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Welcome to Plum Landing.
"Underwater Hiding Places."
Today we're on a mission for Plum.
We're exploring the New England Aquarium.
And I'm Ella, and I'm here with my friends Miriam, Eissa,
Nathan and Sukee, who's an educator at the aquarium.
Welcome to the mangrove swamp.
We're trying to find some information for Plum
about mangroves and how underwater animals hide.
So if we look at all of these mangrove roots here
which are part of this mangrove swamp,
the animals like the white-spotted bamboo sharks,
that brown-banded bamboo shark over there
and all of those little speckled coral catsharks
love to use those roots as a safe hiding spot.
They blend in because, like, their skin pattern
is like the same thing as the mangrove roots,
so it looks like they're part of it
and you can't tell that they're there.
What is a mangrove forest?
A mangrove forest is a place that's in between
the big open ocean and a fresh body of water
like a river or a stream.
And you'll always find them in a really tropical place
like Australia and Southeast Asia.
All these sharks seek refuge in between all of those roots.
They feel like they're really safe
and really well protected in there.
It's kind of like when Plum and the kids learned
how baby fish live in the roots of mangrove trees,
which keeps them safe from predators.
Look right over here.
Those are actually shark eggs
that came from one of our female bamboo sharks.
She actually swims around in a circle
and she tangles her eggs around that mangrove.
So that way, they're not carried out into the open ocean
by the currents, which could be a really scary place for them.
Sukee showed us another mangrove exhibit.
The fish there have a different way of hiding from predators.
Well, let's look really carefully
at all of the little fish that are swimming around in here.
But is there anything special
about the way that they might be colored?
Most of them have patterns on them.
Like that one has got a stripe going through its middle.
This one does too.
One of them is half and half.
So I think they all are, like, divided into sections of color.
Exactly.
If they're split into these sections
and have different colors, just like this one,
do you think if you were really far away,
that is going to look like one fish or two fish?
Two fish.
It looks a lot like two fish,
two little, tiny fish that a big, scary predator
might not think it's worth eating.
That is a way of hiding.
Well, I think it's one of those coral reefs,
mostly because it's got
all these different types of coral in it
and lots of brightly colored fish.
All of these things here are soft corals and hard corals,
which basically make a whole big city for these animals to live.
And many of them like to use these soft corals
as good hiding places.
So this pink anemone fish in this exhibit uses that anemone
in order to hide and to protect itself.
They hide in the sea anemones
because they're immune to the sting.
Other fish that want to eat the fish, they can't
because they'll get stung by the sea anemone.
Now I think we should make some drawings for Plum.
Okay.
I chose to draw the sea anemone.
I'm going to draw the upside-down jelly.
This jellyfish is unusual because it's upside-down.
We always say, "Explore your world."
But if something that you're interested in
is not in your world,
then you can go to an aquarium or a museum.
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