All posts by lma5

2022

Crab: 1 Liliana: 0

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It’s day 2 on Glover’s and our first day in the water! We had a super early (in my opinion) start, everyone woke up around 6:30 and we all geared up and headed to breakfast at 7. After some delicious banana pancakes we got into the water for the first time and went to a patch reef a little ways off. It was a pretty calm swim through a lot of sea grass and then before we knew it we were at the reef! It was incredible and I wish I had photos to add here but I didn’t bring my camera on the first swim, hopefully someone else here will have photos for you to see! We saw so many corals and fish, and such a wide variety of organisms all over the place. Everywhere you looked there was something new to see. We even saw a small lionfish sitting on the reef, which is not ideal for invasive reef species control, but still interesting to see one out in the wild in real life! The first swim was a good one for my taxon group, crustaceans; we saw a Caribbean spiny lobster hiding in a hole underneath some coral, another organism I have been hoping to see in real life. After about an hour in the water we went out for a break and some land prep for tomorrow before lunch. Around this time I was outside with the two kids who had collected a bunch of crabs in coconut shells. They showed me one smaller crab and despite their warnings that he was (understandably) angry, I tried to pick it up to get a better look. Alas, the crab outsmarted me and got a good chunk of my finger in his claw, luckily it didn’t draw blood, just a long scrape and my hurt pride. Clearly my crab catching skills are a little rusty, but there are plenty of other crabs around that are hopefully a little friendlier.

We went back in the water after lunch, but not before a quick jog through the mangroves of death. While dramatic sounding, it’s pretty much a trail through the island that goes along the mangroves, and is absolutely filled with mosquitos, it felt like they were completely covering us until we all sprinted into the water and hid under the surface for them to go away. Once we got through that we shuffled our way through a bunch of sea grass until we got to a sandy area with lots of patch reefs, and we went swimming through looking for behaviors and organisms as part of a scavenger hunt. This area was less protected by the island from waves so we were pushed from side to side and through the reef and pulled around. My handwriting is already terrible, but with the waves pushing my arms and clipboard around I don’t think any of my notes are legible. Unfortunately these waves also pushed me up against the coral, and soon after I swam further away I realized that the part of my hand that had gotten smacked into the coral was turning red, and felt a little like it was burning. I discovered that I had the misfortune of bumping into a fire coral, named that probably because it hurts when you touch it. Coral: 1 Liliana: 0

However at the end of the day we went through our first round of taxon presentations and lectures, and by then my finger didn’t hurt from the crab and my hand wasn’t burning from the coral, and despite all the bug bites, I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow!

2022

There are Crabs Everywhere (08/06/22)

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It’s Liliana! We made it to Belize after a long time at the airport and a short flight. I was immediately slammed by the heat and humidity but we quickly piled into a van and went off to the dock, with a quick snack stop on the way.
The view from the boat was incredible, I spent most of the three-ish hour ride just staring out over the ocean completely entranced by the water and the reef break and the islands we passed. Some of it I spent staring out the window at the horizon trying to not be sick. Our water safety officer was telling us stories about Belize, the reef, the natural history, and his adventures the entire time and I just hope someday I live as interesting and cool of a life as he has.
When we made it to the island we were greeted by the people already there, and also by a ridiculous amount of hermit crabs. They’re much larger then any hermit crab I’ve seen in New England, and they’re on the land and scurry off into holes on the sides of the paths, and are somehow always in the way when you’re walking in the dark. We also saw about 8 larger crabs that were not hermit crabs, blue and green in color. I don’t know the exact species yet so tomorrow I’ll have to work on finding that out. They’re about the size of my hand, with much larger claws then I’ve ever seen before, but unlike the hermit crabs they scuttle out of the way when you walk towards them. They also tend to stay very still until you’re right up next to them, I can safely say that never before in my life have I walked out of a bathroom to be greeted by six large crabs all right outside that I didn’t even see until I was right up to them.
Someone said that the hermit crabs were the Glover’s equivalent of the Rice squirrels, and so far with the abundance and boldness of them both it seems to be an accurate comparison, we’ll have to wait and see if any of these hermit crabs try to steal food out of my hands like a squirrel.
Tomorrow we get to go in the water for the first time, and I can’t wait! Hopefully we will see a greater variety of crustaceans, as much as I love the hermit crabs here.

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It’s Almost Time!

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Hi! I’m Liliana, and I’m so excited for this trip and the chance to learn and explore someplace I never would have gotten to go otherwise!

I can’t believe that we’re going to be there so soon! At the beginning of the summer this trip felt like it was ages away but the time flew so quickly and now it’s only 2 days away! I am expecting this trip to be pretty intense, a whole course in such a short time sounds like a lot, but I think I’ll be so caught up in the excitement of everything we’re going to learn that it won’t even feel like work. I’ve done the pre-trip readings and presentations and everything I’ve learned about from that makes me even more excited to finally see what we’ve been reading and learning about in real life. I am especially excited for Glover’s Reef, I’ve always loved marine biology and the ocean but I’ve never been snorkeling before. I have some basic familiarity with ocean ecosystems and organisms from being an intern at the New England Aquarium, but my knowledge is pretty limited to New England, since I live in Boston. I can’t wait to experience a whole new part of the world and everything new that lives there! My taxon is crustacea for that part of the trip, so I will probably be digging through sand and looking under rocks to see if I can find anything cool, I especially love tidepools, looking into a tidepool is like staring into a portal to an entirely different world!

I will admit I’m a little bit nervous to travel internationally. I haven’t been anywhere but Boston and Houston since COVID started, and before that I hardly ever went outside the U.S., and if we did it was probably driving through parts of Canada. I’m not too worried though because even if I’m nervous I think there will be plenty going on to distract and interest me. I can’t wait to meet everyone else on this trip and get to know them better, and to learn from our professors and guest speakers and from everyone’s presentations! Also shout-out to my high school teachers who really pushed my love of the ocean and ecology! I hope you’ll follow along with us on this adventure!