After waking up bright and early (a little bit too early for coherent thought if you ask me) we caught the T and headed to Boston Harbor. Its a bit of a walk to the ferry, especially carrying giant, cumbersome, green buckets full of equipment. But, thanks to the continued time-management skills of Kate Longley, we made it in plenty of time and got on the ferry without incident.
Unfortunately in order to get to Lovells Island we first had to make a layover at Georges Island. It was a forty minute wait, but the island had l-o-v-e-l-y wooden chairs overlooking the beach. Very relaxing. We read, we slept, we watched geese and then we missed out ferry. Apparently it had arrived five minutes early and left unannounced. Luckily we got a ride from a wonderful two-man water taxi, who changed their route for our sake.
One disappointingly short ride later, we arrived on Lovells island. It was quite a bit of a hike to get to the field site, not helped by the sand, the gravel or the occasional large cobble stone that would sneak into our shoes.
The field site itself was wonderful. A relatively flat area that stretched further out into the ocean than the rest of the beach. We arrived there shortly before low tide so we were surprised at just how wet everything was. Across the site was a series of warm, interconnected tide pools full of large rocks. As awesome as this was for research, they made for slippery going and we had a couple of close calls.
View of the sie, and Isabelle and Pavlina setting up our transect lint
The research was excellent as well. Unlike our visit to Spectacle Island there were no “empty” quadrats. The tide pools were excellent for algae (specifically Chondrus crispus and Fucus) as well as periwinkles (at one spot we found over a hundred). We even found some tunicates! Like Spectacle however, there was an over abundance of crabs. Introduced asian shore crabs, to be exact. They were everywhere and it was always a scramble to grab them before they hid under new rocks. Isabelle and Jeffery overturned one rock that had over twenty crabs underneath!
Scrambling for crabs
Bucket of over twenty crabs!
This particular crab was trying to steal Isabelle’s ruler.
Monster crab – the largest Asian shore crab we’ve found so far!
And afterwards we were treated to ice cream by Kate! I suppose one way to describe the day would be “crab-tackular” (please pardon the pun, I promise I won’t do it again).
~Carolann