Hello! We’re coming up to the end of the fall semester at Bamfield, and we have about 20 days left here at BMSC. We’ve finished up our ecology class and are starting a new one on animal structure and function. We get to play with a lot of cool invertebrates. We’ve experienced two ‘atmospheric rivers’ here, meaning a TON of rain. And a few windy storms. Having a lot of fun here but also looking forward to coming home and eating some sushi. Enjoy the pictures!

First up – field trip! We went snorkelling in Grappler Inlet, which was fun but also very cold despite the sunny skies. We saw some sea stars, shells, a seal (not under the water unfortunately), and listened to popping shrimp. The popping sound was very similar to the sound you hear on tropical reefs, but they don’t know what type of animal makes the sound in Bamfield. Cool!

Looking at sea snails under a microscope. We were assigned phylum Mollusca for our group project – which basically meant looking at snails, limpets, sea slugs and chitons. For this experiment (pictured above) we put a snail on a glass slide and flipped it over so that we could se the underside under the microscope. The big white/yellow soft tissue is called the foot, which it uses to move. This type of snail is a carnivore and drills a hole into bivalve shells with its mouthpart and then sucks out the meat.

Chitons under a microscope! These guys are slow moving, tough shelled and look like the outside of a kiwi. The underside is soft and fleshy (pictured right).

Pretty sea slug pictured left (also known as a nudibranch), and a scallop pictured right. When I put the scallop back in the water it started swimming and snapping vigorously at the surface as if it was trying to bite me. Serves me right for taking it out of the water I guess!

Bear print on the beach! Almost looked fake. And on a rainy hike (right), where we found a large uprooted tree. Pretty spectacular.

Warning – gross tunicates. We are finishing up our directed studies project on trying to kill this invasive species of tunicate, nicknamed sea vomit. We heat treated them and then waited 3 weeks to see if they died. One of our (very smelly) tasks was to assess mold cover on them. And for some preliminary results – it seems that when heat treated at 70 and 90 degrees, they all died which is great news for the aquaculture farmers trying to get this gross stuff off their equipment.

A picture from a walk on a cold, sunny day. Looks quite idyllic. Days like this make up for the relentless rain!

And a beautiful sunset later in the day!

Another beautiful sunset on a field trip!

And a trip down to the docks to collect some invertebrates. Pictured left is a tube worm chandelier, which we pulled up from the ocean. When underwater, worms that live in each of the tubes extend little tufts to feed. Google “northern feather duster worm” to see what they look like back in the water. Then we found a flat worm (pictured middle). On the right is our bucket that had all the species we found that day. There were probably 30 species just in this one bucket!

The ‘movie’ room at Bamfield. Its an empty dorm room with a sheet over the window and a projector! We watched Romeo and Juliet.

A really nice letter from Coco and Chacha! The whale theme is very fitting

Christmas time in Bamfield! They had a happy hour on Friday night where the students helped put up the Christmas decorations, it all feels very festive!

And some Gingerbread cookie decorating! A lot of talented artists among us at Bamfield, I am not one of them to say the least…. (mine pictured right)

 

That is all for now, thanks for reading the blog!