Our morning activity today was sobering. Our task was to design an experiment that would answer some question about marine debris. We chose to analyze the composition of the trash washed ashore on the windward side of this island, Middle Caye. Simply, we would collect refuse and sort it to find out the percent by weight of each kind of material (plastic, foam, etc). What lay before us was hundreds and thousands of scraps littering the pristine rocky beach. We only searched for one hour, but we accumulate, as a group of fourteen, more than ninety pounds of debris. The majority of the volume was styrofoam and hard plastic, with total plastic weighing more than double the total styrofoam (naturally). We learned from the staff here that this type of cleanup is a weekly occurrence, which made out efforts seem like casually shoveling your driveway in the middle of a blizzard. Sobering.
Among the styrofoam debris, some of my classmates collected some spongy objects that actually tuned out to be the siliceous skeletons of actual sea sponges! PSA: Dead sponges do not float, or at least the two or three we collected alongside the garbage.
The afternoon passed quickly with another quadrat survey of coral cover. After dinner we heard a bad-ass lecture from the fisheries managers who regaled us with the ins and outs of their job including threats from fisherman, bribes, and what seemed like the closest things to espionage in the conservation business.
After that we did a night snorkel which represented the first time I’d ever been in the ocean after sundown. I has always heard this was primetime for shark activity, although we didn’t see any near the patch reef we visited. On the list of things we spotted at night were: a cute little slipper lobster, a yellow stingray, many sea cucumbers, a nassau grouper, and corals with their tentacles extended! I expected to be terrified by the abyssal darkness, but instead I was intrigued by what I was seeing and surprised by the variety of nocturnal sea creatures. Just like the night hike at Las Cuevas, the night snorkel at Glover’s taught me to appreciate the daily cycles of activity in any ecosystem.
