Another busy week with variety. I got back on the beach this week, the first time in a couple of weeks because of being away, the weather and the tides. Sort of felt like going back home after being away on a holiday. There were a few changes baecause of the weather, a lot of seaweed washed up in one place, and some of the sand that was building up was washed out. These aren't scientific observations, just observations. That is one thing I have noticed this week, and probably over the whole time, science tries to be exact as possible. It uses measurement to record changes not just thoughts and opinions.
I spent Tuesday looking through a microscope and learning how to identify what I could see exactly. Erin has some soft sediment samples collected from Tongaporutu and we had to look through these with a microscope to see what lived in each sample. I had to learn what I was looking for, and how to distinguish between different worms, and different arthropods. I took me a while to go through each sample and Erin would find more once I had finished, she has much more experience at this and I am still learning. I am carrying on next week and want to get better at it and see if I can find everything and then correctly identify it.
My time at the beach gave me a chance to practise correctly identifying the different species I saw there. I am finding I can distinguish different whelks, barnacles, limpets, seaweeds, but there others I need more practise with, especially snails and chitons. I have also added a $1 coin to my photos to give a sense of scale to the species I am finding. There are however bigger and smaller examples of each species and I need to make it clear my photos are to act as a guide only. These are chitons, I'm pretty sure they are snakeskin chitons but this is an area I need to improve.
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