By Grace Davis, Jeremy Davis, Faith Jayaram, and Tony Yuan To

For most people, collecting, researching, and scanning eelgrass isn’t the first career path that comes to mind. But this is not the case for Morgan Eisenlord, who spends her life working with sea stars and eelgrass. Today she taught us about the latter. Dodging giant red rock crabs and clams that were spraying water everywhere, we collected eelgrass samples and took them back to the Spring Street International School campus to clean them and create scans.

The process began with laying out measuring tapes across the beach. We were split into three groups, each one working on a separate transect. Two people collected samples of the slimy but interesting eelgrass every 5 meters. Another person counted the eelgrass plants at 5, 10, and 15 meters along the transect in order to document the density. The final person recorded everything in their notebook.

After our successful morning of eelgrass research, we returned to the dorms to shower and eat lunch. Many of us then joined Morgan in the classroom to finish organizing the eelgrass. We ended three hours early! This extra time was spent on research projects and other activities.

This sunny, beautiful day ended with an exciting performance of the Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare. Even though we were cold, it was definitely worth it. Goodnight!