Day 13: A Shore so Trashy that You’d Think We Were in Jersey

I woke up to thunder and rainy skies, which was a surprise since last night was the only clear night we had had. I went to the lecture hall to work on blogs before traversing the flood to go to breakfast. We all came to the lecture hall for our last round of lectures by Claire on crustaceans, Jessica on sponges, and Elena on mangroves and sea grass beds.

Scott gave us our topic for today, which would be to look into marine debris. We decided to look into the different compositions and amounts of trash on the windward and leeward sides of the island. We headed out to the dead coral graveyard to start collecting the trash for 15 minutes. The amount of trash was really disheartening, but we tried our best to pick up as much as we could in that time. We sorted as we went, with Andressa writing it down. We finished up the windward side and moved to the leeward side where we repeated the process. We were all pretty sad after, but lunch cheered us right back up again.

After lunch, we geared up for our last boat snorkeling trip. We went to the Aquarium, which was an area of patch reefs with a bunch of cool fish, a deeper spot above a coral reef, then a shallow sea grass area. We got to see a lot of great species, like a reef parrotfish an eagle ray, another donkey dung sea cucumber, a starry eyed hermit crab, and, most appropriately, a nurse shark with a plastic bottle attached to its fin. We swam around for a few hours before getting in the boat and heading back for dinner.

A Giant Caribbean Anemone Peaking Out

 

We finished working on our poster of our findings from this morning, titled Talk Dirty to Me, and presented to Scott. Afterwards, we all hung out in the lecture room to finish up our blogs and notebooks and listen to everyone’s surprisingly great taste in music.

Multiple Anemones in the Patch Reef

Corallimorphs, Zoanthids, and Anemones seen: 4 giant Caribbean anemones, all larger than the ones yesterday at over 15 cm and hidden in the crevices of the shallow coral reefs. 1 flower anemone on the side of a reef in the 1st dive spot, next to fan coral at about 5 cm at the opening. 1 yellow polyp rock seen on top of a piece of dead coral, about 50ish polyps on it. 2 White encrusting zoanthids, both on the bottom of the benthos, not surrounded by anything. One was about 75ish polyps and the other was a few hundred.

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