Today I finally found the Sargassum brown algae. There weren’t whole lot and were free floating on the surface so it could have just been from somewhere else but I was excited to see it. It looked just as I imagined. The dive today was awesome as well. We finally got off the nearby patchy reef but to other area with large reef area. I could see even more kinds of fish, mollusks, and urchins, which we had to catch for our project. I used to only know urchins as orange flesh you eat with Korean hot sauce or a spiky chestnut in the ocean floor. But such beauty they are and how weird they feel when they try to crawl around on my palm. Thinking that their spines are all like legs and means of defense, these urchins are pretty cool animals.

The coral reef is an amazing ecosystem. Diving through the canopy of different hues of brown and yellow, it is as if I am swimming through Cambrian ocean. Yet I am more amazed by the terrestrial ecosystem these atolls can sustain. These island are not at all big but are full of life and are green as much as the rainforest. It is as if an intricate system inside glass ball of emerald blue. I have read that people like Mayans in the Glover’s and Polynesians in the Pacific have colonized the atolls and lived. Population was a huge factor to the sustainability of these islands that some have fell under population that exceeded the limit. I take these historical stories as the allegory of our planet. What will happen when the glass orb break?