Nov.+24,2008

Free Journal: On November twenty-second I visited my ecosystem place for the third visit. When I was first scanning my place I saw a lot of crabs that weren’t moving, and then soon I found out that they were mostly dead. I found three full body crabs that got eaten by some animal or caught by a human, or dried out from the sun. The first one that I found was in one of the tide pools, and it was very wet. But the other two I found laying around on the surface of the tide pools. I also found one big crab leg that was a white and orange color. Another thing that was weird was that we only found the head of a crab which is the size of my palm. So there is five total, and in all my life I have never seen that many crabs dead at one time. What was even weirder was that we saw about three crabs that were alive not where they usually are. Instead of being by the cliffs and getting sprayed by the cool salt water. They were by the cliff side where it was dry and very hot. As I watched them they squired into little holes into the coral, which was by the cliff. I also noticed that there was a lot of birds by the reef away from my study spot and when I went over there trying not to scare the birds they were eating the dead seaweed which getting pushed in by the waves. The seaweed also is not at its maximum capacity because it is barren and the immense heat from the sun is hitting it. This is because the water would usually cover them when it was high tide. Because of the seaweed being scorched from the sun it turned a brown color on my study area and looked like a desert because you couldn’t see a green thing that was on my study area. This affected the animals living inside of the tide pools because they have to adapt to the color that they are in, and in this case it was a brown seaweed that was in their pond so all of their colors changed to a black and white to a brown and white color. Also the ophi got affected because there was a lot of them in this little are when it was high tide and the waves were crashing against them, but now there is nothing there. The ants also benefit because there is so much dead stuff and it is low tide. So they eat the left over of what is left of the birds and other animals.

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