Benifits of Mangroves

• Nursery: The mangroves provide a safe nursery for young marine animals
• Nutrients: Mangroves provide a key nutrient for a lot of marine life, detritus.
• Sediments: They filter and trap dirt/sediment before it washes out to sea.
• Toxins: Mangroves in a sense also filter many toxins in the water before they manage to drift out to sea.
• Buffer System: These help keep the environment intact by providing a corridor for animals to migrate.
• Ecosystem Corridor: The mangroves are so dense and hard for humans to really get through, which creates a nice human free corridor for many different species and marine life to live.

5 Adaptations of Mangroves

• Prop Roots: Red mangroves have prop roots so that they can live in knee high water levels in the ocean. Prop Roots are just roots that come off each other and anchor down into the soil/sand.

• Leaves: Both the Red and Black Mangroves have leaves that have become adapt to the excess salt in the water by having little pores on their leaves that salt comes out of.

• Propagule: The Red and Black mangroves have propogules, meaning that their seeds grow on the mangroves until they are to heavy to fall off.

• Hydrochory: Once the seed has become heavy enough to fall off the mangrove it falls into the water and floats or sinks straight to the bottom and anchors down.

• Pneumatophore:Black Mangroves have these type of roots in which they stay under the ocean bottom but come up in various close places around the main plant.

Monitor Lizard

• Scientific Name:Varanus Albigularis
• Common Name:Rock Monitor/Monitor Lizard
• Habitat: The various species of Varanus cover a vast area, occuring through Africa, the Indian Subcontinent from Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka to China, down Southeast Asia to Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, and a large concentration of monitor lizards are found on Tioman Island in the Malaysian state of Pahang.
• Reproduction: They are reptiles so they do lay eggs. They are Oviparous, laying from 7 all the way up to 37 eggs.
• Prey: They really like to search and find whats oddly a delicacy pretty much to them, eggs..
• Three Interesting Facts:

1.  They have been known to be able to count up to 6.
2.  They have very strong and developed limbs.
3. Monitor Lizards are eaten in parts of southern india and malaysia, where their meat is a considered an aphrodisiac.

Ocean Garbage Patch

• There is not specific ocean garbage patch, there are many all across the ocean. The Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, also know as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine debris in the Central North Pacific Ocean.
• The ocean garbage patch is formed due to the currents of the Pacific Ocean that turn circular creating a vortex of just constant flowing marine debris and trash.
• This has a very large effect on marine life for the ocean. It not only effects marine animals but also the flora that live in the water. It effects the fauna by polluting the water that they breath in and also a lot of fish/animals die in the ocean because circular trash gets stuck around the nose/snout cause them to not be able to breath or eat. The way in which it effects the flora is that it pollutes the water majorly that they breath in and also they the water can be consumed by them.
• There are many things man can do to stop this madness of the ocean garbage patch. One big main thing that man can and should do is to simply stop dumping our trash into the ocean. Human trash does not belong in the ocean. Its not right to make the marine life and ecosystem pay for the actions of humans. 
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Hydrophiiane

• Sea Snakes, also known as Hydrophiinae, are snakes that live in the ocean.
• Sea snakes have made many different adaptations compared to their relatives who live on land. You see humans have the ability to pass the salt from the ocean through urine, while reptiles and birds do not have this ability. Therefore they pass the overload of salt through their nasal glands/passages. The adaptations of sea snakes being in the sea makes them have to be able to use their tails as something along the lines of a paddle. Adaptations are vast in any species so these are just the few.
• There habitat is mainly found off of the coasts of the Indian Ocean spreading around to the Pacific Ocean. Now yes that sounds very large but really the likely hood of you finding a sea snake in the open ocean are very slim. 
• There really are no current issues regarding sea snakes or anything really against sea snakes. They appear to be harmless to a certain extent in the water. They are unlikely to strike a human or are quite shy. But when out of water sea snakes strike wildly at anything that makes a move and oddly they are unable to coil to strike something like their relatives on land. Other than when taken out of water sea snakes do not really create harm. 
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Ocean Acidification

• Ocean Acidification is when CO2 combines into the ocean water making it more acidic.
• Acidification in the ocean occurs naturally and also because humans. Humans cause this because the burning of fossil fuels puts CO2 into the environment which then gets put into the ocean.
• This effects the plantonic and benthic organisms because they live off of the ocean water, but if the ocean water becomes more acidic then it starts to slowly decay the benthic and plantonic organisms.
• Theres many different ways to prevent the acidicfication from growing. Ways that are really easy to starts but yet the human race seems to be to lazy. All we have to simply do is reduce the CO2 emishions we put out.
• I learned that it can kill the ecosystem without us even knowing, its slowly killing the shellfish, and also that humans effect the growth rate way to much
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Monday 2/11

• HAB, harmful algae bloom, is an algae bloom causes negative impacts to other organisms via production of natural toxins, mechanical damage to other organisms, or anything else in the water.
• Blooms of harmful algae can have large and varied impacts on marine ecosystems, depending on the species involved, the environment where they are found, and the mechanism by which they exert negative effects.
• Scientist are not really sure on whether HAB's even occur in the ocean, therefore they really have no idea what to really do to stop it. They feel that the occuring of HABs are increasing by a large amount, but only because observations have been starting to be noted more to figure what is really causing HAB.
• When HAB occurs, usually yearly in the Gulf Coast, many fish seem to wash upon shore dead and for awhile at that. But the algae doesnt stop with just the fish in the ocean, people around or in the Gulf Coast get respiratory illnesses or many people just get horrible allergy symptoms.
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