Blog Credits: Cynthia

Today was project continuation day. Some people had completed data and animal collection, while others still needed to go into the field. The wake-up time today was 6 am, and spirits were quite low. The group that needed to go out into the field went to two separate locations, 4th of July Beach and Deadmans. The group of people going to Deadmans included Maxeme, Ripley, and Wesley, while the group that went to 4th of July included Cynthia, Matthew, Sam, Addy, Silas, and Gabe.

Sam and Cynthia had trouble finding the right type of clams for their experiments, and Silas and Gabe had trouble getting data. Even though the disappointment was high at the 4th of July beach, Silas and Gabe found a very cool dead octopus and had a good time with Adam!

During the time that the students were in the field, the students who didn’t go were in the little lab conducting their own individual experiments.

Once Cynthia and Sam knew they were not going to be able to find the clam types they were looking for, they called Caroline, and she picked up Addy, Sam, Matthew, and Cynthia, all of whom rode back to the dorms. Once back, Uma brought Violet and Isla to Dr. Hazel’s lab to pick up equipment

After Uma dropped Isla and Violet off, she brought Cynthia and Matthew to Argyle Lagoon to try and find clams. Uma, Cynthia, and Matthew spent an hour wading through the water, finding two Manila clams to complete Cynthia’s organism collection! She added them back into the aquarium in the little lab, completing the work she needed to do today!

At one, we all gathered at the Art room and had an interesting talk with Magali Cota. After this, we had a poster workshop with Adam and Ethan, where we looked through different posters from different years and listed their pros and cons.

That’s it for now. Stay in tune for the next few days as students finalize projects! See you tomorrow!

Blog credits: Cynthia and Matthew

Our day started with a 7:30 wake-up and a make-your-own breakfast. At 9:30, we went to the art room and had a fascinating lesson about different kinds of algae with Dr. Becca Guenther. Dr. Guenther currently works in the Sea Star Lab at FHL. She did her PhD on calcified coralline algae. After the lesson, we used cyanotype paper and laid different types of algae to make art.

After you layer the algae to your heart’s desire, you put a glass over the paper and leave it to soak in the sun for 5-10 minutes! In the image, you can see different colors of paper; this is because over time the paper goes from a light blue to a beige color.

Once your paper is done soaking in the sun, you then bring it to a bucket of water to dip in. We had two different buckets of water, one without hydrogen peroxide and one with hydrogen peroxide. The bucket with hydrogen peroxide will make your paper a darker color, and the one without will make your paper lighter. In this image, you can see one of the papers that was dipped in plain water.

Here you can see the final result of the art project. These papers were dipped in hydrogen peroxide, which is why this paper is much darker than the paper above.

After our art project, we hopped in the vans and went to Mount. Grant, where we met Shauna Barrows, who explained the freshwater reserve of Trout Lake and how it provided water for the town of Friday Harbor. We learned that Mount. Grant is the highest accessible point for the public! She also explained how important land conservation is to this island, as runoff of fresh water can deplete the supply for the town immensely, which will deeply impact the people living on the island. That is why the land bank is so important, and the conservation work they do. After this interesting lesson, we went back to the art room for project time, where we could ask Ami and Adam any questions we had. Today we finalized ideas for our projects, and now we are starting the work on our individual projects! That’s it for now, see you tomorrow!