences were based on the amount of sun they receive. It seems that seaweeds that are fully exposed to sun faded from green to brown or red. Those that were either partly exposed or not exposed were green. So my hypothesis is that sun does have some effects on turning colors of seaweeds. I oberserved two different kinds of seaweeds, dark brown ones with relatively narrow leafs and bright green ones with wide leafs.

Rockweed and sea kelp have been idenfied by Prof. Berman, and it was interesting to know that no sea gulls indicate the evidence of predatory sea gulls.


It was exciting to have a class in harbor where I personally observed and figured out the creatures that actually live under water. The knowledges that are acquired from experience last longer that the knowledges from the text book. So let's do it again tomorrow.