The last time that I visited Pt. Piños, I noticed this area of algae covered rocks and the lush beds of sea grass.  I decided that I wanted to return soon to take a closer look.

May 16th at 1pm was my chance!  The low tide of 0.91 that day was at 1:52pm.  I messaged my good friend Susan and asked if she would help me take some pictures using my foldscope.  She agreed, so I gathered my supplies and headed over there.  As you can see, it was a beautiful day!

I wanted to do something different today.  There was a technique in another class that I was aware of and I wanted to try it on the green rocks at this site.  The techniques was to use a toothbrush and scrub the algae off of the rocks in a stream or river.  I figured that it would work in the intertidal as well.  Unfortunately, I could not find a toothbrush to use, but the teaching labs at CSUMB let me use the bottle brushes pictured below.

I went straight for the rocks and started scrubbing a rock and then tried to create a wet mount.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as I had expected (it would have been better with a toothbrush), so I don’t really have any pictures to show for our efforts. except this one:

We abandoned that idea and found a feather!  You can see the barbs and barbules much better in this photo than you can see with a regular camera and the foldscope.  (See my previous post.)

We also ended up looking at a blade of sea grass mounted on a slide.  The photos turned out better than I had anticipated.   Sea grass is a flowering plant, not an algae and can grow in salt water!

We developed a good system.  I made the slides and she took the pictures.  Here is my attempt at a cross-section of a blade of Turkish towel algae ( Chondracanthus exasperatus ).

Here is a photo of the bumps you see on the surface of the blade.

Finally, I would not have been able to complete this post without Susan’s help!  I’m dedicating this post to her!