It was a great day in Perdido Bay!

It's Friday and that means.... Field Trip Dayyyy!!  So this past Friday, my Botany class went to Perdido, Florida!  It was about a 2 hour drive (including the ferry) to arrive at a beautiful beach with white sand, crystal clear water, little shells everywhere, the whole nine yards!  And we saw this beautiful scene...

Nice, right??

We stopped, put some sunscreen on, changed into our gear in the pavilion, and then Dr. Just told us to load back into the vans. Wait. What?  Apparently we're not at our destination quite yet.  But no worries, Perdido is beautiful; we're probably just going to an inlet for some more seclusion and fewer waves.  Well, that's exactly what happened; we stopped to snorkel at an inlet.  But this inlet was not like the photo above.  No, sir.  It was muddy, murky, cold, and surrounded by...wait for it... juncus.  Because we didn't get enough of that junk on Tuesday! But I wasn't bitter. This was the first time I got to use my brand new, super cool snorkeling equipment, and I was going to enjoy every minute of that dirty, freezing water!  I mean, look at this gear...

 You can NOT be sad when using such beautiful equipment.  It's impossible.

(And yes, I am obsessed with Finding Nemo... Just in case you were wondering.)

So we go out to the less than perfect waters and collect sea grasses until our hearts' content.  We sifted some of the Thalassia or "Turtle Seagrass" from the sediment so that we could look at the roots and then brought our findings back to the pavilion that we started at.  So we didn't get to snorkel there, but we did get a nice view for a while there.  At the pavilion, we counted leaves, measured the length of the root, and counted nodes for Thalassia to find out how old the seagrass was. I received a congratulatory fist bump from Just for counting 73 nodes on one of my roots.  Apparently 4 year old sea grass in this inlet is amazing. What can I say?  It was obviously "super seagrass"... there's no other explanation.

When we were done with all of that fun stuff, we had some extra time before we had to leave.  Yay for efficiency and team work!  So we got to go to the beautiful beach after all!! And then back to the lab!

Side note: We drove through Orange Beach, and I just want to say that it is awesome there. There are things there! Like stores and stuff. Almost forgot those existed. So, if you're looking for a new vacay destination, Orange Beach looks like a good choice to me!

But back to reality... I'm at Dauphin Island after a day in Perdido.  We decided to take a walk on beach, which is a pretty regular after-dinner ritual for us.  But this time, we found a trigger fish washed up on the beach.  And that is some exciting stuff right there. One of my UNA friends, Angela, needs to catch 40 different species of fish for her Vertebrate class. So what do we do?  Pick it up and carry it all the way back to the Sea Lab.  Because that's totally normal behavior. But the whole walk back, everyone and their mother (literally) stopped us to look at the dead fish. Very sweet, friendly people here, I might add!  Oh, and we saved a dog's life. That was cool too.

Now what to do after such an eventful walk on the beach...Smoothies and Movies! Because it rhymes.  But that didn't actually happen... We did, however, have some milkshakes that brought boys to the yard. Or not... But only because we don't have a yard- we have a beach.  And mermaids were there (Anna & Angela will back me up on this one), so it's all good.