Our field trip to... (Pt. 1) - Pawikan?

Recently, the staff had a field trip to... BATAAN! During the field trip, we went to the Pawikan Conservation Center in Nagbalayong, Morong, Bataan and the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in Napot Point, Morong, Bataan.

We had this field trip because . We joined because not only it is required and important *for the species, the ecosystem, and more importantly, the world (no ecosystems, no us)* but this is our last field trip with Teacher Rye and in 6th Grade in TLT. Certainly, no one would want to miss this experience, after all, it is our last field trip. It was truly a memorable experience with all our classmates and T. Rye. We expected the field trip to be absolutely fun, exciting, memorable and educational! No on of us got disappointed because of this field trip. No expectations were missed at all! We were extremely excited even before the field trip even started! And yes, it was the best one ever!


Now, about the field trip. First we went to the Pawikan Conservation Center! The PCC is a conservation center (since 1999) that aims to help sea turtles' population grow and increase awareness of what is happening to them, yet, it is an NGO (Why isn't the Gov't funding this?!?). We expected to learn about how sea turtles (pawikan) live, how they reproduce, and baby sea turtles' behavior. We learned all of the mentioned and that the sea turtles' lives are threatened by humans (our species!) via eating, snatching the eggs, and *cough* littering *cough*. We also learned that, for one piece of plastic thrown in the beach, one baby sea turtle dies. Let us stop this torture of the Lord's creations by stopping the litterers!


We were given one hatchling to release to the sea. The hatchlings we released are olive ridley sea turtles (AKA pacific ridley sea turtles; Lepidochelys olivacea) that are part of the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, the class Reptilia, the order Testudines,the family Cheloniidae, the genus Lepidochelys, and are the species L. olivacea. Fact: It is named after the color of its shell. Fact: It is male if its tail sticks out of its shell. We chose this because it was the ones we met in detail! Its ecological role is it is a secondary predator or an herbivore. They feed on herbivores or other predators. We got to release an olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea)


Well, that summarizes the first part of our journey! Hope you had fun, thank you for reading and PEACE!

External Sources:
http://pawikancenter.org/
https://sites.google.com/a/bataan.gov.ph/tourism/interest/pawikan-conservation-center
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_ridley_sea_turtle
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/olive-ridley-sea-turtle/
http://loggerhead-turtles.weebly.com/food-chain.html

Note: the pictures aren't aligned because I used HTML. Sorry for that.