Estuary Boat Ride:
Today we went on a boat ride through an estuary. An estuary is a body of water where fresh water meets salt water, such as an ocean and a river like the one we saw today. The main plants that live in the estuary we saw were mangroves. We saw black, red, and white mangroves. They grow in the water. Since the water is salty the trees have adaptations that allow them to remove the salt inside of them. So, some of the leaves we saw were covered in salt (some of us tasted it).

There were many animals in the estuary. There were a lot of different types of birds. I think the biggest one that we saw was a black hawk. Some of us saw caimans, but I didn’t. Caimans are like crocodiles. There were baby ones swimming underneath the roots of the mangrove trees. We also saw crabs and heard cicadas. There were tons of cicadas and they were extremely loud.

—Martha B

Editor’s Note: for a tour of Florida’s mangrove forest, see program 2, and for more on Caimans see Student Correspondents “Millbrook in Peru,” and PTK Crew member Ann Devereaux’s Travel-Log, “Go West, PTK”

—Martha B