Intertidal Zone Mania

In my group we learned about the intertidal zone and the other types of zones. There is a zone called the splash zone that is not immersed by water but gets wet from salt spray. The upper intertidal zone is only immersed at high tide. The lower intertidal is only exposed at extreme low tide. The subtidal zone is always submerged and contains deeper tide pools. The last zone is the tide pool zone where it is a permanent collection of water. Since there are different zones in the intertidal zone it causes the temperature and salinity to change frequently. The intertidal zone is a good habitat place. It allows creatures a place where they can survive and have an easier time living. The intertidal zone also provides food for creatures that live in the zone. It makes it easier from them to collect food and not have to travel far to get it. Erosion protection is an important for the intertidal zone because if erosion would ever occur it would go into the ocean. Wave buffer is also important because if we didn’t have it there would not be an intertidal zone. So the intertidal zone is an important zone.

In order to answer are question and to do are experiment we visited Waipulani pond located on South Kihei road on the island of Maui. In our study we trying to find out if there were more crabs in the subtidal or lower intertidal zone. When we got to Waipulani are group found are testing area and then we used a digital thermometer to check the temperature. Then we used a pipette to get a drop of water from the ocean to place on the refractometer to check the salanity. Then we placed a quadrant by the subtidal and counted crabs for 3 minutes. We did it again for another 3 minutes. When we were done doing that we used a transect to measure 4 meters out into the lower intertidal. We then placed a quadrant and counted how many crabs for 3 minutes. We repeated that again and got our data. When we were done we averaged all are findings.

This is a picture of a group member counting crabs in the subtidal zone using a quadrant.

This is a picture of one of my group members looking for crabs in the lower intertidal zone.

This is a picture of a tool we used called a quadrant.

This is a picture of Waipulani Pond on South Kihei Road in Maui.

This is a graph of our data that we averaged.

We found that there were more crabs that live in the lower intertidal zone rather than in the subtidal. According to our graph we averaged are data by numbers per meter squared.