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The Vegetation Zone also knowen as the Primary Dune Zone is the zone beginning where the plants grow. It reaches back indefinitely. The reaserchers in this area mainly look for local plant life with small insects for animal life. This area has the greatest amount of plant life of all 4 parts of a beach and hence it's name.
By far the most abundent life formers here were small plantes and flowers. A few insects where found however.
The Splash Zone, also known as the Buffer Zone is the area reaching from the farthest point of where the waves reach till the very begining of the vegetation. It is known as the Buffer Zone because the area is like a pad between where the water reaches till where vegetation begins.
The frame to the left is a diagram of the strip of Grumari Beach which was analyzed. The scale to the left is in meters. The numbers with circles around them denote the location of the 6 crab holes found on the beach. More data is given about them below.
Note: Crabs frightened by human presence, didn’t reappear, footprints seen.
The Intertidal Zone begins in the water at a depth of approximately one meter at low tide, and ends at the highest point the waves reach up on the beach at high tide.
The most abundent multicelular organisem in our this area of the beach is the Tatuí This is a small six leged animal which lives right on the shore where just before the beach. Many of them constantly get pulled up onto the sand of the beach and then sucked back into the sea. The population of these was very high. Apart from tatuí we found no other multicelular organisems in this area. However alot of plankton was found in the water especially closer to the surface of the water. On the beach dry sand it's self we only found one living organism which was a small till now unidentified insect.
We found both animal and plant plankton in the sea. We found larva of a kind of coral, sea anenome, or a kind of shell. The plant plankton we found was identified as blue algea as well as several other kinds of plants.
Apart from one single specimin, all life found was taken from the sea. The sand area which is uncovered when there is low tide but covered at high tide was practically barn of any life forms what so ever. However alot of residue from the Sea was found such as many kinds of shells, a muscle, a molusc, and some washed up sea weads. We did not however find any of these specimins LIVING in our zone.
The Subloteral Zone is the zone begining at one meters depth in the water at low tide and reaching back indefinitely into the sea it's self.
The most abundant life form in this area which we found out about are fish. However since alot of dibreas was washed up by the sea and found in the Intertidal Zone we can conclude that these life forms live in the Subloteral Zone. These life forms include several shells, muscles, moluscs and sea algea. Plankton is also very abundant in the Subloteral Zone
