This is January??

After waking up by at least five in the morning, we all had a long day and most of are going to bed around midnight. We got into Miami around 2. It was so nice outside. It was warm, but a little windy. It was hard to believe that it was the middle of January and people were walking around in shorts and tanktops. Then, we rented buses for the three hour drive to the Keys. On our way to the Parmer's Resort we saw palm trees, mangroves, and the ocean. We got to our hotel and checked out our rooms first. Our hotel is pretty nice. There's a big pool in the middle, it's right on the water, and there are a bunch of hammocks and shacks to hang out around. After a little, we went to check out our SeaCamp. We got a tour from one our "counselors" named Anna. It's a really cool campus. There are a bunch of different classrooms and dorms, a ton of scuba gear, a shark pond, labs, and classrooms. There is a touch tank with sea cucumbers, starfish, sea urchins, and mollusks and a lot of us touched them. Then, we were split up and had our first lab. The 24 of us were split into two smaller groups. My counselor's name was Angelie. It started out with a little explanation of the different kingdoms, phyllums, orders, and so on. Then we talked about some certain classes of sea creatures, like bivalvia (clams, oysters), cephalopods (octopi, squid), and gastropodas (snails). Then Angelie bust out a bunch of squid for dissection. The first thing we did was identify some of its main parts, like the tentacles and mantle. The first thing we had to do was pull out the beak, and after that we had to try cutting out the eyeball, but still keep intact. The first eye my partner and I tried to remove popped and squirted eyeball juice everywhere, so that was pretty gross. Then we had to cut the mantle up to the top and peel it back so we could see inside. It was really gooey and slimy as we picked apart the gills and inside. My favorite part by far was when we removed the ink sack and actually wrote with the ink. A lot of people wrote on their hands with it. The only thing I had dissected before was a cow eye and fetal pig, so this was a lot of fun and definitely not as gross.
Erica Chavez