Tropical Marine Ecology - San Salvador, Bahamas

  What is up lute fans?!       Today started out with a great breakfast of pancakes and sausages. We loaded the truck and waited for what felt like years (30 minutes) for Cooper to get her toe bandaged. The no-see-ums were ruthless and tore the rest of the group up. Shoutout Mike for letting us take shelter in his air conditioned room. He gave Francine ozempic to help with the bites (it was actually Zyrtec she forgot the name…  a girl can only dream). This next part goes out to Matt Smith as we met your doppelgänger from USD (see picture below). We finally left and drove to the farthest side of the island to French Bay where 2 groups were able to finish their data collections with the help of others. Flamin’ Hot Flamingo Tongues counted sea fans but weren’t able to find flamingo tongues :( and Rich Fish finished counting the diversity and abundance of fish on the reef. We then headed to Monument for a delicious field lunch of sandwiches and PB & J’s. Once we...

 Good evening peeps, Today marks the last day before the barge comes so we had a carbolicious breakfast of fried eggs (for some it was only one egg- aka pickle boy 🥒), grits, and our daily bread. No more peanut butter, so we had to make do with its worse cousin, sunflower seed butter. After breakfast, everyone headed their separate ways to continue work on their research projects. Our group headed out to the beach across the street for our second round of collecting sand samples. This time around was not as easy as anticipated and we spent half the time surfing on each other’s backs to collect our sediment samples under water. With an impressive display of water aerobics we were finally able to get the samples and frolic in the ocean. For lunch we had an unusual casserole presumably made of leftovers. Whatever they did worked, because all plates were cleaned. After that it was back to the lab where everyone reported their progress. The damselfish group visited the reef at the pipe...

Dear adoring fans,  We started our day drenched in sweat and coconut oil after a long night of fighting the bugs and the demons. We headed to a delectable French toast breakfast, complete with orange juice. Then the worst happened: Eric and Marika left us. They’re now headed back to their clean, bug-free homes as we remain in the trenches.  Then, the group split to work on our research projects. One group, composed of Cooper, Abby, Zoe, and Kennedy headed to the pipe to observe the grazing patterns of damselfish. They will continue tomorrow, observing the fish every 2 hours. Another group, Shannon, Francine, and Sophia, went to Graham’s Harbor to do transects of the lithified sand reef there, in order to count the abundance and richness of reef fish. Another group, Kailee, Morgan, and Toby, headed to Rocky Point for sand samples to look for meiofauna in high, mid, and low tide. Later analysis showed many nemotodes and copepods. The final group, Madi, Logan, Paola, completed 6 ...

 Dearest gentle readers, Today marks a day of new friends and new enemies. A late night battle over a spare box fan meant our early wake up call was extra hard today. Early risers woke up at 5:45 while the room full of sleepy, less cool, sweaty sleepers didn’t get up until 6:20 (probably due to the fact we didn’t have ac🤨). Breakfast was another day of pancakes and sausages with a less warm kitchen staff at the ripe time of 7am. After quickly eating, we loaded the truck (finally reunited with truck G!) to head to club med for our boat launch. Angie, Eric, and Maurika spent a luxurious day there yesterday so they served as our tour guides. We practiced our French with Simón (bonjour 🥖👨‍🎨) who proceeded to spell every one of our names wrong (even after we after we spelled them out loud). We scoped out an old shipwreck from a barge that capsized in 1902 (which was then bombed by the US military- “classic americans” said Simón). There were lots of black durgon, blue tang, and serge...

 Hello from San Salvador, Today we started our day with breakfast of eggs and bagels before heading to the classroom. In the classroom Mike prepped us for today’s field work. We were looking at macro and microfauna in the sand. This is basically bugs and worms that live in between the grains of sand. After Mike was done prepping us we headed out to the beach. We took samples far up on the beach, on the intertidal and in the water. We put all our sand in a softer to look for the macro fauna but unfortunately found nothing. To get the water samples Abby had to help Mike by standing on his back with the help of Toby. We then put samples into plastic bags to take back to the lab. We also spent some time playing in the water before heading back to the classroom. Mike taught us how to play the lionfish game, which involves sneaking up on people and dunking them in the water.  Back at the lab we looked at the samples we took under the microscope and counted all the different microfau...

Good evening loyal readers, It was a particularly sunny day in San Salvador today, as well as a particularly special day as it is our very own Paolas 21st birthday! A majority of the celebrating occurred last night to ring in the occasion, and we had a much more relaxed day on the island today. A handful of our strongest soldiers made it to breakfast in the morning (pancakes, bacon, oatmeal, and some juicy debriefing), and the rest of the crew enjoyed sleeping in as we didn’t have an early field work day today. I would also like to note that the bugs were extra vicious today, which was not appreciated! Our ankles have certainly seen better days, and most of us are looking slightly diseased.   “I think it’s actually kinda fun to look a little diseased” -Morgan  “Am I gonna die???” -Shannon (2 different responses to the bug bite carnage on our bodies) After breakfast, some decided to go back to bed, and some others hopped straight on the figure analysis train to get it out of th...

Hellllooooo Washington readers. Today was honestly boring, but we’ll see about that later TOONITE…😗😛. We went to telephone pole just to get stung by jelly parts. I don’t know if it’s their way of hair loss, but they should keep that in control some of us are holding on by a thread….🐠 but anyways we were suppose to….i don’t know but we were looking at, but we were looking at something and we saw a whole lotta fish. A little too deep for our liking because our ears were hurting like shet tryna go down. After looking at feesh, and more feesh (I’m still trying to learn the names but be so for real a fish is…a fish). We headed back to the research center and on the way stopped by the store in town and ughhhhhh 👹 WE SKIPPED WENDY’S!!!!! We are so outraged by this. 😑 IDK WHAT THEY PUT IN THAT STAWBERRY CHEESECAKE ICE CREAM but imma need 13 more of thooossseeee. I tried so hard to keep the rage I had inside at a minimum. I’m still mad about it now and it’s 9pm 💀. We came back for lunch (...

 About half the class woke up early to watch the sunrise from the point next to the collapsed pier. Some slept in too late and had to run the rest of the way. It was beautiful but buggy! Then it was time for a breakfast of pancakes (again) and sausage (again) but it was delicious! The research institute is at capacity so we did not get a truck but it was a short walk to the snorkel site today and we got a van to carry our stuff (thank you Angie!). We did more seagrass surveys and snorkeled around the lithified sand reef. We spotted 2 more sting rays, a parrot flounder, a bunch of sea fans, and watched the turtles more. It was cloudy and some of the group was cold but we won’t complain to our readers in Washington.  We walked back and ate lunch (Bahamian pizza!!) and then enjoyed a quiet afternoon. Most people finished their figure analyses with plenty of time for a nap. Mike was feeling quite generous and gave us the night off of class (thank you Mike!!), so after dinner the g...

 Hello all, Welcome back🥳 The morning started off fantastic, with our favorite breakfast of fluffy french toast topped with a brown sugar mixture, sausage, and an electric blue drink. It was so good, it made Mike stop his fast and eat breakfast for the first time since we’ve been here! Wow! French toast (Morgan got hungry) From there, we headed to Pigeon Creek, where we set off to study a Mangrove Forest. Mangrove Forests are found in estuaries and are nurseries for reef fish. While we were looking at the forest, we saw fish such as barracuda, school masters, and glass fish, sergeant major, and needle fish. After, we took a short land break to warm up, as the water was very chilly.  Snorkeling at Pigeon Creek  After our break, we got back into the water to survey the sea grass beds, adjacent to the Mangroves. We used quadrats to calculate percent cover of two species of seagrass—turtle and manatee grass. While swimming through the seagrass bed, we saw some cool creatures...

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...

  Hello loyal blog followers!! Today was another beautiful day at Gerace complete with yummy food, lots of snorkeling, and turtle spottings. We started the morning with a delicious breakfast of pancakes and bacon to fuel us for our trip to Rocky Point. We attempted to go yesterday and the waves were too intense but not today!! We saw lots of parrot fish, surgeon fish, and some we have yet to identify. Time to hit the books! We also were tasked with observing the sea fan distribution across the reef and found they were much more dense on the edges of the reef. We took some notes, played in the water, and packed up our gear. The group wasn’t quite done snorkeling so we made another stop at the collapsed pier on the way back. And thank goodness we did because we spotted a sea turtle feeding on some sea grass and a huge sting ray!!  We made it back just in time for a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup. The group split up in the afternoon to work on figure analyses. Some found...