On Monday morning Rooms 9 and 10 had a very long bus ride to Long Bay to North Shore. The purpose of going there was because we are learning about tiny little water fish species. We had 3 different activities to learn about 1st exploring the rocky shores, 2nd was collecting things from the high tide and our last activity was learning about identifying biodiversity species from the beach. Once we took one step out of the bus it was stone cold shivering, feeling the wind pushing against you, it nearly felt like we were at the North Pole.
Everyone settled down under the shelter and had a 10 min break before we started. After a short while we went out to the beach crossed a little stream and talked about how we can save the pollution from going out to sea. So then we suggested that we needed to stop polluting out to the sea and put it into the right place, THE BIN. We got 1 tray each for 4 groups and had to fill in water half way and collect anything that we’d find inside the rocky shores. My group found numerous sea snails. The most interesting specie for me that I learnt about was the Sea anemone because it’s touch is so slimy,slick and felt like jelly. I wish I would've seen it under water so that I can it’s red or blue tentacles flash out. The other specie that I was curious about was the different kinds of starfish. Sarah our tour guide taught us a trick to identify starfish is to gently slide your hand around the rocky pool. Luckily I saw one but it wasn't from my group.
Our second activity was collecting items from the high tide area into a bucket. There were different kind of things out on the high tide like dead black seaweed beautiful shells. Another thing that we discovered was different sized sand hoppers. They would usually hide under the dead seaweed because if they dry up from the sun they would eventually die. After we walked along the beach we found one jelly fish, big and fat, that was alive. Soon after it was time to move onto our next activity which was to sort out the classification of the the things that we removed from the high tide.
We had to sort out where a sea snail was from which was a Gastropoda, after was the sort of starfish we gathered from the rock shores and that was from asteroidea and we also learnt about other classification for other species. We also had to form our bodies into the way of a starfish and a shell like paua because a paua has two shells connected to it so that it could stay closed. It was really fun and hilarious because the team next to us were a bit struggling to put there own legs up, I think because my group was more muscular.
From this trip to Long Bay I learnt a lot of information about the rocky shore and the life of the marine reserve. I hope to go there again and then learn more information about the marine species.
