We are being invaded by hitchhikers!!!!

Another beautiful day on the harbor.  Our journey began today at the Marriott Long Wharf in Boston, MA.  It was a lovely 85+ degrees and the sun was blazing bright and proved to agitate my already agitated body with a case of dehydration just after we rounded the aquarium.  Once at Rowe's Wharf and the Barking Crab I had to weigh on my team a little more heavily than I would have liked while I attempted to cool down and rehydrate.  Below are my observations:

Rows wharf/Barking Crab

Mussels – Blue – Smooth black shell, violet interior, sometimes covered with orange “slime”.  Flesh inside is bright orange with a black neck?

Sea Lettuce – bright green, ruffled edges, slimy also a brown version similar to this but much more crunched up

Skeleton Shrimp – everywhere!  Reaching out off from where it is attached in a grabbing like motion

Grinnells pink leaf – attached to pillar covered in barnacles  about 12’’ long ribbon like attached with a small stalk

Periwinkles – orange, smooth, covered with skeleton shrimp looks like a goose berry

Gulfweed Shrimp – very small, gray brown, look like very small shrimp or lobsters found inside of open mussel shells

Star Tunicate – on the back of a blue mussel, golden stars on blue background

Orange Tunicate – Orange, slimy, gray lobes on it

Sea Grapes – light green/yellow looks like a fetus or some sort of creature is inside.

Sea Squirt – attached to rope, light green similar to sea grape, but squirts water in defense

Green Alga – stringy, thin, bright green and looks like sea weed used in an Asian seaweed salad?

The dock picture on BlackBoard does look very similar to what we saw today on our trip; however, the growth looks a lot more dense with a wider variety of life on it.  There are fine limbed brown flora, yellow orange sponge, and what looks like barnacles and many more orange tunicates.  There also seem to be a couple of worms towards the center of the picture.  This could be possible because of the water temperature.  We had a relatively mild winter and have had a mild summer so far.  We were also on docks that had recently been scraped at Rowe's wharf which may have effected what was there while we were looking.  The has been a lack of rain which means the water column was not been shuffled that much making the zones within the column to stay relatively stable.  Although there are similar species in this image that we saw today, it appears that there is a much more dense sample than what we were looking at today.