Squid

Body Parts and Functions

Fin: Helps squid change direction when swimming

Mantle: Contains all internal organs

Chromatophores: Spots that change size in order to change squid's color for camouflage or possibly communication

Eye: Well developed; allows them to see

Arm: Squid have 8 arms covered in suction cups.

Suction cups: Help the squid hold onto food

Tentacle: Longer than arms and only have suction cups on the tips; used to pass food to arms and then to mouth

suction cup under microscope

Gonad: Reproductive organ

Gills: Absorb oxygen from water

gills under microscope

Heart: Circulates blood

Ink sac: Squid releases ink from this gland when it is in danger

Brain: Highly developed for an invertebrate

Siphon: Squirts out water so that the squid moves like a jet

Heart, ink sac, brain, and siphon

Beak: Takes in food; resembles a bird's beak

FINAL PRODUCT:

Evaluation:

6 interesting facts:
When a squid is threatened, it releases a cloud of ink to confuse predators and give it a chance to escape.
Squid can be as small as a thumbnail or as large as a house.
Squid sometimes feed on their own kind.
About 6,000 metric tons of squid are taken yearly for human food and bait.
Female squid produce 10-50 elongated egg strings, which each contain hundreds of eggs.
In many species of squid, the parents will die soon after leaving the spawning ground. :(

The most disgusting part of the lab was how smelly the squid was, and taking the beak out. It was also fun (in a disgusting, yet fascinating sense) to take the ink sac out and paint with it. My least favorite part of the lab was that we did not get any gloves; it seemed a bit unsanitary and slimy. But overall, it was interesting to receive a fuller understanding of squids.

Benefits of Mangroves

Friday 2/22

There are the red, black, and white mangroves.

Red mangroves live in deepest salt-water of the three and have large prop-roots.
Organism benefits: Place to hide from predators for young fish.
Human benefits: Used for fuel wood but its most common and important use is in the leather industry: its bark is peeled and tannin is extracted, which is used as a dye.

White mangroves live farthest away from the water of the three. Leaves are rounded elliptical.
Organism benefits: Sugar for the insects.
Human benefits: Used for fishing poles, tool handles and as wood for fences.

Black mangroves live in a few inches of salt water and have pnuematophores.
Also, the leaves have salt crystals formed on the top side.
Organism benefits: Place for breeding, nursering, and especially feeding.
Human benefits: Can be used for fishing poles, charcoal, and in the production of honey.

It helps the fishing industry a lot by keeping the young, baby fish safe so they can grow up, breed and be caught, providing profit.

Ocean Garbage Patch

Thursday, 2/21

The ocean garbage patch is a ginormous sea of plastic bags, bottles and other debris that is growing in the North Pacific, and now another one has been found in the Atlantic. Ocean currents collect floating garbage for thousands of miles and drop it into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, one of the major ocean vortexes around the world.



Plastic products can be extremely harmful to marine life in the gyre. For example, loggerhead sea turtles commonly mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, their favorite food. Many marine mammals and birds, such as albatrosses, have become strangled by the plastic rings used to hold six-packs of soda together.



Marine debris can also disrupt marine food webs in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. As microplastics and other trash collect on the surface of the ocean, they block sunlight from reaching plankton and algae below. Algae and plankton are the most common autotrophs in the marine food web. If algae and plankton communities are threatened, the entire food web may change. Animals such as fish and turtles that feed on algae and plankton will have less food. If those animals start to die, there will be less food for predator species such as tuna, sharks, and whales.

Because the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so far from any country’s coastline, no nation will take responsibility or provide the funding to clean it up. Cleaning up marine debris is not as easy as it sounds. Many pieces of debris are the same size as small sea animals, so nets designed to scoop up trash would catch these creatures as well. Even if we could design nets that would just catch garbage, the size of the oceans makes this job too time-consuming to consider. And no one can reach trash that has sunk to the ocean floor. However, we can slow the patch from growing if we use biodegradable plastics and be reusing plastic rather than throwing it in the trash.

Reptiles

Hawksbill Turtle

Common name: Hawksbill Turtle
Scientific name: Eretmochelys imbricata
Habitat: Rocky areas, coral reefs, shallow coastal areas, lagoons or oceanic islands, and narrow creeks and passes. They are rarely in water deeper than 65 feet.
Adaptations: It has a beak like mouth to capture food better.
Status: Endangered :'(
Current issue facing them: They are often killed for their shells and a lot of people like to eat their eggs. Or they can be accidentally caught in fishing nets.
I absolutely adore turtles they are so beautiful and amazing and graceful. <3 <3

Ocean Acidification

Tuesday, 2/19

Ocean acidification is when carbon dioxide is produced by the burning fossil fuels and is then put into the ocean. Many major problems can develop in the marine ecosystem because of this. The animals most at risk are tarapods. Their shells are progressively becoming thinner and thinner as time goes on. Their shells will eventually completely disintegrate from the immense amount of pollution and carbon dioxide us humans use everyday. If the the shells from these small animals keep getting smaller, they will die and so will the animals that eat them. Their will be a chain reaction throughout from the bottom up to the top of the food chain. By not burning fossil fuels we can prevent this from happening. We can use solar energy and not use the earth's materials. In the end we are killing ourselves.

Essay Question For Next Test

Friday 2/15



Karenia brevis is the dinoflagellate responsible for the red tide in Florida and Texas. When it's in high concentrations, it causes the water to take on a reddish or pinkish color. It uses its two flagellas to move more easly through the water.


It is harmful to marine animals and humans, causing death and neurotoxic shellfish poisoning. Symptoms of neurotoxic shellfish poisoning include vomiting, nausea, and a variety of neurological symptoms such as slurred speech. As a result, the Gulf coast economy is negatively affected because it prevents people from being able to eat shellfish. Because the fisherman can't sell it, they economy takes a dive.

What I've Learned About Plankton

Thursday 2/14





I've learned many things about plankton this week, but I'll condense it to 5 main points. Unlike what I have believed my whole life, plankton are the world's main source of oxygen, not trees. They produce 80% of the Earth's oxygen. One reason why they are so important is that they are at the bottom of the food chain in the ocean. Without them the pyramid would fall apart. And lastly it improves immune function and brain health. Diatoms are single alga that has a cell wall of silica. Dinoflagellates are a single celled organism with two flagella and a cellulose covering. They form one of the chief constituents of plankton. Some dinoflagellates cause harmful effects on marine life because of the toxins they carry. Lastly, there are two main types of plankton, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Zooplankton are microscopic invertebrate animals that swim or drift in water while phytoplankton are microscopic plants in the ocean.

Bottle-nose dolphin

Wednesday 2/13



Common Name: Bottle-nose dolphin
Scientific Name: Tursiops truncatus
Habitat: coastal: adapt to warm, shallow waters because of its smaller body.
offshore: adapt to colder, deeper waters because they are bigger, they conserve heat.
Reproduction: In Florida, the females is sexually mature at 5-12 years, males at 10-13 years.
While in South Africa: females are sexually mature at 9-11 years, males at about 14.5 years.
Status: not considered to be endangered; its near-shore distribution, though, makes it vulnerable to environmental degradation, direct exploitation, and problems associated with local fisheries
Facts: They live 20 years or less based off the census in Florida.

The gestational period is about 12 months.
The adults eats about 5% of its body weight and a nursing mother eats 8%.
Issue: The Japanese and Taiwanese kill them for food. They are exposure to pollutants and biotoxins.
Some have parasites and other bacteria. They are often injured or killed due to fishing gear.
Reason: I picked the Bottlenose dolphin because my mom has told me about how she got to swim with dolphins before she had me. I've always thought that would be such a cool experience, and am really intrigued by this animal :)

Plankton Race

Tuesday 2/12

The most difficult part of this activity was getting it to go extremely slow. The first design ended up being the last one. We used a small fuzzy ball (like in the picture below) with a toothpick inside. If I could do this over I would change the design by just using the small plastic square we were given, it wouldve gone slower. The fact that we had free reign of the design without any regulations is what I liked best.

Harmful Algae Blooms

Monday 2/11

Algal blooms that have harmful or toxic phytoplankton are HABs. Because they look red or brown, they are also called red tides.

One of the causes of harmful algae blooms are saxitoxins. Saxitoxins are a large toxin family referred to as the Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) toxins. When toxigenic marine dinoflagellates are eaten by shellfish, toxins concentrate and then the people who eat them consume it and get sick. The algal species itself can grow incredibly fast when conditions are right, like below.



Preventing HABs:
-control the things that create blooms such as the leaching and runoff of excess nutrients
-devices that result in the mixing of lakes (for example, by air bubbling), that enhance vertical mixing of the phytoplankton
-increasing the water flow through lakes or estuaries
-use compounds to chemically-precipitate phosphorus, and then take out the sediment by dredging, when managing an area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas
-adding alum, ferric salts or clay products so it will settle the phosphorus to the sediment layer
-suction dredging the top half meter of sediments

However, these efforts can be expensive and are best suited to small affected water bodies.

In 1953 the longest single red-tide episode was recorded, staying 18-months along the Florida Gulf Coast. There was a catastrophic amount of deaths of marine animals that were recorded from Tarpon Springs to Key West. During these events, there were reports of dead bottlenose dolphins, sea turtles, and numerous fish species.

Marine Plankton

Friday 2/8

They provide food for other animals.

The majority of our oxygen supply comes from plankton.
They show us where currents are and where healthy ecosystems are.

Dinoflagellates are apart of a group called alveolates. they are most common in marine and freshwater phytoplankton. some are heterotrophic. Diatoms, on the other other hand they are unicellular, photosynthetic algae with cell walls that contain silica.

Sea Star

Thursday 2/7

Common Name: Sea Star
Scientific Name: Asteroidea
Adaptations: A sea star has five arms, if one of them is cut off it can regenerate or grow back.
Habitat: lives on the sea floor
Interesting facts: they don't have a brain, only a nerve center that allows information to pass within the star, they are also omnivorous
I chose the sea star because for some reason I've always been fascinated with them. I think they're so freaking cool :)

The Trieste

Wednesday 2/6

The Trieste made its famous dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench on January 23, 1960. To go down to the deepest point on the seafloor the bathyscaphe had 9 tons of iron shot for weights to bring it down. Plus the air tanks were flooded with seawater to help it sink even faster. It descended 3 feet per second until it reached a depth of 27,000 feet, when they slowed it down half as fast.

The Trieste only stayed at the bottom for 20 minutes, but getting there took almost 5 hours. At that depth, the pressure was more than 16,883 pounds per square inch put a bunch of stress on the Trieste, cracking an outer plexiglass window. Pretty intense stuff. Although, there weren't any other problems after that. The Trieste was the first and only vessel to enter the Mariana Trench in history. In 1963, it was used to find the Thresher and then was put in the Navy Museum in Washington DC.

Beebe and Barton

Tuesday 2/5

In 1935 Beebe and Barton dove and set several consecutive world records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human. The captain of their crew allowed the bathysphere to stay at the bottom for only 3 minutes before going back up. Beebe described eerie and extravagant undersea animals, along with large water voids with no apparent life. For years, no one believed him and they said he was making it all up. Then photographs and other scientists' observations verified his observations, and Beebe was officially credited with the discovery of hundreds of new life forms.

Beebe and Barton conducted dives in the Bathysphere together, marking the first time that a marine biologist observed deep-sea animals in their native environment. Through these dives, the bathysphere proved its qualities but also revealed weaknesses. It was hard to operate and involved considerable potential risks. A break in the suspension cable would have killed the men inside; surface waves and the boat moving could have caused such a thing. Because of these disadvantages, the bathysphere was replaced by the safer, more maneuverable mesoscaphe and bathyscaphe.

Why Should We Study The Ocean?

Monday 2/4

We should study the ocean for several reasons.

1. To expand our knowledge of sea creatures and discovering new species Who knows how many animals in the ocean we could learn about if we just dove a little deeper.



2. Also, we could discover new trade routes. Certain canals and seas could be faster to travel a certain way, and we just may have not realized it yet. If we study the ocean we might be able to figure out which route or path would be the most efficient with certain types of boats.



3. We could find more oil. With that we could boost the economy, ect ect.



4. We might even be able to understand the ocean, and therefore the weather, even better. If we could find a way to predict when a tsunami or typhoon, ect. is developing or when it will hit we could lengthen the amount of time we have to get people safe.



5. We may even be able to stop, or prevent global warming.

Boat Race

Friday 2/1

Well, due to the unfortunate event of the hair dryer's violent death, we were unable to race our boat. I went in on Friday during my lunch to race the boat and to make sure it wasn't touching the sides so it would properly race. After putting the 20 marbles in the boat (10 in each water bottle so the weight would be distributed evenly) I used the hair dryer on the lowest setting and tested it. There were only a couple times that it touched the sides, but all in all it raced quite well. Sure, it wasn't fast, but it did its job and sailed true. Throughout the testing I noticed that it actually sailed a lot better going backwards rather than the direction I had built it to sail. All in all, I think we did pretty well considering the time we had to make an entire new one after our beloved 1st one was violently taken from us. Below is a side shot of the final product.

Boat Design/Construction

Thursday 1/31

My boyfriend, Dallas, and I constructed a boat to race for Aquatic Science. The first model had a hull made up of two halved water bottles inside of each other. We superglued a couple sticks together as the mast and a sheet of paper as the mainsail. The keel was part of a rubber flipper that we cut and glued underneath the water bottles to help it sail straight. We didn't have a chance to test it in the pool with the hair dryer because another boat crushed ours and we had to make a new one. The new one is made up of two water bottles side by side with 3 pencils as support for the mast, and a triangle mainsail made up of foil wrapped around the pencils. We had two keels this time made up of Styrofoam. Because I didn't have a phone or a camera; I didn't have the chance to take pictures of our construction. But below there is a picture with the main parts of the sailboat that we made sure to have.