Written by Una, Addy, Kate and Gabe

Today we woke up well rested, we started our day with breakfast and packing lunch. We then headed to False Bay to meet with Dr. Vik Iyengar who studies the sexual reproduction of insects specifically the marine earwigs on the island. We helped him collect over 100 earwigs to use in his lab. They were very easy to find by just flipping over logs.

After helping out Dr. Iyengar, we surveyed for Lugworms. A couple students dug them up and others used quadrats to record how many were in certain areas. Some students just threw the quadrats and recorded data like that, while others were deliberately looking for signs of the worms. The signs of the worms look like skinny piles of sand, since the worms basically eat the sand and poop it back out! They do this to digest the bacteria in the sand for food, but they don’t want the sand so it has to go somewhere.

After wrapping up our earwigs and Lugworms, we ate lunch at False Bay before heading back to the dorms. We quickly ran down to the marina and collected buckets of water for our aquarium to hold our testing creatures. Finally, we sat down and continued to develop our ideas for projects. Some students are still searching for the perfect idea, some are meeting with scientists, and others are digging deep. We are so excited to build these projects and share with our family, friends, peers and the locals of Friday Harbor.

We have no guest tonight, so many of us are exploring town before we have dinner and some fun group activities tonight!