Mollusk Anaylsis

All week in marine biography, we have been learning about mollusks.  On Wednesday, we dissected a clam. and on Thursday we dissected a squid.  The mollusks have a morphological feature after which the phylum is named.  The word "mollusk" means "soft thing."  Therefore, mollusks have soft bodies which explains the name of the phylum.  Since mollusks have soft bodies, they face biological troubles.  Because of their soft body, they are more fragile.  Along with that, they have more difficulty to support their bodies in terrestrial environments or to fixate to substrates in aquatic habitats.  A lot of mollusk species solve this problem by having a shell to support and protect them, and also to prevent dehydration.  Mollusks are divided into classes.  The five classes are: pelecypods, or bivalves, which includes oysters, clams and mussels.  Gastropods include snails and sea slugs.  Cephalopods include squids and octopuses.  Scaphopods include tooth shells.  And polyplacophora include chitons.  All the animals we dissected in class had a vertical symmetry.  Each animal we dissected down the middle and they all were pretty much the same in their own being.  The clam had a hard but smooth shell that was very hard to open, the inside of it was very gooey and slimy.  The squid was overall squishy and soft and were clearly no bones in it, but there are two parts of it that are hard which was the beak and the pen.  The pen supports the squid and gives it structure but isn't a bone, and the beak is it's mouth, and those are the only two hard spots.

New England Aquarium Field Trip

The marine animals had all different behaviors.  I observed an octopus for a while, and it stayed suctioned to the corner for the tank for a long time and it was sleeping.  When I took a picture of it with flash on, it woke it up and it starting moving and suctioning more tenticles to the glass.  Octopus are very smart animals and they can get out of almost anything, that's why it's hard to keep it in a tank because they will find a way out.  The workers at the aquarium will put a metal box of food in the tank and they will lock the box, and the octopus manages to get the box open.  Another marine animal that I observed were the penguins.  It was mating season at the aquarium so the penguins did a lot of mating.  They also love standing on the rocks and squawking, making loud noises.  They also swim all around and have a lot of fun.  The penguins also get attached very quickly to humans so they try not to touch them.

Marine conservation is a very good thing, because it's tying to save the marine environment.  One way for marine conservation is to not cut down the mangrooves because there are so many marine animals that have habitats surrounding them.  Another way is to not touch the animals because they try to have the aquarium in a wild-like situation as well as they can, so they need the animals to be independent.  One example is that one of the aquarium workers told me that they try not to touch the penguins because one day they're going to try to put them back into the wild in areas where they have become extinct.

http://www.neaq.org/index.php?gclid=Cj0KEQjw0fOoBRDn88Pol8bqhN0BEiQARGVJKms5KWJXGhanq1Uel_KL6sQB7OpdnyJQFG6-h0JrjNgaAukL8P8HAQ

(these are all pictures taken by me)

This field trip enhanced my learning about marine bio.  This was the third time that I have gone to the New England Aquarium, but since it was a school field trip, it was the first time that I actually had to study the animals to be able to write about them, so I had learned more.  It makes me really interested in the marine animals and makes me want to work with them.