Constitution Beach, East Boston.

Hello everybody ✌🏾, this week our team (team Patrice) visited Constitution Beach in East Boston. Although this beach is pretty small it is still home to many creatures and animals that work together in its ecosystem. A highlight of our week was finding a lot of hermit crabs on the first day when we were choosing things to put on our scavenger hunt but then when we did the actual scavenger hunt for ourselves we couldn’t find any! Unfortunately we didn’t catch anything in our crab trap, but fortunately we had fun digging in the dirty finding clams and different colored rocks.

The first species of marine life I encountered at the beach was the hermit crab or scientifically called the Pugarus Longicarpus. Fun facts about them is that they’re both Arthropoda and Crustaceans. Hermit crabs can’t naturally grow out a shell, they take unoccupied shells from different varieties of other marine life that have natural protective shells. They choose shells usually half an inch wide. 

The second species of marine life I seen was the sea snail. Fun fact about these snails are herbivores. They have this  file like tongue that they use to eat diatoms and algae on rocks. The scientific name of the sea snail is littorina littorea. When these snails die long wristed hermit crabs use their shells for protection, y’all about the circle of life. 

Overall this week was a great week and I’m ready for the next ! 

Signing off,

Alex S.