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Exploring America’s Underwater Treasures: Species Identification and Habitat Characterization

Discover how to identify marine species and characterize different habitats in National Marine Sanctuaries. Learn about rocky reefs and soft bottoms, and how to estimate species abundance. Explore unique creatures like sea cucumbers, box crabs, and rockfish. Find out how to rate abundance levels using specific criteria and use lasers for measurement. Characterize habitats to gather valuable information for monitoring and tracking changes over time.

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Exploring America’s Underwater Treasures: Species Identification and Habitat Characterization

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  1. National Marine Sanctuaries America’s Underwater Treasures

  2. Habitat Characterization What are the species you are looking for? What are the habitats and what do they look like? How do you estimate abundance?

  3. Habitats Rocky Reef : Any area with rocky boulders, granite, or pinnacles

  4. Habitats Soft Bottom: Any area that is lacking reef material, and consists of soft, sandy, or muddy substrate

  5. Species Identification • Characteristics • to look for: • Body Shape • Color • Behavior • Habitat

  6. Invertebrates Sea Cucumber (Parastichopus californicus)

  7. Invertebrates Box Crab (Lopholithodes foraminatus) • Slow moving • Usually seen over soft bottom habitat

  8. Fish Rockfish (Sebastes sp.) spiky dorsal spines Big eyes Big lips

  9. Fish Juvenile rockfish

  10. Fish Ratfish (Hydrolagus colliei) • “wing-like”fins • watch for shadows • on the bottom

  11. How to rate the abundance Single 1 Few 2-10 Many 10-500 Abundant 500 and more….

  12. Abundance Single 1 Many 10-100 Few 2-10 Abundant >500

  13. Lasers= 20 cm apart

  14. What is it?

  15. What is it?

  16. What is it?

  17. Characterizing habitat • Gain information about the ecosystem and its inhabitants • Monitoring • Tracking changes over time

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