How awesome is it that our school is near a street called Marine View Drive. How even more awesome is it that a local community college has a laboratory and an aquarium a few miles north of us that they open up for school field trips.
MaST: Marine Science and Technology Center
We started our lesson by asking a good question, "What's in our water?"
We know about the big things, like this gray whale.
But what about the little things, the things that need a microscope in order to see?
So we became the scientists and went outside to use a plankton tow.
We came back in and looked at our water samples through microscopes.
We looked for both zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants.)
We saw some!
We even saw one that looked like Sheldon J. Plankton, a SpongeBob SquarePants character.
See the resemblance?
We then went to the touch tanks that are full of local marine life.
Inside the main building is a mini-museum that houses the skeleton of a whale.
It was found beached in West Seattle.
It's huge--37 feet!
We learned about how some whales have baleen which is used to strain plankton from seawater. An adult gray whale in the summer feeding grounds eats approximately 2,400 pounds of plankton a day!
We examined several types of baleen.
We saw what was in the gray whale's stomach--plastic bags, a surgical glove, a Capri Sun container, duct tape, a sock, a golf ball and more! We wonder if these things contributed to its death. We wonder what can be done to clean up our beautiful Puget Sound.
Thank you, MaST for allowing us to come be scientists. We are becoming more conservation minded and enjoyed our day of investigating the world around us.
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