PURPEL
By Marcela and Katie
On our 8th grade trip we went to Catalina Island for five days of fun,
with our C.E.L.P. (Catalina Environmental Leadership Program) group. We
went snorkeling, kayaking, hiking, composting, and a ropes course in the
span of a five days. We were to pick a question on the Catalina Island
environment. Our question was where do purple things live? The color that
we are focusing on is purple, we are trying to find out where purple animals
and plants live and why they live there.
When we went snorkeling we took along a GPS, global positioning system.
We only saw purple sea urchins and a few fish that had a purple
tint or purple spots
on them, like the Blacksmith or Two-Spotted Octopus. Color can tell many
things about an animal, such as if you take a piece of purple
algae and put it in fresh
water after it has lived in salt water its whole life it might not be as
healthy rather than if you had just left it in the salt water.
Color can also tell what
species and animal is, if it is poisonous, or dangerous, or just if it is
nonpoisonous. Such as a one animal can be dangerous to one other
type of animal, but serve
as protection to another animal.
Our conclusion was that all of the purple animals were found around
rocky areas. The answer to our question is all colors are important,
and unfortunately
we
could not study every color in the kelp forest. The problem on our project
was that we went to Catalina during hot year. In a hot year it is too hot
for the
kelp to grow. If we could go back to Catalina Island we would not go during
a hot year, because that made all the kelp die. This could effect where
the purple
animals lived in the ocean. If there was more kelp we might have seen more
purple things in the ocean. I wish we could come back again, this trip
was amazing and
we will never forget it!
