Today we woke bright and early and headed out to a patch reef in the lagoon on a boat. We laid out transects with partners and used quadrats to gather data on the live stony coral cover on a reef located in Glover’s Marine Protected Area. We also did another experiment and gathered as many sea urchins as we could in 25 minutes. We repeated all of our experiments on other patch reef that was outside of the MPA.

So today I did see some new corals. I saw an Acropora cervicornis!!! It was very beautiful and I was thrilled when I saw it. I also noticed that some of this coral was infected with white band disease. There was a patch of recently dead white skeleton on a branch and also old dead skeleton that had been overgrown with turf algae. I also saw a Montastraea cavernosa today, which does in fact look like a mat of zoanthids but I could tell the difference between the two.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow we are learning about reef zonation and heading to the reef crest. Hopefully I will not get seasick.