Return to Cunner Ledge!

I've been working hard on collecting and sorting algae from morning to night for the past few days, but this morning I found some free time to walk around Nahant's East Point, which is always nice. It was just after low tide, so I went out to my old field site next to Cunner Ledge. Here it is, marked with the yellow arrow in the picture and on the Google map for East Point. You can also see the Marine Science Center on the map.


I am a little less sure-footed than I was last summer (especially since I was climbing the rocks in flip-flops this morning) but I went back down and looked for my 0.5 m x 0.5 m plots. We set up 30 plots along that seaweed-covered ledge last July. My plot markers are still around :)

This was the very first field experiment that was truly my own - Matt helped me set up the plots at the start, but I collected the data and maintained the plots for the 8 weeks that it ran. It was a small-scale manipulation of the diversity of basal species, i.e. species that bring energy into the system. Seaweeds do this through photosynthesis and filter feeders like barnacles and mussels do this by consuming plankton from the ocean.

And while we're on the topic of my field site, I finally got round to digging up the screencap of Cunner Ledge in the movie Shutter Island. The movie was partly filmed in Nahant, and my field site makes a half-submerged appearance. So here we have Leonardo DiCaprio pointing a gun at a guard, which is all very interesting, but LOOK THERE IS MY SITE IN THE BACKGROUND. Which is really the best part of the entire movie.