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Wonderland tide pools

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To examine tide pool communities we visited the coast along a part of the park known as Wonderland, an area rich with tide pools. We had two tasks to complete. First, we identified as best we could the species of the algae and animals found in three differently sized tide pools (small, medium and large). Once identified, we characterized each species as rare (<5), common (5-25), or abundant (>25) in order to attempt to determine if a log-normal distribution of species was present in the three pools. See the lab report for our conclusions. Smaller tide pools experience more extreme heating, increased salinity and lower oxygen levels as the tide ebbs than do larger tide pools, so the organisms living here must be more hardy toward these stresses (euryhaline, eurtythermic, etc). Second, we collected data including size, depth and distance from the water from 10 tide pools in an attempt to graphically describe the niche of 2 species we had selected. We intentionally selected on stress tolerant species, the blue mussel Mytilus edulis and one stress intolerant species, the crumb of bread sponge Halichondria panicea. In each pool we noted the presence (& relative abundance) or absence of each of these species. A link to the plots generated from this data can be found below. Though this experiment was somewhat successful, we determined that the elevation of each tide pool (relative to the current tide) would be useful information to have next time.

Click on a photo below to enlarge.

Collecting data from the tide pools at Wonderland 2000