Relationships Among Marine Organisms.

This week in Marine Biology, there was an activity where each student had a necklace with the name of some marine organism, and we held parts of a string to represent a food web.  I, was a baleen whale.  In the food web, I was connected to the person labeled "krill;" the marine organism known as krill are very abundant in the Southern Hemisphere, and that's where baleen whales often like to be, because krill is their favorite thing to eat.  In the 11th century, baleen whales were hunted down by people for their oil, which they would use for lamps.  Baleen whales are probably the favorite meal of bull sharks.  There is an interdependency between baleen whales and  phytoplankton.  Krill EAT phytoplankton, so if they weren't around, there would be less to no krill.

Image taken from     http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/marine-life/baleen-whale4.htm

FINAL POST

The semester course that was Oceanography had aspects of physics and geology.  Given that physics is in the ocean, and the ocean is in Earth, this should've been quite obvious.   I learned many new concepts and things in this class.  It started with the underwater observatory.  Believe it or not, people sometimes go out to the middle of the sea, dive down a few meters, and live in there for some time, to look at the sea, face to face.  There's also the history aspect of Oceanography; explorers like Christopher Columbus, Sir Francis Drake, and of course, Charles Darwin.  I did a project about Charles Darwin, talking about his journey all throughout the world on a ship known as The Beagle.  He went to the Galapagos Islands, and found some new species of birds.  And then there was the tracking hurricanes.  It was learned that most hurricanes happen in the Summer, take a couple hours to take form, and strike the east coast days later.  I did actually know most of that, though I wasn't very interested before then.  Another thing was the measuring the tides.  The moon has effects upon the ocean, and the tides are often high or low depending on time of day and the position of the moon.  And, lastly, there was the study of heat in water.  There is no cold, only less warm.  If the water has a lower temperature, it has higher density.  Deeper down in the ocean it is more dense and cold than it is up at the surface.

Moon and Tides

The moon effects the water in terms of gravity.  Depending on the position of the moon in the sky, and in which phase it's in, the ocean will have either a low or a high tide.  Example, when it's a new moon, the high tide might go up to 8 feet at 11 in the morning, but then go back down to a low tide of below zero at six in the afternoon.  But as already said before, the moon is always somewhere different every time, especially in different times of the year.  This makes predicting the tides, nearly impossible.