Bush walks, spiders and plants

While I was thinking of how to start this blog, I read through my past entries and noticed that I started a lot of them with, "First of all..." Well today I am not going to do that. So here we go. 

I apologize for not having photos actual photos of the venue. They made us leave all electronics in our bags and we had to leave them in a locked room.

Today, as part of my Biology preliminary course (Year 11), I had to go on a mandatory fieldwork trip to the Bicentennial Park Education Centre at Homebush Bay. Throughout the excursion, we had to fill in a booklet that required us to perform experiments and collect information from various tests which will then be a part of our final results at the end of term 3. 

During the bus ride, my friend Mike and I pulled our Nintendo DS' and played Elite Beat Agents, which is a seriously fun rhythm game where you tap the buttons in time with the song. We went up against each other over and over again until we got to the place; playing songs like Walkie Talkie Man - Steriogram, ABC - Jackson 5 and Sk8r Boi - Avril Lavigne. 

We got out of the bus and walked to the site, which was where we ate our morning tea while they explained what was going to happen, and where we had to leave our bags. After that, we got split into our classes and went off to our separate routes. 

My class was led by a guide named Mel, who was lovely and very helpful when it came to filling out the booklet, to an area called "The Mangrove Classroom". Here, we had to collect data of abiotic features in the area, such as humidity, soil pH and water salinity. The activities didn't take long and half an hour later, we were off to our next destination. 

I'm going to bore you by writing ALL of our activities but this is a list of activities we had to do:

• Count mangrove seedlings and crab holes and draw conclusions from the data (trends that have occurred etc.);
• Design an experiment to figure out the "relationship between the height of pneumatophores (root system) and tidal inundation;
• Recognise and expand on the adaptations of the Grey Mangroves and a mangrove animal;
• Create food chains and discuss the outcomes if a producer or consumer were taken out of the food chain;
• Collect more abiotic features in another area (Saltmarsh Community).
• Fill in a table on relationship terms, allelopathy, parasitism, mutualism, commensalism);
• Draw a profile of the vegetation in a 100 metre area (this was where a big spider crawled up on my leg!);
• Identify impacts of human activity on the ecosystem.

Oh wow! That is A LOT. I apologize for boring you out from this but I just had to include it. If you got this far without awesome pictures (I know I wouldn't have) then thank you so much for reading!!

Be safe and take care :)

♥