Tag Archives: ceviche!

2022

Day 7: Sea Ya Later Glover’s

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Our last full day at Glover’s 🙁 We started it off with our last data collection for Sunday’s research question about coral cover and sea urchin abundance at a non-MPA site. This was pretty quick as we have all become really efficient with our methods and were even able to collect 177 (!!!) sea urchins, all Echinometra viridis. It was pretty sad how dead this reef was but I still saw an Amber Pinshell mollusk and some Common Sea Fan. We were also able to go to a protected area where there were so many different reef fish and I got to dive down a lot to observe them closer. The water was pretty rough but it made it all the more fun! I saw lots of Branching Vase Sponge, saucer leaf brown algae, Jania spp. and Amphiora fragilissima red algae, a parrot fish, more French Angel Fish, a puffer, and some stag horn coral! Also, Dr. Solomon secured us our third lion fish of the trip, a small but the perfect addition for our collection.

“Surchin for Urchins: The Correlation Between Number of Urchins and Percent Live Coral”

After finishing up our poster for the experiment, we had a few topic lectures so we would have more time for the lion fish ceviche!! After dinner, we gathered in the wet lab and first dissected the fish. We had three different sized ones: Snack, Appetizer, and Main Course. This was of course based on their sizes, and I got to work on Main Course, and it was hugeeee. We first took the 680g (!!) fish and measured the gape width and length which was about 3 cm and 3.25 cm respectively. Then, we sexed it and found out that it was a male before cutting open it’s stomach to see what was inside. It had these two little pieces that were pretty digested but we think it may have been some kind of invertebrate. It was super cool to be able to analyze the food that we were about to eat, especially something that is harmful to our environment. After all the fish were gutted and cleaned, Dr. Solomon made it into a delicious ceviche that we enjoyed with some plantain and corn chips. Highly recommend, 12/10 experience and a great way to end the first part of our trip.

– Sophia

 

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Last Day on the Reef!

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Hey y’all! It’s Michiel again : )

I’m sure you guys already know that the day started with everyone waking up and getting breakfast by 7. After waking up this morning and getting breakfast, everyone quickly put on their snorkel gear, got their transects, quadrats, and clipboards, and boarded the boat to go out to a non-MPA reef. There, we collected data for the research question I talked about on June 11. The reef was a pretty good depth, not to shallow or too deep, but it had a lot of fire sponge and fire coral. Thankfully, I managed not to touch any while I was there. It also had a lot of dead coral and there were very few fish. I remember seeing two Cocoa Damselfish (Stegastes variabilis), but I can’t remember seeing any other fish I could identify. After, Ava and I laid out our transect and counted alive and dead coral in our quadrat, the entire class began collecting sea urchins for 10 minutes. This place was full of sea urchins; I ended up getting 11, but some people were able to find a lot more. We ended up with 177 sea urchins after only 10 minutes.

After this reef, we went to a much nicer, deeper reef where the class had a chance to snorkel without the pressure of collecting any data. This was our last time to snorkel on the trip, and I’m really happy with the reef they ended up taking us too. The coral in the area was beautiful, and I saw so many fish. In terms of herbivorous fish, I saw a bunch of Cocoa Damselfish (S. variabilis), some really large Sergeant Majors (Abudefduf saxatilis) – they were about 20 cm – Threespot Damselfish (S. planifrons), and Bicolor Damselfish (S. partitus). I also saw a Blue Tang (Acanthurus coeruleus) and a male Bluelip Parrotfish (Cryptotomus roseus), both of which I followed for a while to get a good picture. I got some fine-ish pictures of the Blue Tang, but I couldn’t get any good ones of the parrotfish because the parrotfish kept going all over the reef, moving through coral so fast that I could barely keep up with it. All of these fish were really hard to get pictures of because they tend to hide within the coral whenever you approach them.

Huge Abudefduf saxatilis

After we left that reef, we compiled all of the data we’ve collected over the past couple of days. We were able to conclude that there is a correlation between a high percentage of live coral coverage and less sea urchins. However, we didn’t see any correlation between the amount of urchins and whether we were collected at an MPA or a non-MPA. We think this may be due to our ability in collecting sea urchins improving as we went from reef to reef. This would explain why we collected so few sea urchins from the first non-MPA site we went to, which probably skewed our results. After determining all of this, we put all of our information on a poster and presented our project to Scott and Adrienne.

Later in the day (after lectures and dinner) we dissected lionfish. My group was given a really tiny lionfish, which was challenging, but my confidence in my dexterity skills skyrocketed after I saw how well I did on the dissection. The most interesting part of the dissection was opening its stomach to examine its content. We were able to see some invertebrate organism within it that measured about 2.1 cm. After dissecting the fish, Scott took them, fileted them, and made ceviche. The ceviche was delicious, and we were all happy that we were simultaneously having a wonderful snack and contributing to the betterment of our marine environment.

After the ceviche, we worked on our assignments and got ready for bed. This was the last day of the reef! I’m sad it’s over – I had so much fun snorkeling – but I’m excited for everything I’m going to learn in the rainforest.

The best photo of the blue tang I could take : (
A photo Sophia took of the blue tang!
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Last Day on the Reef: Lionfish Ceviche

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Today marks our final day on Glover’s Reef Research Station! We started the day with a morning snorkel, finishing the last of our data collection for our research project we started a few days ago. I heard from Elena that there were some more ctenophores here but I wasn’t lucky enough to see them myself. This time around I was finally able to find and collect some urchins during our urchin survey! We also did one final snorkel in a new area just to see the reefs one last time before our departure. Some highlights include: Caribbean reef squids, another lionfish speared, and I saw a pufferfish!

If you look closely you can see a sea urchin hidden in the dead coral, and on top is a christmas tree worm
Some pretty bladed fire coral (do not touch!)

After returning from our morning snorkel we spent the afternoon combining and analyzing our data from the previous day’s collections, and created a poster presenting our project and its conclusions to our professors. Based on our (limited) data, we were able to see that on patches of reef with a higher percentage of dead corals, there were also a higher number of sea urchins we were able to collect. But there was no clear correlation between a patch being within the protected area and the percent of dead coral. Here is a picture of our lovely poster (I drew the little urchin heart)!

This afternoon we were able to eat a unique delicacy that helps get rid of a pesky invader of the reefs: lionfish ceviche! Over the course of our stay, our professors speared three of them, and we finally put them to good use! But of course as scientists, before we made the ceviche, we dissected each lionfish and determined its sex, weight, length, and saw its stomach contents! My group had an exceptionally large fish that we nicknamed “Main Course”, whose carnage we removed unfortunately spilled onto my lab notebook (good thing its waterproof!). The long awaited ceviche was  delicious!

Dr. Solomon trimming the venomous spines from the lionfish

Then I spent the rest of the night packing up all of my stuff that has become so brutally disorganized over the past few days that I’ve just accepted that nothing in my duffel bag will be entirely clean or easily found. I’ll be very sad to leave this place in the morning (especially in anticipation of the four hour boat ride), but I’m so beyond excited for where we are going next!

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27/05/19 I’m not lion…I had fun.

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Today is our last full day of class since tomorrow is just traveling! We began the morning with a fun activity—cleaning up the island! We took trash bags out, geared up with long pants tucked in socks, shirts tucked in pants, jackets tucked in rubber gloves, and picked up garbage at four different sites around Middle Caye—the mangroves of death, the coral graveyard,  the Glover’s Reef dock, and the touch tank. I, along with Pierce and Keegan, picked up trash at the coral graveyard for 30 minutes. My hands pruned up with sweat, but the coverage was worth the mosquito protection.

 

Some interesting garbage found:

-lots of plastic bottles, lots of plastic bottle caps

-plastic utensils

-many sole-mate less sandals (ha!)

-Crocs

-baby doll leg

-stuffed animal

-LEGO

-toothbrushes

-rope

-2 hyperdermic needles

-a crab using a round bottle as a shell! Trash Crab!

Then, we had some coconut water, coconut meat, and lionfish ceviche—just doing our part to remove invasive species. The lionfish that I dissected was a 79.1g virgin male, and we found a whole, un-digested juvenile slippery dick wrasse in his stomach! The wrasse itself was at least 3 centimeters, maybe even 4. What a cool find!

Lionfish of genus Pterois beside the slippery dick wrasse (Halichoeres bivittatus) found in its stomach

We had our last lectures for the course on annelids and the history and culture of Belize given by our wonderful guides Herby and Javier—they were excellent and they will be missed so much!

Thank you Glover’s Reef Research Station for a fantastic week! Now, I’m prepared to head on home.

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Why must good things come to an end? 

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  • Why must good things come to an end? 

    Today was a day of many lasts: snorkeling at Glover’s Atoll, sitting at the pier with the squad, and interacting with the lion fish. The post-Belize depression will be real but I will be sure to return to this lovely, peaceful, and unbelizeable place (credit: Sami).

    First things first: food was amazing today. After dissecting the lion fish we have gotten from the surrounding reefs, Chef Scott turned the white meat fish into a delicious bowl of ceviche, lime-marinated fresh fish mixed with diced onion and tomato.

    10/10 would eat again!

    Even the vegetarians helped finish the fish, an environmental friendly act due to the lionfish’s devastating effect on native fish species. Nonnative to this region, the piescivorous lion fish feed on smaller fish that are native to the region, at a disproportionally high rate. This causes up to 70% decrease in 

    native fish populations.

    A similar trend can be said of brown algae, Sargassum seaweed in particular, which has crowded out large populations of coral because of its ability to grow from dissembles parts of itself and its tolerance to hot water.

    At the Southwest Caye of Glover’s Atoll, we hung out at the resort and savored the beverages that the Caribbean had to offer, including Belizean pineapple Fanta which instead of using corn syrup as sweetener uses cane sugar. We noted the amount of conch shells on the island and thought about the regulations in place at this region for conch fishing. We hope they weren’t collected from restricted fishing zones, weren’t undersized, or caught during the mating season. 

    As our pilot research project has shown, marine protected areas support more corals and number of species, which can be worthy contributions to the coral reef ecosystem. Illegal harvesting of conch would instead be a detraction.

    In the waters around Southwest Caye, we observed the abundant sargassum seaweed. They are especially obvious because of they float free on the surface of water. Under water around the patch reefs near Middle Caye, I saw a lot of lobophora and White scroll algae. Most of these algae communities are near or inside coral communities, and share their habitat with many species of fish, spiny brittle star, and anemones. If one made a conclusion about the role of algae in the coral reef ecosystem from these observation, it may be that algae seems to be living in good relationships with its neighboring corals. However, comparing the algae and coral compositions of today to that of the last couple decades, the correlation between algae growth and coral decline can be alarming. We wonder if our grandchildren will see the corals that we got to see today.

    For about a week now we have been coordinating  a group mediation.

    Alas, tonight we meditated together as a class and some of us mentally prepared ourselves for the end of what feels like an era.

2016

Tough Love

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Our last day here on the reef has been a little sad for me. I will absolutely be coming back here at some point in my life, but leaving tomorrow is gonna be difficult for me.

We started the day by wandering around in the back reef and collecting biodiversity in a bucket so we could identify it. I identified a species of chiton (the fuzzy chiton) and some genus of snails (cerithium and trochus snails). We also found a donkey dung sea cucumber, some box jellies, some huge hermit crabs that were using queen conch shells, and a few mantis shrimp.

As we were collecting stuff I got stung by something on my elbow and it was hurting for the next couple hours. Eventually it calmed down, but I’m still not sure what stung me. Possibly some kind of jelly.

In the afternoon we dissected lion fish to look at their size and the contents of their stomachs. Then we made lion fish ceviche which we will be eating any minute now.

After the lion fish dissection, we boated over to south-west caye and had a few drinks and watched the sun set. This place is so beautiful that it’s impossible to describe in pictures or words. I sat and watched the stars for awhile on the dock and thought about how amazing it would be to see this many stars every night. I’m gonna miss this when I got back to Houston. Despite the stings, bug bites, rashes, and layers of dirt and salt, I would love to spend huge quantities of my life here.

2016

(Nakian) May 30: Dissection x Lionfish x Pina Colada

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Brown algae found today
Brown algae found today

Tonight is the last night in Belize. We went to the patch reef nearby our dorm and collected specimens in the morning. We found bunch of little crabs, a level 45 hermit crab (the biggest I have seen), bunch of algae, and played with conchs that tried to swath our hand away with their extended body. It was amazing to see so many different animals in such a shallow water. After that we returned to our coral colony project and concluded that colony coverage decreased.
In the afternoon we dissected lionfish, recording their weight, body length, gape size, body fat volume, and stomach content. Since we didn’t know the previous data we couldn’t make any conclusions but it was fun cutting up an invasive species. I am only waiting to taste the ceviche I heard they were making with the fish we dissected.
I collected the same 5 kinds of brown algae that I have seen while I was staying here: Sargassum, Dictyota, Turbinaria, Padina, and Lobophora. I couldn’t find any other and I concluded that these are the most common species in the region.
Before dinner we sailed to Southwest Caye, a resort island. We sat in a bar and drank pina colada by the dock under the sunset. After a amazing dinner, and watching the slideshow of our photo we have taken during this trip concluded our course very nicely.