beach observations

On 4/11/11 me and my class traveled to many beaches so we can get data for our lab. the class was split up in two (kind of...) my group was assigned to go to sugar beach, Kam 1 beach and keawakapu beach. here are my observation on these three beaches.

Sugar Beach:

sugar beach is a white sand beach but a bit darker tint than Kam 1 or keawakapu, this leads me to think that it may be part detrital. there is a seawall to the left of the beach but i dont think that would be the resion for the darker sand tint. i know that sugar beach is also used for kanuing, the every day use of the kanues may erode the beach.

Kam 1:

kam 1 is a white sand beach. i think it is completely biogenic because the fact there is no lava rock near the beach, also the beach is white as snow. i don't know of any coral reefs near by (although there may be some), the sand might come from large deposits of sand in the ocean carried from currents.

Keawakapu:

keawakapu is one of my favorite beaches on maui. its very calm and safe to the public. although not the most appealing to those who like to surf. it is a white sand beach, if you have ever been in the water there you know where that sand comes from. to the right you see a bunch of rocks, under the water is a large coral reef. alot of the reef near the beach is dead so its obvious where some of the sand comes from. if you go farther out you can see the coral is alive with many fish hanging around. some of the corral might also come from fish poop.

whale observation lab

Introduction: over to past 10 years thousands of humpback whales have been hunted for the resources. japan and Norway alone kill over 1500 whales every year. because whaling is outlawed i'm wondering if the amount of whale population has gone up or down.

Question: is there more whales at the beginning of the session or at the end of the session?

Hypothesis: the amount of whales killed might still be high today so there would be more whales at the beginning of the session.

Prediction: If the number of whales hunted go up then there will be more whales at the beginning of the session.

Materials:

pen/ pencil

data sheet

clinometer

Procedure:

you will need to find your elevation from sea water with a GPS.

then you will take your clinometer and aim at a whale. the angle of the clinometer will help judge the distance from the whale. you will take to angle and put it into a formula: D= elevation X tan (angle.

Data: at the beginning of the session i spotted an estimated 5 whales from shore. at the end of the session i was not able to go to the whale watch, but friends let me use the data they found. it turns out that they spotted an estimated 7+ whales.

Conclusion: i hypothesized that there would be more whales at the end of the session, but my data clearly shows that there where more whales at the end of the session then at the end of the session. there may have been some sources of error. when we where spotting whales at shore we might have miss counted the amount of whales, and since i was never at the whale watch i dont know the exact amount for sure.

over all it was a great time of good whale watching fun. although i wasnt able to go to the whale whatch its self i dont think it hinders my ability to understand the whales. after all we will in hawaii.

This is my wanted poster for advanced research topics (or science). This poster fetures two pictures of marie curie, a picture of what she discovered and a brief paragraph of her work. it took about 1 hour to make with a few edits. This poster will be demostrated by Stephen Smith on wedensday or on the following monday.

clinometer

the clinometer is very simple to use! all you need to do is follow these simple steps!

1. find your elevation via the gps.

2. find an object.

3. look at that object through the hole in your clinometer.

4. have a friend note down the angle that the string is pointing to.

5. now plug the information you have into this formula: D= elevation x Tan( angle

6. now plug this into your calculator and BLAMO! you have your distance!

whale watch at McGregor's point

the purpose of the whale watch for me was to see how many whales i can spot, then at the end of the year compare it to the number of whales i see at McGregor's. So is there more whale at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year? if whaling has gone down id think there would be more whales at the end of the year because at that time all the whales would be done traveling. the observation at McGregor's point was great. i think i saw 4 different pods, but i only recorded 2. it was very hard to see them because they where way of in the water, also the sun reflecting of the water was making it hard to see. all i saw was water spouts, no breaching sadly.

in this lab there are 9 marine phyla. these are porifera, cnidoria, mollussca, arthropoda, echino, nemotoda, prutyha, annelida and crustations. we will go to the tide pools and observe and count as many marine phyla as we can. we will use a quadrate and a transect line and count up all the creatures that are in our quadrate. we will count each creature and name them by there phyla.

are research question is which marine phyla are present at the tide pools and which one is there the most of. our hypothesis is the mollusk will be the most of any phyla at the tide pools. so we found out our hypothesis was true, but there may have been sources of error such as, re counting specimen, rising tides, creatures moving ect.

it was great fun geting out there in the pools. we got to see some amazing creatures like a puffer fish! it was also a good learning experience. it kept us thinking and i don't think anyone got bored.

tide pool blog