What’s This?A week ago a garden eel was swimming along and he bumped into a thing that he didn’t know what it was. It was green and bumpy. “What’s this?” He asked himself. “It wasn’t here before. Tomorrow I’ll go above it.”The next day the eel was swimming again. He went above the green thing. But there was a thin green thing there too. “I wonder what this is?” he wondered. He came back the next day. He was going to go above the other green thing. He ran into another green thing. It was like a leaf. And there were a lot of them. “Hmmmmm,”The Garden eel said. “If there is another thing above this, I’ll ask my friend to help me figure out what it is” The day after that he came back. He went above all the other green things. And he saw a green thing that was the very top of the green thing. HE was wondering what these green things were. He went to his friend the Moray eel’s house the Garden eel told him what happened. Moray thought for a long time until he said “You might be seeing different parts of the thing every day. You should look at it from far away and you’ll see all the parts of it together!”The next day Garden did what Moray told him and he saw what it was. It was SEAWEED!Authors NoteThe Garden Eel (which is a white eel that has black spots) sees different parts of the seaweed every day. He puts them together and finds out it is seaweed. Here are the parts of the seaweedHoldfast: This holds the seaweed to the seafloor so itdoesn’t float away.The stipe: This is the stem of the seaweed like all plantshave.The lamina: A leaf like part of the seaweed that is attachedto the stipe.The blades: These are pretty much the leaves of theseaweed.
