It was a long route to get to the Marine Centre Portobello from Mosgiel, chitchatting with Christiana and the breath-taking scenery didn’t take us long to arrive! I was excited when I walked through the very detailed entrance door.

We started the day by introducing ourselves and telling everyone what our favourite candy was and what we could do to help the sea. Then we were divided into different groups according to our name tag colour! Our team project is Marine Metre Squared (Mm2) where we went to different seashore environments and use a quadrat to study the biodiversity within them and discuss the differences between the different areas and why.

We went down to the shore on the second visit, I am glad that the weather was nice! We found different sea creatures such as crabs, chiton, sea stars, sea snails and seaweed down at the rocky shore! After doing our first quadrat we went back up to the Marine centre and ate our yummy lunch waiting for us on the bench. Yum… What a delicious lettuce and cheese bun and chocolate fish. Soon after finishing our lunch, we got to the touch tanks which is one of my favourite activities! My favourite creature to hold was the camouflage crab and to stick my hand inside of a sea anemone!

On the third visit, we started to prepare our group presentations. The objective of our project is to calculate the biodiversity under rocks at different tide levels. Our group has chosen to create a poster and a stop motion video to show and explain to people how to use a quadrat. We started by practising drawing sea creatures, my role was to draw seaweed, chiton, sea stars and limpets. A short time later we started to write the script. When half of my group started to make the stop motion video the other half of the group was working on the poster. The stop motion video was way harder than we had thought it would be but we managed it well!

On the last visit, we went back down to the shore and did another quadrat, it was a lot easier this time! We headed back to the Marine centre after we finished the quadrat and finished off the poster and stop motion video for our presentation later in the day. We received our certificate of completion later in the day and present our research project to our whanau and friends!

I am grateful to have this opportunity to participate in the marine study research project and to understand the future of marine science. I am fascinated with all the different sea creatures that I see and how this study is important to the future of our sea!