Horn Sharks located in the Channel Islands
This trip to Catalina Island was the best that my group and I had ever been on. The night snorkel and kayaking had to be the highlights of the trip. While we were there, we conducted many experiments and collected a lot of data. My group and I tried to find out the type of environments that the many fish of sea floor live in and which ones they are. We stayed at a cove called Howlands Landing. The most useful part of the trip for us was the snorkeling, because it helped us answer our main scientific question.
The question we were trying to answer was what creatures lived on the
floor of the kelp forest and what allowed them to sustain their lives.
We got most of the information for our project from the snorkels and the
roving diver fish count. The rest of the information, like where most
the fish are found, we got from books. Then we used the G.P.S (Global
Positioning System) to mark where we found the fish and then we would
transfer the points to our My World map. We would also use many different
water testing and depth finding tools to help us with our research. The
main device for our project was the depth meter, which told us how far
it was down to the bottom where the fish lived under the surface. The
leopard sharks we saw seemed to enjoy feeding on the small crustaceans
at the bottom of the ocean at about thirty feet down. One other fish that
we were lucky to find was the horn shark, which only comes out at night
to feed and hides in the caves in the day. The coolest fish we saw was
the bat ray, because they are very timid, but when they move it is by
pure power of their rubber-like wings. The one bottom dweller that we
would have loved to have seen would have been the moray eel, because they
are supposed to be the most rare species to see in the channel islands,
but we found most of the fish we were looking for.
The fish were trying to find were: C-O Sole, California Halibut, Moray
Eel (did not find), Spiny Lobster, Ochre Sea stars, Bat Star, Shovelnose
Guitar Fish, Purple and Red Sea Urchin, Bat Ray, Leopard Shark, and Horn
Shark.We did not find some animals because it was a few years after an
El Nino year, which means the water temperatures rise or fall. This changes
the environment on land, but mostly underwater which made it harder to
get what we needed. The other problem we encountered was the fish's timidity
towards humans and them swimming away before any of us could get a good
picture with a camera. Also the amount of time we had in the water was
to breif, it seemed like we would waste our time getting suited up and
people would whine about being to cold or just being uncomfortable in
general.
Our maps show the locations of the fish around the Channel Islands and
they also show the depth at which the fish were found. The majority of
the data was ours, but we also used data that other scientists had found
in the Channel Islands. We also were able to put links to the pictures
that we took on to our map that show the fish in its natural habitat.
