Inverts o' St. Cat's

6/23/09 Saint Catherine's Island, GA

Today is day five of the invert section; just started my project today, which I'll get to shortly. Invert has been incredibly fun, especially the aquatic and marine labs. Among the amazing diversity I've seen so far are (roughly by taxa) bryozoa (encrusting and dead mens fingers), assorted sponges, sea pansies, sea whips, anemones, some hydroids, ctenaphores, all sorts of oligatchaetes, a host of bivalves and gastropods, squid, sea cucumbers, star fish, brittle stars, sand dollars, blue, hermit, lady, speckled, mud, mud fiddler, sand fiddler, and spider crabs, white, grass, and ghost shrimp, amphipods, copapods, and isopods galore, various coleopterans and thier larvae including toe biters and water tigers, at least six different dragon fly varieties, golden silk spiders and all sorts of other arachnids (including of course plenty of mites and ticks), tunicates (yea, their cordates but not part of subphylum vertabrata so still inverts, right?), and I'm sure plenty that I'm leaving off. We also did marine vertabrates in this section just because we were allready trawling and seining for inverts, so we've seen spot, croakers, silver perch, whiting, atlantic herring, silver anchovies, florida pompano, file fish, lookdowns, hogchokers, flounder, a bur fish, toadfish, sea robins, a southern stingray, and I'm sure more I'm forgetting. I also saw the second sea turtle of my life, thankfully not in the trawl but rather out in the open ocean from the Sewanee boat. We were jetting from the north to south somewhere near McQueen's inlet when he stuck his head up just off the bow, looked around, realized there was a boat incoming at a unnatural speed, and shot back underwater. Even though it was just a brief glance it was awesome. We also got to hang out with some gopher tortoises, which are niether inverts or other marine things but the envirovet program happened to be on the island and they were catching the tortoises to practice taking blood, etc. We got to learn about them and return them to their burrows after the envirovets were done with them. The gopher tortoises are not native to the island but relocated here by the New York Zoological society, which operates some research and breeding programs on the island. Awesome creatures, glad I got to see them. Coming up on the animal behavior section in a few days, will write more.