The final event of a series of Saturday adventures related to our focus on our seas and coastline.  The aim over the last month has been to raise our awareness of  the importance of these environments with our community, we see these opportunities as a starting point to encourage more STEM activities across the Merrin whanau.

The venue was Cass Bay and an overcast day greeted us as we assembled on the shore.   Seven Merrin 'citizen-science families' gathered just before low tide ready to find a suitable rockpool to survey.   Armed with their Marine Metre Squares (hence MM2), Rocky Shore Guides, recording sheets and keen eyes they headed off in search of creatures and plants that inhabit this wild place and that live in that fascinating space between the high and low water marks.   The data we were gathering would be uploaded to the NZ Marine Study Centre at Otago University so we started by recording the GPS position and then identifying and writing down all the different seaweeds and animals that were living in our square.  It was amazing how many things are living in and around the rockpools - and the more you look the more you find.  Our tamariki learned the best places to carefully look so that the animals remained safe.  We all became excited when we found crabs and anenomes and chitons, our 'Sherlock' skills came into play as we then had to work out just which creature we had found.  We found so much living in these small areas;  Neptune's neckless, sponges whelks, tubeworms, starfish and millions of barnacles just to name a few - check out the Rocky Shore Guide with the ling at the end of this article.  Amazing!

Being citizen scientists makes you hungry and we completed the day with sausages, sauce and onions on the BBQ. 

We will be heading out again in about 3 months to be citizen scientists again and collect more data, so we'll let you know when and hopefully you can join us.  

Here is the link to the website if you want to know more: https://www.mm2.net.nz/

Finally a big 'thank you' to all the families who have joined us over the past month on the Beach Clean-up at Sumner, the Snorkling with DiveHQ at Rolleston and the MM2 at Cass Bay.  We hope to organise the postponed Banks Peninsula fieldtrip with Ecan and CCC later in the year.