Catalina Island Leadership Program

Phoenix Country Day School

Kelp Forest Information Links

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuaries

www.scripps.edu

How Do the Senoritas and Blacksmiths Work Together?

For our eighth grade trip, we went to Catalina Island to study the kelp forests and their inhabitants. We used many tools and devices to take readings or depth, salinity, temperature, turbidity and more. We also learned about the influences that we have on the environment and the natural world. If we turned off the water while we were shampooing our hair, each person could save thousands of gallons of water every year.

In our group, we were investigating the relationship of Senoritas and Blacksmiths. Our question was, how do Senoritas and Blacksmiths support and help each other to survive? We mostly observed on the trip. We did not need any water readings because they were not relevant to our project. Looking at the different species of Fish and Kelp was a relief from all of the work and data that we were expecting.

We found that the Senoritas and Blacksmiths almost always live very near to each other because they need one another for survival. On our map, we are showing how close the Blacksmiths and Senoritas are in the wide expanse of ocean. The green represents the Senoritas and the red represents the Blacksmiths. As you can see, the red is almost constantly on top of the green. We had a few difficulties in the beginning, deciding what our project should be. We had a few options but finally decided that the Senorita and Blacksmith relationship would be the most interesting to explore further. We would definitely study not only the Senoritas and Blacksmiths but many other pairs or groups of fish species that cooperate to help each other in the huge ocean.