Tag Archives: lionfish

2022

D-8 traveling to las Cuevas research station

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Hi everyone!

Today has been a super long day! We woke up at our normal time (7 am breakfast) and ever since then we did not stop. After eating breakfast we all hurried to the boat, which we rode to Belize City. It took about 4 hours. Although it was a long ride, I can’t complain, the views were gorgeous! Also, thankfully most of us took Dramamine to avoid any chance of seasickness and it appears to have worked, as no one experienced nausea this time around! In fact, most of our crew was able to sleep throughout most of the ride!

After getting back to Belize City we ate at Calypso, a restaurant near where we were dropped off. The food was quite good, I got the pasta primavera! One interesting thing about the pasta was that it had a lot of pickles, something I hadn’t seen before in a pasta primavera; typically I’m not a fan of pickles, yet I think it made the pasta more flavorful!

Also, I thought for the remainder of this trip I would no longer see mention of my aquatic taxa, piscivorous fish, yet it seems like mentions of the lion fish continue haunting me.

After eating at calypso we quickly headed out to get to the Tropical Education Center, where we are spending the night. Yet, before getting to the TEC we made a stop a local store to get supplies for our time in the rainforest! Personally, the only thing I needed was bug spray, yet how could I say no to cookies, so I got some of those as well!

After our stop we then made it to the TEC where Dr. Aravalo talked to us about the Scarlet Macaw. The manner in which he presented his data made me very emotional for some reason. I was hoping to ask more questions, yet today we were on a roll and we could not prolong our Q&A for too long. After our talk with Dr. Aravalo we got dinner, out of which my favorite was the cake! After dinner we headed straight to the Zoo, which was a quick drive from the TEC. At the Zoo we got to see many of the nocturnal animals in the exhibit including the Jaguar and the Tapir and even a four-eyed possum (which was not a part of the exhibit).

I almost forgot to mention that earlier in the day, when we arrived at the TEC I saw really beautiful flowering plants, yet no bees nearby to indicate bee pollination.

At night while writing my blog I was a little sad I had not gotten to see bees today, yet things often occur when you least expect it! Tonight while showering I actually got to see my taxa. It wasn’t near any plants it was hovering over the light of my shower stall! Although it was too far up to get a good look I believe it was a Concave Nose Striped Sweat Bee.

2022

Today we ate a Snack, Appetizer, and Main Course!!! (Day 7)

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Hi all, it’s Faith with Day 7 updates from the 2022 Belize trip!!!

Today we woke up and gathered our last non-mpa reef data. The waves were brutal; McKenna described them as, “being thrown in a washing machine.” The reef was about 5 feet deep, and it was mostly sand. The winds made this data collection positively  horrendous! It was really hard to keep our quadrats in place, and the transect tape kept coming undone. I EVEN GOT FIRE CORALED (or “fire hydroided” since fire corals are actually hydroids). Nevertheless, we powered through.

The urchin collecting went surprisingly well. Today we collected 177 E. viridis (Reef boring urchins). per usual, we found them burrowed in tight niches of branched hard corals and under rocks. We found some exceptionally large ones today being 1.25 inches + !!! Even though there are always urchins we can’t grab, I usually notice more species variation on the reef. However, this patch reef only had E. viridis; there were no pencil slate urchins or boring urchins in sight!

Outside of the urchin hunt, we didn’t find any other echinoderms. I’ve really enjoyed being the urchin- identifier on the urchin counting team for the past few days. I realize I haven’t described it much, but that is because we usually only find Reef urchins and the occasional sea egg. Today, however, I got to throw the urchins back into the sea. They look like little soot sprites as they float to the bottom.

After the data dive, we went on a recreational snorkel. I was also fire coraled here, but I’ll forgive it. This reef had significantly less urchins than the non-mpa reef we had snorkeled earlier. The ones I saw were E. viridis and they were burrowed in coral crevices. Even though we didn’t do a formal collection, the reef had a visibly lower urchin count.

This reef also surprised us with 2 Caribbean reef squid (the only squid in the Caribbean), 2 spiny lobster, and a lionfish! (I found the lionfish btw)

Back on land, Caio showed me how to catch lizards so that I would be prepared for seeing them in Las Cuevas. (I think he likes me more now that he knows I’m the reptile taxon). According to the Caio technique, you have to cup the lizard with your hands when they can’t see you. Then, you let the front legs perch on two fingers while you press (lightly) on their torso with your thumb. I put a picture of me holding one below! The lizards we caught we brown anoles (A. sangrei), and they were climbing the trees behind the kitchen.

Later in the day, we analyzed our data about corals and urchins, answering the question, “how does the sea urchin population correlate with the live coral count, and how does this change across mpa and non-mpa reefs?” Our data was mostly inconclusive because of our improved ability to find sea urchins and environmental factors.

Last but not least, we dissected the 3 lionfish we hunted! Liliana got to dissect the big one; meanwhile, Maegan, Michiel, Ava, and I dissected “Snack,” the small 23.6g immature female. We didn’t get much data besides that, but she did eat a tiny fish in her limited years. Snack, Appetizer, and MC (main course) made a great ceviche. Also MC was a giant lionfish weighting 680g!

Anyways I’m about to enjoy some ceviche, till tomorrow!

QOTD: “Surchin af”

“BRB I’m gonna go rub this book on my head”

E. Viridis from urchin hunting!
Ceviche Prep!!!
Dissecting Snack, the small lionfish
Me holding an Anolis sangrei, brown anole
Caribbean Reef squid I found
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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!

2022

Dreams Coming True (14/06/22)

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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!

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Lionfish: 4 TFBs: 1

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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.

2022

i thought the urchin was my friend…but it was anemone

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Unfortunately, the day did not begin with urchins, but they will enter the scene soon, don’t worry!

We started off the morning by planning out another experiment. We knew we were going to be visiting preserved reef patches and non-preserved reef patches and collecting some sort of data with the quadrats, and that we would be doing urchin scavenger hunts. From there, we developed a research question that we could answer by gathering this data. We decided to investigate the correlation between live coral coverage and urchin prevalence, and how the amount of each changed between protected areas and non protected areas. We did not finish collecting data, so stay tuned!

Before we went out to the reefs, we waded in the sea grass bed and collected specimens to look at more closely in the outdoor lab. Some notable finds include a Caribbean spiny lobster, mantis shrimp, damsel fish, several varieties of crabs, lime urchin, anemone, corallimorph, conchs, and our favorite-brown algae! We found some sargassum natans, and some of the saucer leaf algae!

Afterwards, we went to the reef patches. We went to the non-protected area first to collect our data. It was difficult conditions, since the waves were strong and it was hard to stay in place. The urchin hunt was also difficult, since they like to hide in little burrows, so one could not easily get them out without harming them. We then went to the protected reef to snorkel for fun.  Entering the protected area, I felt like I had died and gone to brown algae heaven (although maybe that wasn’t a great sign for the corals). There was saucer leaf algae, white scroll algae, and sargassum everywhere! They were intermixed with another type of algae, although I couldn’t identify it. The algae was growing all over the old, dead corals so densely I couldn’t even see the sand. Exciting stuff!

We also found a damsel fish garden, which was super cool. The damsel fish have little gardens where they cultivate their favorite algae, and protect it from other fish. And finally, the group spotted a lionfish, which was promptly speared (lionfish are invasive, and their capture is actually encouraged!) and brought aboard so we can use it for activities later this week.

When we got back, we counted, IDed, and measured the diameter of the urchins we collected, and then settled in for the night! Tomorrow, we are going to be collecting more data for our research, and maybe we’ll even have an answer. See you all then!

-Elena

some of the algal friends we collected
a slate pencil urchin
the damsel fish garden ft. the gardener itself
saucer-leaf algae and the unknown algae
free the homie
…but like don’t cuz they’re invasive 🙁
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Collecting Specimens: Lionfish Spearing

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Today we spent our morning collecting specimens in the shallows near the island and identifying them in our wet lab before releasing them! We were able to collect a surprising amount of organisms, including lots of green algae, a few crabs, a spiny lobster, and some mantis shrimp!

We were also able to generate a new research question and go farther out from shore to see some more patch reefs within the atoll and collect data to answer our question. We are interested in how sea urchin abundance correlates with the percentage of coral cover that is dead, and how this relationship might be different in areas of the reef that are protected and other unregulated areas. Data collection today was very challenging due to strong current and some equipment malfunctions, but we made it work! We should be working on this project for a few days so hopefully we will have better luck tomorrow!

We also visited patch reef that is a marine protected area (MPA) which was much deeper and more complex than we have seen so far! Although I didn’t spot any more jellyfish today, I saw so many magnificent coral structures and colorful fish. I saw an entire school of what might be blue tangs pass by, and some truly massive Orbicella corals. We even spotted a lionfish, which is a very venomous, very invasive species which Dr. Solomon was able to spear and catch for us to eat tomorrow! It was so exciting to watch!

2022

Day 4: Patch Reef Health + Sea Urchins

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Our class traveled on boat to perform some examinations of the patch reefs on Glover’s Atoll today! Using our transect tapes and quadrates again, our class decided toe analyze the relationship between the density of sea urchins and percentage of live and dead coral on both marine protected reefs as well as unprotected reefs. We discovered that although our methodology seemed sound that with the shallow waters, strong ocean currents, and the presence of millepora alcicornis or Branching Fire Coral that was present on both reefs. Jasmine got stung by this hydrozoan unfortunately :(, but the stings will go away with hydrocortisone! We did discover that the marine protected reefs were deeper and had healthier and more abundant corals and fish!

In the marine protected area I saw many solitary Christmas Tree worms of all colors!Right next to it is some Magnificent Feather Duster worms!

I also got to see my first split crown feather duster! You can tell by the how the radiole splits perfectly in half mirroring itself.

I believe I also got to see my first Christmas Tree Hydroid which was very exciting!

I even saw three lobsters with Faith all lined up in a row! Incredible!Right after I saw my biology professor, Dr. Solomon, spear a lionfish which is an invasive and harmful, yet delicious, species to the Caribbean. Lillian was very excited! 😀

Earlier in the day we collected all sorts of sea creatures for examination in the wet lab room. There was: green algae species, brown algae species, glass shrimp, conch species, anemones, mantis shrimp, several crab species, sea urchin (Caio picked it up with a net), and even a lobster!

I can’t wait to go to see more on the outer reefs tomorrow! Peace out!

~ Maegan

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So Many Fish!

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Hey guys! It’s Michiel again; I’m sure you all missed me : )

This morning started the same as every other morning here. I woke up, got ready, and joined the others for breakfast in the dining hall by 7. After breakfast, everyone in the class put on their snorkeling gear and went out into a new area of the water that’s behind the dining hall. It was full of sea grass and very shallow, but our goal was to find as many interesting species as we could and put them in a bucket. Some notable finds were a lobster, Diadema antillarum (a sea urchin with an interesting history), a sea anemone, and several crabs. In regards to herbivorous fish, though, we caught a Cocoa Damselfish (Stegastes variabilis), and a Bicolor Damselfish (Stegastes partitus). These fish are actually very territorial, so we saw them chasing and trying to bite one another in the bag. Once we laid out all of the species we caught in the wet lab, every person presented on the species caught within their taxa. We passed around lots of algae and talked a lot about different corals; it was so much fun!

After this, we took a break for lunch before going out on a boat in our snorkeling gear to work on a new research question we had come up with earlier in the day. We are trying to identify the correlation between sea urchin prevalence in a reef and the percentage of dead coral in the reef, and we want to see how this changes between Marine Protected Areas and other areas. We went to a reef that wasn’t in an MPA and tried to measure the percentage of dead coral in the area we were looking at using transects and quadrats. However, the waves were really strong and the reef was shallow, so Ava and I kept getting pushed into coral. After collecting this set of data, everyone collected sea urchins for 10 minutes, and we actually found 18 of them!

With our urchins and data collected, we left this reef and went to a new reef that was in an MPA. However, since the wave conditions were so harsh, we just snorkeled instead of collecting data. This reef was really nice. It had a bunch of fish diversity. I had a lot of people coming up to me asking about fish they saw (they mostly saw Yellowtail Damselfish and Blue Tangs). Unfortunately, I saw neither of these, but I did see a Blue Chromis (Chromis cyanea), which is beautiful, and some Threespot Damselfish (Stegastes planifrons). These kept staying very close to the coral, hiding in the crevices as I approached. They tend to do this because they’re pretty small, so they’re great prey for larger fish and are therefore more likely to hide when approached by something larger than them. We also saw a huge lionfish that Scott speared and took with us back to the island! Hopefully we will be feasting on lionfish ceviche tomorrow.

That was most of my day! We had some presentations in the evening that were very interesting (as always), but now it’s time to rest in preparation for tomorrow. Have a great night, guys! (Also here are my very feeble attempts at taking pictures of some of these fish).

Sergeant Major
Cocoa Damselfish
Blue Chromis