Tag Archives: Crustaceans

The Big Goodbye- final blog

I didn’t wake up to birds today, I woke up to the sound of my sister getting ready for school, and my brother playing video games. Instead of being greeted in the morning by hermit crabs and bees, it was my dog. Instead of the smell of soil, rain, and the sea, it’s the smell of a city (pee and cigarettes). My dad kept asking if I would want to go back someday, and my answer is always “yes, of course!” Like I would sit in the mangroves of death every day for an hour just to go back with everyone for another week.

It’s crazy how despite all the differences between the coral reef and the rainforest, the thing that really relates them the most is the vast diversity they hold and maintain. I’m sure we could get into scientific differences, the framework of the reef being built on the exoskeletons of coral, the forest reliance on the nutrient cycle to maintain the trees which provide for the rest. I’m inclined to say that rainforests are the coral reefs of land (instead of the opposite, but that might just be my personal preference for the reef).  But instead of thinking too hard about all the scientific levels these two ecosystems relate, I think they’re related in that they each filled me with the same sense of awe, wonder, curiosity, and endless excitement. I could stare over each environment for hours, and never get bored, there’s always something new to look at, a different fish, a new bird, a new interaction, a tree so tall you can’t see the top, or a reef so deep you can only imagine what’s on the bottom.

My expectations going in were that it would be much more formal, more pressure and much stricter. In reality it turns out our professors are kind, understanding, and just as curious and excited as we are, they’re just happy to help us grow in our knowledge and experience and push our interests even further.

My favorite part of the course was Glover’s reef, without a doubt. I think it’s really solidified for me that marine biology is what I want to continue to study, that I can thrive not just in a lab at my lab bench with pipettes, but also in the field. I know that I can handle unexpected circumstances, changing plans and uncertainty and not freak out.  I’m supposed to write about my least favorite parts of the course but I can only think of the van rides, not because they weren’t fun, just because I get carsick really easily. Honestly, I kind of miss the mosquitos and the bugs. I also learned that I can make new friends, even when it’s scary and it’s all people I’ve never met before. I always thought I was really shy and I was really scared of meeting new people, but even after a couple days I was ready to call everyone there with me a friend, and I hope that we will all continue to be friends even as we continue through undergrad or graduation, and I really hope to be able to work with everyone again in the future in some capacity or another.

Not to bash premeds, but this course has completely erased any doubts I had about changing paths. No matter how much work we were doing, how long the days were, how frustrating the waves, how seasick I was or how itchy I got, I was always happy. I was completely engaged and eager to learn. I really thought that medicine would be the only thing worth pursuing for me, and when I was forced to drop premed because it was making me miserable I was worried that nothing else would be as worthwhile or fulfilling. But I’m realizing there’s no point in having the most respected career or the most intense academics if you’re miserable the whole time and not even interested. I wanted to be a marine biologist in elementary and middle school, and even the first few years of high school, then I changed my mind to becoming a doctor, but that clearly didn’t last, I just don’t think I can stay away from the ocean and everything there is to learn and explore there.

EEBIO full steam ahead!!! This isn’t the last time you’ll see me on a reef, and hopefully someday I’ll be able to go all the way to the bottom of the ocean!

“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”

Dreams Coming True (14/06/22)

In 6 minutes we’re going to make lionfish ceviche. I have always wanted to eat a lionfish since I started working at the New England Aquarium and learned about them as an invasive species, I knew I had to do my part to help. Unfortunately (? maybe fortunate) they’re not found in New England, and I haven’t been desperate enough to go to Florida just to eat a lionfish. We caught our first lionfish a few days ago and it was huge, since then we caught about 2 more. I have no idea if I’ll like lionfish ceviche, since I’ve never had ceviche before.

In other things we did today, we went to a non-protected reef to finish our coral data collection, and then another reef just for fun. Did not encounter many crustaceans today other than the normal hermit crab population here.

I can’t believe it’s our last night here, I don’t think I’m ready to go, there’s still so much to learn and explore here on the reef and the island. I think it’ll be hard to adjust to the new environment but hopefully it’ll be just as much fun!

Drop off and Sea Sick (13/06/22)

Another early and eventful morning. After breakfast we went out on the boat to the fore reef, just outside the coral circle of the atoll. Once we got outside the reef the waters got choppy and I got seasick a little bit, I thought once I got in the water I would feel better but I still felt sick whenever I looked up out of the water. I was perfectly happy to just lie in the water and stare down below and get pushed around by the waves. Wherever we were was at least 60 feet deep I think, but it felt way deeper. One of our water safety officers free dove all the way almost to the bottom! I had no idea that was even possible for someone to do, but we looked down and he was just swimming along the bottom below us. We saw lots of fish, but a little too deep to get a good look, and even a sea turtle way below us. We swam over to the drop off, like in finding nemo, you suddenly can’t see the bottom of the water anymore and it just drops into deep blue and then black, maybe it only goes a little bit deeper, maybe it goes miles deep, you just can’t tell or see anything past the darkness. Weirdly instead of being scared I was just more curious then anything. My first lab research experience was with hydrothermal vents and those extremophilic organisms around them, so most of my first marine knowledge was of the deep sea instead of coral reefs. I would love to someday get SCUBA certified and dive right down to the bottom to just see what’s there past what I can see from the top. And someday I’m going to go in a submarine to the bottom of the ocean if I can, I want to see everything down there, it’ll be like stepping into a completely new world.

I got pretty seasick on the way back, luckily I kept my breakfast because it’s a shame to lose a good meal, and took a short nap on the dock to get my bearings. After lunch we put together a beach cleanup activity! We managed to collect about 64 kg of trash across the island and sort it out for disposal. Highlights include:

a complete fish skeleton (not trash, just cool).

A full tube of mascara

A tiny plastic sheep

A bottle of bright blue dye that turned everything else blue

A bottle of yellow smelly liquid (pee? I really hope not)

Several baby flip-flops (why do they need shoes, they can’t even walk)

A single Balenciaga slide

and lots and lots of plastic bottles.

There was plenty more trash but our bags were overflowing and we can only carry so much. It’s really sad how much there is on what’s supposed to be a conservation site, just washing up from other islands and everywhere else in the world the currents take it.

Before dinner Nate handed out some of the shells he collected to the local hermit crabs. One of them actually accepted it, and began to examine it closely, preparing for a move. We stood in a circle around it, completely frozen so we wouldn’t scare it and watched and cheered when it moved shells into a nice new shell that was a better shape and size.

The crab was treated to some coconut, because moving is stressful.

And the coconut was quickly swarmed by the other crabs, hopefully our friend got plenty to eat before it got crowded!

Lionfish: 4 TFBs: 1

Another early morning and right onto the boat! We went to two different marine protected areas. After laying out our transects and quadrats and collecting our data on live versus dead coral we did another sea urchin hunt. The first area I was only able to find one dead urchin skeleton, but as a class we got 52 sea urchins and a sea egg named Harry. The second site I had a little better luck, I managed to find one sea urchin, but with it was a bonus brittle star! I also found 2 crabs while searching for urchins but I couldn’t see any of them aside from colors before they scrambled away. Best guess is that they’re either green porcelain crabs, or emerald crab/green clinging crab. I didn’t see any lobsters, but Ruth, one of our water safety officers, found a ton and took some photos on my camera (her photography is miles better than mine!) that I’ll add here after I figure out how the camera works. We also caught another lionfish on this trip out, it’s in the freezer now waiting to be eaten. Everyone is saying we’re going to make ceviche at the end of the week with the fish, I’ve never had it before so hopefully it’s good!

Our post lecture snorkel took us to a reef just a little off of the island, this reef had lots of fish and even a stingray and reef squid! We also saw 4 lionfish around the reef but since they were small they were hard to catch and we didn’t manage to get any of them. Hopefully we’ll have better luck tomorrow. This reef was much more bleached and dead then the other patches we’ve visited, and there was a lot of algae on the sea floor decaying and suffocating the coral with their decomposition. Despite that the living parts of the reef were amazing and the fish were huge! I can’t wait for tomorrow, I’m really hoping conditions are good enough for us to visit the fore reef.

TFBs: 1 Lionfish: 0

My life goal has finally been achieved, but we’ll get to that soon.

This was a great morning for crustaceans. It was too windy to go out to the fore reef so we stayed closer to shore and went looking through the seagrass for organisms to bring back to the wet lab to examine. We found lots of algae, snails, and other organisms, but I don’t care about those, I’m here for the crustaceans. Can you spot how many crabs are in this bucket? I don’t actually remember how many we caught, but we got plenty of aquatic hermit crabs, a green clinging crab or emerald crab (Mithralculus sculptus) who was very well behaved and let me pick him up without pinching me.

We also found several brown crabs that I haven’t been able to identify yet, who were not as nice and tried to take a chunk out of my thumb when I went to move them 🙁

We also saw a spiny lobster! One of our water safety officers picked it up in the seagrass and plopped it into a bucket for us to examine.

It was pretty small for a lobster, but still big enough to be intimidating to those unfamiliar with lobsters.

We also found several mantis shrimp, which I had no idea were even in this area!

After an afternoon boat ride we went to a large reef patch and spotted a lionfish! It was the biggest lionfish I’ve ever seen and luckily this time our professor brought the lionfish spears and was able to impale it and bring it back onto the boat for us. It was almost perfect timing after my presentation yesterday about the lionfish invasion of these reefs and how my life goal was to eat one. It’s been years of me searching for a lionfish, and soon I will finally be able to eat one.

I will sleep soundly tonight with the promise of lionfish tomorrow.

Coral graveyard and crab shenanigans (09/06/22)

Hi y’all, it’s Liliana again.

I am completely exhausted right now so lets hope that I can write something coherent. We started early again at 6:30, and I hate to say it but waking up that early is becoming more normal. We practiced using our transects and quadrants on land before we formed our research question and went out on the water. This time we stuck to the sea grass and swam through it looking for a specific green algae, penicillus. Each group of two with a total of seven groups swam at least 100 feet out, looking to see how many we could find in a 2×4 area every 10 feet, in the end despite all the ground covered we did not find that many. My group only found two, but we found some other exciting stuff instead like an upside down jelly! And more relevant to my taxon we found a crab next to the upside down jelly, but it was very dead and I didn’t want to get close enough to the jelly to see what the crab was. We wrote our findings and made a group poster and presentation about our mini experiment.

After lunch we went to the coral graveyard, which is great for identifying coral species since you can get a really close look at all the parts and how it looks underneath the living tissue.

After that I got to present my lecture on lionfish/invasive reef species, and my years long mission to eat a lionfish, and I hope that this trip will finally be my chance, since there are many lionfish on this reef that need to be removed.  Today was interesting in terms of crab behavior.

On my way to the bathroom I spotted this hermit crab dragging a small lizard across the ground into a hole.

We also discovered that the hermit crabs like coconut, they’ve been swarming the area where the children were cracking and eating coconuts.

Anyways, it’s time for me to go to sleep, I am exhausted and need all my rest before tomorrow.

Crab: 1 Liliana: 0

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!

There are Crabs Everywhere (08/06/22)

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.

It’s Almost Time!

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!

Holy Smokes! (A look back at the past two weeks)

In both the rainforest and the reef we observed great amounts of biodiversity. Both these places are located in the tropics which receive more direct sunlight than more northern ecosystems. Having lots of available sunlight allows for more plants and therefore there is more energy available to species that eat plants which could be why we saw so many different levels of herbivores and carnivores. Wow, that’s some science right there.

In both places, trees formed a vital part of the ecosystems (canopy and mangroves) and in both species have developed adaptions to compete and live in close quarters. In both areas we also found endangered species and invasive species, which though the causes for each habitat being endangered differ, both stem back to humans (sigh).

I expected more structure to our research, but was pleasantly surprised when we were allowed to pursue topics that interested us.  My favorite parts of the course were mostly in the rainforest- finding tarantulas at night, going into the cave, and getting to see all sort of different beetles, butterflies, and other things we don’t see around Houston. I found on this trip that I do not enjoy underwater research, in particular counting strands of seagrass was a low point, but it was still a good chance to learn what marine biologists do.

The most poignant moment for me on this trip was the trash collection activity on the last day- I was blown away by how much we collected and how much remained.  Also in preparing for my presentation, I learned about seagrass and mangroves and how they are actually vital for reefs and land ecosystems. I also went into the trip with a generally negative opinion of ants, but Scott’s passion and fun facts converted me to the cult of the ant. In particular I thought the leaf cutter ants were cool as they have super complex social structures, architecture, and they have little ant highway which somehow manage to be less chaotic than Houston’s own during rush hour.

Species seen:

Amphibians:

Morelet’s Tree Frog, Mexican Tree Frog, Broad Headed Rain Frog, Campbell’s Rainforest Toad, Gulf Coast Toad

Crustaceans:

Orange-tipped hermit crab, green climbing gall crab, giant hermit crab, furcate spider crab, spiny lobster, miscellaneous shrimp, blue land crab, blue land hermit crab