A Day at the Docks.

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 29th, our little field trip was to head over the the Charleston marina. Because you never know what you'll find underneath those docks.

(Actually, you kind of do, because it's a pretty specific habitat).

BUT. Here's a crazy interesting thing about it. The floating docks, are well, floating. So what happens is larvae is laid there and the young hatch there and they live their entire lives on these floating docks. And one wrong step, and then fall off to their impending doom. (Not really, but they do fall down to the sea floor where, in some cases, they do die. But in other instances, they just have to figure out how to live in a new habitat. Isn't that crazy to think about? They can never return back to the docks.) Which meant we had to be kind of careful when we picked creatures up and placed them back because we didn't want to be the reason for their demise.

So this is what we basically did for like two hours. It kind of made me sick so.. I kind of stopped doing it but it was a relaxing little day.

Rachel, me & Courtney.

We also made a friend. And he & his friends were quite the pranksters. This guy knew that we were collecting stuff and he would wait around for us to feed it to him (which we never did). And when we weren't feeding him, he would try and scare us. Kind of a playful thing but it was kind of funny/scary, depending on how close you were to him when he decided to pop out of the water. This is a fur seal and he was cute.

 He was also kind of a little model. He knew that we were all taking his picture so he swam over to us and just kind of sat there and showed off for a bit. Here he is in his model pose:

One of the coolest things that happened was one of the harbor seals who was also pretty playful would dive deep and then pop up underneath someone's face. (Remember how we were all laying down on the dock with our faces inches above the surface?) A few people got quite the scare but the best one was Dr. Holyoak. He had his waterproof camera with him and he was taking all sorts of pictures and he heard a splash above his head, but he was wearing baseball hat so he couldn't see what it was. Well, when he did see what it was, he was practically nose-to-nose with a harbor seal so he quickly snapped a picture as best he could with his camera. And this is what he got:

 Pretty cool, huh? You can read his full account here.

This is the post office I wrote about here. I figured it should be documented. Kind of small & sketch, right?