Crystal Beach Park

Crystal Beach
Palm Harbor, FL
75% cloud coverage
82 degrees Farenheit with a breeze
71% humidity
Salinity: 28 ppt

This week we visited Crystal Beach Park as our example of an estuary. Measuring the salinity, we found that it was 28 parts per thousand, below the usual sea salinity of 35 ppt. This confirmed that it was an estuary, and we hypothesized that the fresh water source could be an underground spring.

When we first arrived at the park, the class ventured out onto the dock to peer into the water below. Observing from overhead, we saw two mating horseshoes, a stingray, mollusk, and various sea grasses. Walking further onto the water, the class saw how the substrates progressed from mineral, to plant, to animal based.

Our hands on activity for this trip consisted of laying a 30 meter transect and measuring the bio diversity in the quadrat every 3 meters. Our group got the area ranging from the shore out along the pier, an extensive and very rich zone that took an exceeding amount of time to process. Among our recordings were over 20 species, with turtlegrass, oysters, shoal grass, and barnacles being the richest in quantity. Overall, our biodiversity calculation was .824, just a few hundreths behind the diversity level of the group who processed the mangrove area.

The Crystal Beach field trip was important in order to evaluate our ability to practically use tools and measurements to calculate data while in the field. This helps us come to our own conclusions, relying not just on information we are told but also to witness it for ourselves.