Hi friends,

Today was my first day snorkeling and it was quite an experience. My only snorkeling experience before this was in the Rice Recreation Center swimming pool and that is definitely not even close to what we went through today.

Before analyzing my snorkeling experience, I will go through chronologically the events that led up to it. I woke up at 5am (!), and we had a quick PB&J breakfast before heading to the dock to take a boat to Glover’s Reef. From the dock, the journey to Glover’s Reef took about 2.5 hours. While it was long, it was fascinating to see some of the things that I have been learning so much about, such as the reef crest and atoll formation. It was obvious when we were entered the lagoon of Glover’s Atoll, as the water became really shallow and the captain of the ship had to navigate carefully to avoid hitting reefs or accidentally running the boat ashore.

After some careful navigation in the lagoon, we reached Middle Caye, which is where the Glover’s Atoll research station is located. Middle Caye is a quaint little island with a very rustic feel to it. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of self-sustainability the island community had integrated into their daily lives, with a wind turbine and a solar panel array to generate electricity, recycling toilets named Clivus, and desalination facilities as a few examples of this.

Walking around the island, I was reminded of a video game that I used to play back before college, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, which is an action game set back during the Golden Age of Piracy. A huge part of the game was spent exploring atoll islands such as this, hunting iguanas and finding dead pirate skeletons on lush tropical sandy beaches, so strolling around the island definitely took me back a little bit to my younger days.

Pardon me for digressing! And let me continue with the rest of the day. After settling in on the island, we finally got to snorkel! Getting into the ocean waters was reprieve from the sweltering weather, and we edged our way out into the open ocean, swimming to the closest patch reef that we could find. And having not seen coral reef systems in person before, I have to say, IT WAS BEAUTIFUL!!! The ecosystem is so vibrant as expected, and while floating on the surface I stared in awe at the creatures just minding their own business and milling in and out of the crevices created by the corals. I saw fishes that I couldn’t name (though I found out thereafter that I had at least seen parrotfishes and surgeonfishes), I saw a spiny lobster which was part of my partner’s taxon group, so that was great! I saw many corals of different sizes, which I would get to know in much more detail in the afternoon courtesy of Adrienne’s passionate tour of Middle Caye’s coral graveyard. After the snorkel trip, I was handed a shell from Adrienne, which I believe is a triton and belongs to my taxonomic group.

Looking back, while the coral reefs were really fascinating to explore, it would have been much better if I knew what I was doing. Then again, it comes with experience and I am looking forward to the next few days with renewed hope. I’ll let y’all know how it goes in the next few days.

Till then,

Damien the land animal