Maya, Rachel, Victoria, Zack

*This blog post was late because we woke early to survey slugs with Professor Erika Iyengar Tuesday

Early in the morning, we woke up to a nourishing breakfast before hiking Mount Young with Sharon Massey, a teacher at Spring Street and a scientific illustrator on the side. She was there to foster our observations of the local ecosystem; we practiced some scientific illustration of our own on the summit, from drawing extensive landscapes to penciling in the smallest details of flowers and insects.

Learning from Sharon Massey

The hike up Mount Young

After a lunch of heated debates about James Bond and Marvel movies, we headed back to Deadman’s Bay, our location from last Tuesday, to conduct a field study with PhD student Will King. Will discussed with us the differing environments in the intertidal, as well as ways that the various creatures living there grapple with both biotic and abiotic factors. During our field study, we used transects and calipers (precision measurement devices) to locate and measure one sampling of the local barnacle population.

Clarissa hard at work measuring barnacles

Data analysis was next on the agenda as we returned to the Spring Street lab and recorded our findings from the intertidal as well as information from Beatrice’s rabbit field study on Sunday.

For dinner tonight, Professors Erika and Vik Iyengar were our guests. They both live in Pennsylvania and work at the Friday Harbor Labs in the summer, studying marine ecology and behavioral ecology respectively. Aside from our engaging dinner conversations filled with stories of snail mating and the scientific inconsistencies of Finding Nemo, professors Vik and Erika both presented slideshows on their studies of rattlebox moths, maritime earwigs, and local slugs.

Lights out was at 9 PM tonight in preparation for a ridiculously early 4:15 AM wakeup tomorrow morning.