The Beginning of Groundhog Day

 With our first night over, and many creepy crawlies, including several hundred ants, mosquitos, and two geckos, we rolled out of bed at a ripe 7:00 am. Averaging 15 bug bites a person, and no toilet paper, we suddenly realized what we had gotten ourselves into. 

Anticipating our first dive, we fueled up with a lovely breakfast of eggs, oatmeal, and canned tuna. Then we hopped in the back of the truck at 8:30 am with our snorkel gear and smiles to take our first official tour of the island. After stopping at several potential dive spots, we finally hit the water at "Telephone Pole" beach. Smoothly and swiftly we dove in to find a harem of blue head wrasse guarding their home. 

For safety purposes, Mike gave us a lesson on fire coral and how we should NOT touch it. Despite its cute fuzzy appearance, it will make your skin burn due to its nematocysts that sting you. Not 20 minutes later, Mike himself accidentally ran into the fire coral, his sun shirt saving him from injury. While snorkeling, we also saw a few round stingrays with barbed tails and a large blue parrot fish.

After our snorkeling adventure, we returned back to base for a hotdog lunch. We were met with a few extra hungry eyes as an iguana stayed close by.


Following lunch, half of the group stayed at the base to study while the other half walked a half mile to Graham’s harbor to study for tomorrow's exam and snorkel in the seagrass beds. While hoping to find grazing turtles, the group found lots of seagrass, a couple stingrays, and numerous colorful fish. 


Dinner today was delicious chicken and deep dish baked mac and cheese. After learning our lesson yesterday, we arrived early to ensure that we sat inside to avoid the bloodthirsty bugs. When 7:00 pm rolled around, we arrived in lab four for our first official “class” and were assigned our first figure analysis. Tomorrow we will be turning in a one page explanation of a specific figure from our assigned article, “An Empirical Test of Recruitment Limitation in a Coral Reef Fish”. 


We are excited to finish our exam tomorrow, and continue learning about the tropical marine communities!



Sincerely,

Amy and Sarah 


Comments

  1. Kristine BrownJanuary 8, 2023 at 8:12 PM

    Thanks for the updates!!! What an opportunity. And so cool to see the rays! I’ll be curious to hear about if the coral is facing the same bleaching issues as other places around the world. Can’t wait to read more!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 9, 2023 at 10:59 AM

    Love the updates, keep them coming

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJanuary 10, 2023 at 11:07 AM

    We should have sent everyone with big jackets snd deep woods off and some pics!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Happens in the Cave Stays in the Cave

Image
Bright and early, our alarms went off at 5:45 am to walk the half mile to Grahams’ Harbor to watch the sunrise. The view was fantastic, and a great way to start our day. After a delicious breakfast of French toast, bacon, and oatmeal, we loaded into the back of the truck for our daily adventure. Our first stop was at Dixon Hill Lighthouse where we climbed up a steep spiral staircase to reach the top, about 160 feet up in the air. We were given a short lesson on the historic oil mechanisms and weights that helped the lighthouse function. After all of us had a turn admiring the view from the top, we came down to inspect the millipedes that were crawling on the stairs and sign the guest book. While hanging out at the base of the lighthouse, a friendly dog approached us and was excited for pets and playtime. We decided to name the dog Mikey Junior, after our fearless leader Mike. In the process of playing with Mikey J, he ended up stealing the human Mike's hat!  Following our stop at t
Read more

1, 2, 3, Seagrass Yippee.

Image
 Our morning started off with delicious pancakes and bacon to fuel us for a morning of counting seagrass. After breakfast we made our way to Graham's Harbor before stingray shuffling our way into the water just to find out that the tide was too high for counting seagrass in the shallow waters. We made our way to the deeper waters where Mike setup a transect line separated in 7 meter segments and at each segment we laid our quadrant. We then proceeded to take estimates of Manatee and Turtle seagrass coverage where visually, point intersect, and individual blade counts of the 2 different grasses were performed.   To help Liz count the seagrass Breana stood on her back to hold her down while she counted... very scientific.  Altogether we counted roughly 4000 blades of seagrass this morning... thanks Michael. When we plotted and viewed our data trends during lecture we noticed significant standard error. This trend exposed how amateur we were at counting sea grass. After escaping the n
Read more

Exam Day Fun

Image
1/9/23 We all woke up bright and early and after looking at the new bug bites we got overnight, we walked over for a 7:30 AM breakfast of French toast and sausages. Right after breakfast we got in the truck and drove to Rocky Point - our snorkeling location for the day. Rocky Point was a reflective beach located about 200 feet off the road from where the truck was parked. The weather was sunny and the air temperature was approximately 76 F and the water was right above 80 degrees.  With slates in hand we entered the after, ready to write down any observations or questions that came up.  The water around this patch reef was very clear and we were able to see lots of different species of coral, sponges, and fish. The reef was dominated by sea fans in bright colors, and lots of the fish that lived in close association with this reef were parrotfish, such as the rainbow parrotfish.  With high energy waves crashing onshore, we were able to feel the water movement even farther from shore lea
Read more