Ok, so, it’s been a few days, I know. But I return, to update once more. On Friday, we went to the mud flats. the day started out absolutely horrendously. It was pouring, we had near hurricane force winds, there was some hail. All in all, it was awesome. 
The mission for the day was to collect mud shrimp, and hopefully some ghost shrimp, to put in our little tubs in the lab. Since the weather was so bad our prof made it optional for us to go out. I and a few others decided to brave the weather and go hunting the elusive shrimpys.
The Brave Explorers
Naturally as soon as we went out all the bad weather went away. Sigh. Ah well, we still had some fun wind gusts to deal with. Luckily the mud sucked us in so we didn’t fall over! We used our little probes and shovels to find the shrimp. We looked for the holes in the sand that would tell us where they were. The goal was to collect two species, Upogebia pugettensis, the mud shrimp, and Neotrypaea californiensis, the ghost shrimp. Our hands got pretty muddy and at times the mud tried to suck us in!
Ok, I admit, I did try to find this deep patch of mud but it’s still pretty cool that mud flats are like this. My leg is buried to the knee! The mud also tried to claim my waders while i wiggled free, but I managed to prevail. Mud shrimp weren’t the only things we found on the mud flats either:
Habitat
Yes, that is a giant tire. At least I didn’t have to haul this one up from the ocean floor! Woot woot. 
Our mission for the day was successful as well, and we caught tons of shrimps of both species.
Monday we had a small field trip as well. We had a guest speaker, Sylvia Yamada, who is a researcher at OSU. Se came to talk to us about the European Green Crab and how it’s doing here in Oregon. It seems it’s hanging on, barely. After the trip we went to the little Hatfield dock and hauled up the crab traps our TA put there Sunday night. We actually caught several crabs, including two green crabs (it must be a good year for them).
The roomie
Me with our friend Cancer magister, aka the Dungeness crab
That was fun too, even when we got hailed on. The rest of the crabs we threw back, except for one a couple that we kept to join with their other invertebrate fellows in our aquarium. Muahaha.
