Today was the itchiest day of my life. I have never been so covered in bug bites, so I am ready to leave this island. Today we collected trash in different areas of the island and analyzed its composition which was mostly plastic and Styrofoam.
In the afternoon, we dissected a lionfish and it was used to make ceviche. I normally don’t like seafood, but I thought it was pretty good because it didn’t taste like fish.
The small fish was found inside the stomach of Liz and Cassia’s lionfish.
I didn’t see any sea anemones, zoanthids, or corallimorphs because we didn’t spend any time in the water today.
Today, we returned to the two patch reefs we went to for our previous research project, one inside the marine protected area and one outside. In both patches, we collected sea urchins for thirty minutes and then measured their size to compare the sea urchin community structure between the reefs. We ended up collecting Long-spined, Reef, West Indian Sea Egg, and Red Heart sea urchins.
Bucket of sea urchins
In the evening we went on a night snorkel. We got lost and swam around the sea grass a while because we couldn’t find the patch reef. By the time we found it I was pretty tired. I did see a Spotted Eagle Ray swim right by me which was amazing.
I saw more Giant Sea Anemones (Condylactis Gigantea) today which I am finding to be the most common anemone in these patch reefs. Some of the time they have had green tips and other times light pink tips. There is a lot of color variation in many anemones, corallimorphs, and zoanthids. Bella saw a Mat Zoanthid (Palythoa caribaeorum) on some coral which has green tones and forms polygons when packed tightly in colonies.
