A rocky morning, and an afternoon in the estuary.

Today in Puerto Penasco we started off the day by observing an intertidal rocky shore area closer to town, it was littered with basalt boulders and much smaller rocks in between them which made a good habitat for a variety of organisms, we found a lot of bristle stars as well as a sea hare, some sea cucumbers, and even our exciting very first octopus find, a small twin spotted octopus, this and other organisms such as squid are part of the mollusc class and are scientifically called cephalopods, which when translated to its literal meaning is “head footed.”



Afterwards we had another lecture by Paloma from CEDO about marine mammals of the Sea of Cortez as well as some of the human impacts that can affect the animals here such as the Vaquita, the world’s smallest porpoise, which has been nearly driven to extinction due to gill net fishing for Totoaba fish in this sea.

In the afternoon we went out on kayaks in a nearby estuary, here we saw the mudflat intertidal zone, where we observed many fiddler crabs here among the grass. On our way through the water we also observed the oysters being farmed in the area, Paloma’s lecture earlier in the day helped put in perspective this industry, as oyster farming is considered to be a much more environmentally sustainable way of acquiring sea food compared to the much more disruptive gill net fishing farther out at sea.



- Gabriel Carcereri

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