Today we had a scavenger hunt on the reef. So I saw all of the corals I saw yesterday but today had some new surprises. I saw a few parrotfish. I only recognized the initial stage of the spotlight parrotfish and then I saw a parrotfish in the terminal phase but I was so excited I forget to actually look at its distinctive markings.

Quick side note. At lunch today we had a vanilla cake for desert and I kid you not that it was the fluffiest, softest, most wonderful cake I have ever eaten. Okay, moving on. We designed a study and went out to the seagrass beds. We quickly realized how difficult it was to lay down a transect and quadrats in six feet of water and count halimeda and penicillus green algae. This required multiple dives down the bottom, which was difficult not because I ran out of breath, but because I kept floating back up.

After that we went to a coral skeleton graveyard. I finally learned how to distinguish the skeletons of Pseudiploria strigosa, P. clivosa, and P. labrynthiformis apart. We also saw huge Acropora palmata branch shards, which made me a little sad. Back in the heyday of the Caribbean, before the Acropora genus was largely wiped out by disease in the 1980s, these corals formed forest-like structures throughout the reef. I cant help but think how amazing that must have been. We also saw a piece of Pillar Coral, a coral I didn’t think we would see because my sources said it was rare to occasional with few concentrated areas. But apparently it is here!