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!