At 8am we all trickled into the MIT Sea Grant office and readied ourselves for the exciting day ahead. This was our first field day! After carrying two buckets worth of equipment through the Boston T system, we were rewarded by a relaxing wait for the ferry.

After boarding we were given a short tour of the Boston Harbor as we made our way to Spectacle Island and even met a gentleman who had caught a Lionfish off the coast of Rhode Island! We disembarked the ship and headed to our site on Spectacle Island. The beautiful landscape quickly passed by and we then saw the picturesque little beach where we were recording our data from above. The only way to get down to the beach was by climbing 50 ft of massive boulders down to our transect sites. So we carefully scooted down the rocks and began placing our first transect. Guided by our GPS coordinates, we placed 3 transect lines of 80m, 45, and 40m in the small beach. while placing the second transect line we made a surprising friend, a raccoon! The little critter was about 30ft away from the end of our transect tape.

Rabid Raccoon?

Although we were a little concerned by a raccoon waddling around at low tide we continued to place and document the location of our transect lines. On our third and final transect line we completed a beach profile, and completed water quality testing.

Beach Profiling!

Carolann doing water quality testing!

After we tested the water at the base of our transect, we also decided to test the water in a large tide pool also on the beach. We photographed and recorded many of the species that we saw there including some tiny fish! Throughout the the day we picked up and sexed crabs and practiced our percent cover reading on a couple rocks. After we got to poke around at the tide pool, we had to return to the ferry. At the visitor center Kate learned from the park ranger on duty that the raccoons on Spectacle Island have actually adapted and come out at low tide to forage. Turns out the raccoon wasn’t rabid after all!