Blog Post #7: Shannon Point Field Trip

     The field trip to Shannon Point was easily one of my favorites in this class. I loved the scenery and coastal location of the lab (not to mention the enormous windows to look out of), and it was great to finally have a more hands-on education on marine ecology.

     The most interesting thing I learned about marine ecosystems would have to be how sea anemones can entirely change color based on the type of plankton that is native to the area or climate. Also, I thought it was cool to see how more "green" anemones are native to the North Pacific, while brown anemones are native to the more southern coast of the US and Mexico.

     Nate's talk on scientific diving was also fascinating. I never knew how complicated achieving the title of "scientific diver" was, and I learned a ton about the history of diving, which was fairly unknown to me before this trip. I was really interested in the art movement boom of underwater photography personally, especially because it came about fairly long after the necessary photography equipment was available!

     One of the most exciting parts of the trip for me was actually finding a species of plankton under a microscope. I couldn't quite ID it myself, but it's body was very transparent, which allowed me to see many tiny egg's in the mother's abdomen, all with little red organs similar to their mother. It was so thrilling to finally catch an organism under the glass, but was quite difficult to actually isolate it enough to stop jumping around out of the view of my lens