Crystal Beach

Crystal Beach
October 1st, 2015
82 Degrees Partly cloudy; Breezy

Came to identify the different types of mangroves, and animals in this specific estuary. 

Crystal beach was a fun field trip, we saw many different types of animals in the gooky and smelly water. First we walked onto the pier where we saw a ginormous stingray (the biggest I've ever seen)

                                                         

Above are 2 horseshoe crabs mating! They did this the whole entire time we were there and went in circles around us! Clark picked them up so we could see the bottom and it made me squirmish. 

We then each saw the diversity in a specific area for a certain number of creatures we could find. We had the shallow end which was probably the least diverse. We found a lot of mini crabs! Almost microscopic. We also found a mollusk, snail, mini crab, gastropod and a snail type thing! My job was to dig into the dirt every 3 meters and look for whatever we could find in it! It was super smelly! Our diversity of creatures and plants was .6291, the closer it is to 0 means it is less diverse and the closer it is to one made it more diverse. I would consider ours a little less diverse but we did have many repeating mini crabs! 

After all the groups were finished we took time to identify different types of mangroves. 

Above are the black mangroves, you can tell they are black due to the bottom of the leaf looking white! They tend to be the tallest and they are pnuematophores! 

 These next ones were the white mangroves, you could tell these apart from the others because they are the roundest and lighter in color then the black ones! 

And last but not least are the red mangroves, these leaves are smooth and bright green! 

There were no buttonwoods at this estuary. But I do have a very good idea of what a buttonwood does look like. It tends to have a white "pom pom" flower and cone like fruit. 

In an estuary you should realize (normally but not always) the different mangroves tend to grow from red to black to white to the buttonwoods starting from the water to the land!

This was a very fun field trip even though it was super hot! I am very glad I decided to put on those shoes in the end! Because now that I look back that would have been pretty gross to get into that water barefoot!