Another day, another adventure. Right after breakfast, we counted our sea urchins from yesterday and then hit the water once again. We released our urchins from yesterday and then motored over to another patch reef, this time one in an unprotected marine area. We performed more transect surveys here in the same fashion as yesterday, collected more urchins, and came back to analyze all of our data from the past two days after lunch. This took us three hours, but we received good reviews on our work. We found a lot more urchins in the protected reef.

On the reef, I only spotted more Parazoanthus parasiticus zoanthids on the same vase sponge species, but didn’t manage to spot any other members of my taxon group in the water today. I did, however, see tons of flamingo tongues, which provide a stark color contrast with their environments and have beautiful colors (pictures to come later when we return to strong wifi). Our group also saw a nurse shark lounging under a rock. To cap off a nice day in the water, I handled a Diadema sea urchin a bit recklessly and currently have two tiny spine fragments in my right hand to show for it. The joys of the sea are endless.

After wrapping up our research for the day, we had an hour of free time. Damian, Deepu, Alessi, Therese and I got a game of beach soccer going with a couple of the guys working on Middle Caye right now, which was a ton of fun and left me so sweaty that I probably looked like I had just come out of the ocean. There’s nothing like a small-sided pickup soccer game to get me going, though. I also spoke a bit of creole with some of the people here, as the Belizean dialect is very similar to the Jamaican dialect that I speak. All in all, today was a great day for research and personal enjoyment.