How am I supposed to know how much that is?

I couldn't count them all.

(Meg) We are averaging up all of the fish that we saw.

So we're going to take all of our averages and put it into a chart to see the numbers of fish compared to a protected area versus an unprotected area.

Now we're doing garibaldi.

11, 9, 10, 17, 10 Kelp bass.

4, 1, 2.

(Meg) I'm going to divide everything by 6.

The 6 is because I did 3 transect dives, and she did 3 transect dives, so you add them all together because we're putting all of our data together.

Next is giant kelp.

7.

Next is gorgonian.

Zero.

Sheephead.

Numbers.

Zero.

(Elle) Zero.

(Meg) It's all zero.

Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero plus zero... (Meg) I think we worked pretty well together.

There were definitely moments where I was like okay, this is too much of the little sister, too much of the little sister--it's like little sister overload!

(Meg) Do you really need to do this?

Zero divided by 6 equals...

Zero!

Oh, shocker there!

(Meg) But then there's times where it's like I'm having fun.

Hey Elle, look what I found.

All right, awesome.

We could use that because the paper might have been a little small.

So we have a very large dry erase board now.

These scissors cut weird on the waterproof paper.

Because our highest number for the averages is 11, let's only take it up to 15?

And there's the kelp bass.

Look at all these colors.

Wow!

Giant kelp is, for Avalon, 9.

Gorgonian, Avalon.

Zero.

Okay, gorgonian, I mean cucumber, Avalon.

Zero.

Hey ladies, how's it going?

Hey Colleen.

What are you up to here?

We made a chart, as you can see, a chart of all of the data that we've collected over the past few days with you of all the fish and the invertebrates and all these indicator species.

I've noticed that in all of our data, Avalon Dive Park, the green, has a lot more numbers than the Lions Head has.

(Izzie) Hm, I wonder if that's because the dive park is protected?

(Elle) Well, we figured out since these are the 2 that are fish, there are definitely a lower amount of them because, well, I know that the dive park is protected, but that doesn't mean that when they're out of the dive park, when they get fish, it doesn't really give them a chance to come to the dive park.

(Colleen) Right, they're not always staying in the dive park.

They can move in and out-- that's a great observation.

(Meg) Also we talked about the weather and how that could've been a large factor of why we did not see many of these invertebrates, the urchins, gorgonians, cucumbers, because it was so surgy.

And also with the Avalon Dive Park, there were many other divers that could've kicked up the bottom.

That's a good point.

So that could've hurt the visibility some.

(Colleen) Do you know what urchins primarily eat?

(Meg) Kelp, giant kelp.

(Colleen) Great!

So these guys are pretty much sitting on the bottom.

They're never going to be swimming around in the water at all, and they're eating seaweed.

Most of the time they're just going to eat drift seaweed that's kind of broken off and is drifting by and they could just eat it that way.

Another indicator species is the California sheephead.

Any guesses what these guys might eat?

(Elle) Kelp too?

(Colleen) Nope.

(Meg) Urchins?

(Colleen) Yup, they're going to eat urchins.

When the sheephead get to be pretty big, they can actually eat urchins.

They also eat other hard things like crabs and things like that.

So if we fish out a lot of our sheephead, if we reduce the numbers of sheephead, what's going to happen to our other populations?

The urchin is going to grow numerously, and then it's going to eat all the giant kelp, and then the giant kelp is going to go down, then any animal that eats giant kelp is going to die because they don't have any food.

(Meg) Plus giant kelp also give shelter to many animals.

So if the kelp and the sheephead-- it's kind of like a domino effect.

So it's all interrelated... That's what I was gonna say.

the domino effect-- if we take one, even just one piece of this giant web out of order, then we're going to have implications down the line.