Mudflat/ Sand Flat Intertidal

Today we explored the intertidal mudflat/sand flat at Cholla Bay.  At first glance, you might not think there is a lot of life, besides bacteria in the mud flat area, but there are small pools of life.  And Mollusca everywhere!  At the mudflat under the surface is anoxic, hydrogen sulfide being produced by bacteria decomposing the organic material makes it black looking and very smelly.  I was impressed by the oyster shells embedded in the rocks along the mudflat area.

We saw a few swimming crabs like the blue crab, hermit crabs, and moon snails.  As we reached the sand flats, there were clam shells that had Phitch's octopus inside with their eggs.  Those octopuses were very strong for their size, extending their arms and trying to close the shell they occupied back up.

I didn't see any live sand dollars, but I found out they were probably there under the sand or mud since that is where they go during a low tide.  Apparently, you can find them because they do need air and you can look for that in the sand.  I did see quite a few broken pieces for sand dollars scattered across along with many clam shells.  

–Laura











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The End of a Great Trip

Image
  Our week in Puerto Penasco has come to an end, but what a week it was! We started the week with some surveys of intertidal habitats and tidepools, with each habitat having a unique community. We found a myriad of organisms at the sandy shore with rocky reef behind CEDO, including octopus, crabs, fish, sea urchins, sea stars, snails, and lots of sea hares. The rocky shore behind Vina del Mar also had a high abundance of organisms, including apricot sea slugs, nudibranchs, brittle stars, snapping shrimp, octopus, sea cucumbers, and crabs. The students enjoyed all of the habitats we visited, but I have a feeling the Cholla Bay mud/sandflat may have been their favorite. It had considerably less hard substrate, but the animals took advantage of the hiding places that were there. We found a lot of crabs, octopus, clams, and hermit crabs, and even some penaeid shrimp, gorgonians, and a flounder.  The sandy shore and rocky reef habitat behind CEDO.  Students tidepooling at the rocky shore ha
Read more

Serenity- FYI

Image
  For Your   Information Or Fireworms Yare super Inot the move This is a PSA that I feel strongly about! If you go tide-pooling at any beach, watch out for these guys (pictured in red worm). Sometimes called a bristleworm, these friends will shoot out little bristles like a porcupine mixed with a desert tarantula’s leg hair mixed with a worm. They look soft, but those white marks on the edge are razor sharp and will lodge themself in the flesh of whoever winds up being their unlucky victim. Then, the excess of the “hair” breaks off, leaving the residue in the skin. The skin generally becomes extremely irritated, in some cases developing a rash. Because the hairs are small and clear, it’s difficult to pull them out with tweezers, and unsanitary to pull them out with tape. The best thing to do is to wear gloves and water shoes and stay away. The second best thing to clean the area well, rinse in hot water for 15 minutes, wash in vinegar, and to wait.  Fortunately, there’s some hares in t
Read more

Muddy Flats (Maribel)

Image
  On our fourth day here we went down to Choya Bay. I really enjoyed this exploration and the zone was by far my favorite environment to explore. It was still an intertidal zone, but the difference here was that much of the land was muddy. There many water and air sockets scattered alongside the terrain. Essentially we were exploring the bay at low tide, which was a large vast exposed area of muddy intertidal zones. It was very surprising to see the amount of life, and how they are able to survive under extreme conditions. We found a lot of snails, octopus, crustaceans, and my favorite, sand dollars. The challenges of many intertidal area are desiccation, or water loss, which causes many organism to station in small tide polls if available until the tide is high again. The temperature changes can be extreme, the salinity changes, there is interrupted feeding, limited space, and oxygen availability and build up of CO2 is limited at low tide. Regardless, the organisms of this terrain hav
Read more