Back to the Reef

Today we headed back out to the reef to adventure, but this time we got to go as part of our work day.  This week is sea week so each day our classes are centering our lesson plans around the local environment and culture.  Today we examined the different types of life that can be found in the different tidal zones, tomorrow we'll have a scavenger hunt to see who can find the most organisms and will be doing some studies on those various little critters.  This week is especially good for these studies because the water level at low tide is 5 feet below sea level right now.  There are only a few days a month the tide gets below sea level so sea week has to be scheduled around that.  Being that we're experiencing especially low tides, we enjoyed the company of several other members of the village who were gathering some tasty tidbits (and of course a few of their canine friends since everyone has a dog here).  With Mike and I and 14 students looking for critters, we were able to see a lot more cool stuff than we did when we went out on our own last summer.

One of the 3-5 students pulling on a section of bull kelp,
about half of its length shows up in the picture

Ordinarily we would have a about 30 students, but we're missing several of our high schoolers.  The school district hosts a vocational academy for 2 weeks in a neighboring fly-in town which enables the students to get a semester's worth of credit in a vocational class so about half of our students were gone to that.  Then around half of the remaining students went to Tatitlek for cultural activities.  They'll rejoin us next week so we'll have more than a couple students in class.

Sponge peeking out from under ribbon kelp - I hear ribbon
kelp is tasty, but I haven't tried it

Star fish and a little crab

This lovely little lady is related to the bidarkis everyone
loves to eat, but is much more colorful.  I think it's
called a lady's slipper, but I'm not sure.

Baby octopus - he should be glad he's little because we
saw two big ones going home with someone to be supper

A pink sea anenome peeking out from a rock

The kids take some part off of the seaweek that's full of water
and squeeze them so the water squirts everywhere - fun!

Baby eel

Very pretty snail - you don't see a lot of these around here