• Students will practice description skills using marine organisms.
• Students will learn the difficulty of painting a verbal picture.
• Students will develop an appreciation for the descriptive skills necessary for a scientist.

1. Tell students to imagine that they are scientific explorers from around 1750. They have gone on an expedition to an uncharted part of the world and are seeing organisms that no one from their society has ever seen before. They are to try to write descriptions to illustrate the organisms to the people back home.
2. Explain to students that scientists have to rely on descriptive skills when identifying organisms. Especially before the widespread use of photography, biologists had to describe the features of organisms to distinguish between species. Today, careful description still is a foundation of scientific research.
3. Have the class divide in half. They should turn so that half the class has their backs facing the other half of the class. In other words, the two halves are back to back. They will need a pencil and a piece of paper.
4. Explain that they are to write a description of a shelly organism so that another person can draw the organism. They cannot use the name of the organism (like clam) or scientific terms (e.g. muscle scar). You should encourage them to include measurements and specific data about the size and shape. Have a number of rulers handy so that they can measure their shells if they choose to.
5. Distribute a shell to each student. Try to have a variety of types and sizes. Have them start writing.
6. As students from the two opposing sides complete their writing, swap papers and have the students attempt to draw the shell from the verbal description. Be sure that all students get a description to draw from. If you like, you can make it a contest to see whose drawing most closely resembles the original object.

You may want to team with an English teacher to assess the descriptive writing in this activity.

• Students will use discussion to generate ideas about how organisms adapt to their environment.
• Students will learn specific adaptations for the Rocky Intertidal Zone.

Northwest Beach - Tide Pools Pools of thriving sea life are left behind when the tide recedes, and mini-communities of marine plants and animals can be observed.

Ask your students to pay attention to specific information regarding conditions in the rocky intertidal zone and to adaptations organisms have for survival.

After watching, make a list of factors which might influence your life if you live in a shoreline area. These might include: salinity, heat, moisture, predation, finding food, sunlight, staying put, etc.

Show the PowerPoint presentation 'A Virtual Tour of a Rocky Shore'. Photos are accompanied by some background information about each species and zone for your information. Encourage students to use this presentation as a focus for discussion. Given the conditions present in each zone, how do they think organisms might survive. They should address the different factors which they listed after watching the video above. The objective of this exercise is for students to brainstorm and to be creative in thinking about adaptations.

• Students will consider the various abiotic influences on organisms living at the edge of the ocean.
• Students will examine organisms to determine adaptations for survival.
• Students will learn that organisms use different strategies for survival.

Introduce the idea of adaptations. Ask students to look for adaptations to survival while watching the video.

Northwest Beach - Tide Pools Pools of thriving sea life are left behind when the tide recedes, and mini-communities of marine plants and animals can be observed.

1. Brainstorm:
   1. Discuss factors that organisms living in the intertidal zone have to contend with. Some abiotic factors include changes in temperature, salinity, light, moisture, and wave action. Biotic factors include finding food, avoiding predation, and mating. List these factors on the board.
   2. Discuss some of the adaptations referred to in the video
2. Break students into groups of 2 or 3. 4.
3. Provide each group with the shells of one or two marine organisms.
4. Ask students to think about the factors they heard about in the clip and listed during the discussion. What special features do they think this organism has that enable it to survive in the intertidal zone.
5. You may want to have students share their results with the class. Ask them to choose one organism or one unique adaptation to explain to the group

• Students will compare rocky substrates with sandy substrates to determine the difficulties of living in each environment.
• Students will experiment with models to determine how adaptations enable organisms to survive.
• Students will understand that organisms have a variety of adaptations to protect them from a variety of influences.

1. Divide the class into groups of 3 or 4.
2. Each group should get a tray with sand, some rocks, and a variety (at least four or five) of small organisms or objects representing organisms.
3. Their goal is to experiment with the variety of organisms on each of the different substrates to see what adaptations might be useful for living on there.
4. In the first part of the student instructions, they are asked to brainstorm factors related to survival in a shoreline area. If you have done Activity 2 in this lesson, they should be able to do this on their own. If not, you may want to do that part as a class after the video clip and before having the students work on their own.
5. Students will build models of the shoreline. They should pile sand or rocks at one end of their tray and they should fill the tray about half way with water at the other end to represent the ocean. They will then experiment with the different organisms as described in the student instructions. They should then clean the sand out of the tray and repeat with the rocks.
6. Encourage them to try different methods to get organisms to stick and be prepared to provide extra materials such as tape or string. They might bury them, orient them differently, tie them down, use tape, etc. Remind them that a sandy beach often has thousands of feet of sand below it, so a limitation of their model is that the tray has a bottom. They may not use the bottom of the tray to attach their organisms.

1. On a sandy coast, the substrate is constantly shifting while on a rocky coast it is not. However, on a sandy coast, the sand is able to absorb some of the energy of the waves while the rocks cannot.
2. Answers will depend on the organisms you use. Things that can stick will do better in rocky areas, things that can dig will do better in sandy areas.
3. Storm waves can wash away the sand or will increase the energy present on the rocks, uncovering or unsticking many organisms. This is often reflected by the increase in shells at the beach after high waters.
4. Answers will vary. For example: Once an organism can avoid being washed away, it still has to deal with other influences. For instance, if the students buried an organism, how does it avoid predation? It won't be able to move quickly but the fact that it is buried gives it some protection. It might get food by sticking out a tongue-type organ that allows it to filter the water. Etc.