Box Jelly Beach

Literally almost out of my Marshallese coconut oil. I DO NOT KNOW WTF WE FUNNA DO ONCE ITS OUT. The bar then night swimming sounded pretty great at the moment, but went wrong and ended w/ a jellyfish sting. Shannon was in the worst pain ever and some of us tried peeing (I missed) on her toe to relieve her of her pain. Payola and I didn’t know it was a myth at the time, but anything to make Shannon think she’s getting better. This beach was right across the research center it is now deemed the box jelly beach for Shannon. After a shower we were knocked out at I think 12-1am..not too shortly after it was already 8:30 am and we headed out to telephone pole. As we assessed the waves (more so Mike) we decided telephone pole was not the place to snorkel…the waves weren’t passing the vibe check. We went to somewhere closer and got some really cool conch shells, some more cooler than others. Morgan and Abby watch your backs 🎯.  Those shells need to be kept in a lockbox or some shit. Because of this enemies were made.


The later part of our day in the field was occupied by surveying a fossilized coral reef outside the town of Cockburn. We did three different transect surveys using quadrants of the percent cover of various types of coral. We gazed upon Starcoral, brain coral, staghorn, and elkhorn coral over 100,000 years old. This gave us a window into the oceans' past and a deeper understanding of how coral species abundance has changed over time. 


After lunch, we plunged into another figure analysis about the community structure of octocorals and how, in recent years, as coral reefs have been declining in abundance, octocorals have appeared to grow. The paper attempted to assess the structuring ecological forces of octocoral community assemblies and hypothesized that they are similar to those of terrestrial forests. Upon completing our figure analysis, part of the class went back to Grams Harbor to re-commune with the local sea turtles.


After dinner, we made our way back into the classroom, where our exam scores were revealed, fear-mongering of box jellies took place, and we talked about our figure analysis on the paper about coral and algae interactions. Fortunately, our evening class was interrupted by a short snack break with pints of ice cream, which unfortunately resulted in several shattered plastic spoons, which reminded some of the age-old adage that patience is a virtue. 


Yours truly,


Francine and Logan


















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