Vik Iyengar came to dinner on the 28th, on July 1st he was out in the field at False Bay early at 7:00am with Salish Sea Sciences. Here are a few photographs… To learn more about Vik and his research, please take a look at this earlier blog (and its links): Vik and Erika Iyengar: Earwigs! Slugs!

Photos by Tom Grauman

By Jaimie, Sara, Arielle, Jake—

Today has been a long but exciting day. We woke up at 6 this morning and promptly headed over to False Bay. False Bay has its name because when the tide is high, it looks like a nice place to anchor a boat. However when the tide goes out, the entire place is drained.

Photos by Tom Grauman

At False Bay we studied the population of Lug Worms (Aberinicola) by haphazardly placing quadrats and then counting the holes inside. We did this 100 times, then dug up 25 randomly chosen holes to get roughly the percentage of the holes that are actually occupied.

After that, we went further up the bay with Vik Iyengar and collected earwigs from under logs before returning to the dorms.

Once back, we went to the science room and wrote down the procedure for measuring the Lug Worm population and collecting earwigs.

After lunch we headed to the labs and practiced doing scientific drawings of the marine life we collected yesterday. We spent about an hour there before returning back to the dorms and sorting the earwigs by sex and size.

Next, we had some exploration time before welcoming our guest for dinner, Will King. Mr. King is a graduate student studying marine ecology. His study focuses on barnacles, and tomorrow we will be joining him in the field. After dinner, Mr. King gave a presentation explaining the effects of climate change on marine ecology, specifically how barnacles will react. Now we have about an hour before we will go to bed, waking up bright and early to work in the field tomorrow with Mr. King.