Virginia Key Beach Park Research Paper

The ocean covers around 70% of the world, contains hundreds of thousands of life forms, and many that have yet to be discovered. Although, we can learn a lot in the classroom environment, there is no better way to understand the marine environment than to physically explore it. The field trip to Virginia Key Beach Park was a great experience. The park is located minutes from downtown Miami and just off the Rickenbacker Causeway. Me being from Texas I had to do some research for the history of the park. Virginia Key’s history beings in 1896 when the City of Miami was founded. Due to segregation still in effect all the famous attraction Miami had to offer were only for the whites. For this reason blacks started to use Bear Cut later known as …show more content…
There were 3 groups the land lovers, waist deep, and the swimmers. Everybody groups of 3-5 got a bucket and a net to capture the organisms. Our group was made up of 5 or 6 and we explored everywhere. We started by looking at the deeper area by the buoy that indicated it was the end of the swimming area. We tried catching some fish but they were too quick, after we failed in that area we moved closer to the beach where we able to find 2 big starfish and some rock sponges. After finding the starfish we decided to go and explore the rock walls. We saw many organisms, like this big crab but it quickly hid in between the rocks where we couldn’t reach. All we were able to only catch sea snails and more sponges since we couldn’t get on the rocks due to being unstable. After about an hour and a half every group brought their findings to the table where we got the chance to talk and take pictures of the organisms. The six organisms that we collectively found that interested me the most were the corals, sea slugs, sponges, starfish, plants, and fish. Each one of the organisms have different characteristics, and behavior that make them important to the marine