Hello everyone! This week has definitely been an amazing experience. Last week I spent my time at the old science center taking care of all the marine animals. This week I was fortunate enough to be able to help out with the sea camp at the new center. For the rest of the week I was assigned to one group for safety precautions. Each day I learn about something different. Monday was about Dolphins. This day was mostly about slide shows and was filled with extremely interesting facts: Dolphins have 2 stomachs; they dive up to 1,000 feet; and, dolphins can live up to 50 years!
Tuesday we were learning about squid. We have presentations every day so we went though our presentation and the moved onto the squid dissection. At this time we were looking at the gills of the squid, the ink sac, and then the internal skeletal structure called a pen. All the squids organs are found in its mantel. The mantel looks like the head of the squid, but it’s actually like a sheath over the internal organs. After the dissection we took the kids to the beach to try and catch jellyfish with a big, five-man net.
Wednesday was shark day! For this day we mostly went over presentations and took a field trip to the beach to look for shark teeth. Most of the sea campers did indeed find shark teeth on the beach. We collected about seven shark teeth but most of them were broken. To go along with the videos and presentations we looked at dioramas and parts of the shark.
For Thursday our topic was sea birds and marsh animals. Since we couldn’t go to the marsh we went to the beach to go bird watching. There we saw a laughing gull, a ring-billed gull, and a yellow-legged gull. When we got back from the beach we were able to look at crabs and sea squirts from the marsh. We studied the fiddler crab and found out how to tell the gender between a male and a female.
Friday was turtle day!!! This day we presented mostly since there was a heat warning. The presentations included how to tell which sea turtle was which. You can tell by the scutes. A scute is a bony external plate or scale. Some interesting facts I learned: the sex of sea turtles, like other reptiles, depends on the temperature in the nest; only one out of 1,000 hatchlings survives to adulthood; turtles have many natural predators including birds, crabs, fish, and mammals like raccoons; female adults can lay thousands of eggs over their lifetimes, so at least a few of them survive to maintain the species. 
Carli that was a very nice informative report for each day and even I got to learn things too. Very interesting and enjoyable. If it wasn’t for Covid 19 I sure your experience would have even more Fascinating.
Carli is a very intelligent individual. Working with her was very helpful as she offered many different interesting perspectives. If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t know that seagulls are not a real thing. She is a very sweet girl and always cheers me up. She is such a joy.