Crab trap recovery from Pedder Bay

As part of their CAS week project, divers Benoit, Isaac, Hiro and Sabrina attempted to recover some of the crab traps that have been abandoned in Pedder Bay. They did two dives on Tuesday, the first of which was successful only in that they “recovered” our anchor!

On the second dive, however, Benoit and Isaac did locate a crab trap then used a red lift bag to bring it to the surface.  In the photo above Isaac is swimming at the surface and Benoit just below the surface to bring the trap to the boat.

The photos below show the crab trap on the boat Hyaku and two proud divers!

On the trap there were a few species of red algae and yellow encrusting sponge with a few decorator crabs crawling around.  Well done team!

Esquimalt Lagoon – 3 October 2013

It was a sunny Thursday morning at Esquimalt Lagoon for the other class of second year marine scientists.

Again, we did two beach seines but at this location there was much less seaweed.

We found crangonid shrimp in the seine:

We then moved to the cobbles and found a diverse collection of organisms under the rocks.

Lots of crabs including: green shore crabs (Hemigrapsus oregonensis), decorator crabs and hermit crabs.

We also found amphipods, isopods, barnacles, periwinkles, mussels, fish eggs and flatworms (and those were all under a single rock!).

Witty’s Beach – 30 September 2013

It was a rainy Monday morning (30 September) but second year marine scientists persevered…

We did two beach seines:

which both resulted in copious amounts of seaweed.

We searched through the seaweed and found some interesting organisms that we looked at back at the lab using dissecting microscopes (photos from Taylor’s iPhone).

A decorator crab.

A flat-top sea squirt (Chelysoma sp.)

A cancrid crab.

We also examined the sand grains under the microscope:

 

We did a little digging at Witty’s Beach…

 

and found a beautiful red polychaete worm:

 

And finally a photo of the Haystack Islets: