In the so-called Mangroves of Death, I wasn’t attacked by a single mosquito! What a disappointment. I took two trips through the mangroves today; first we hiked through to count Christmas tree worm populations on different species of coral on the back reef. Ellie and I found zero on our section of the reef, as did most of the other groups, so we couldn’t really draw conclusions about Christmas tree worm host preference.

However, we did find a huge donkey dung (sea cucumber).

Then a small group of us did a trash pickup in the mangroves… even after 30 minutes of 4 of us working we barely made a dent in the amount of trash in one small area. 🙁 The totals that the class picked up around the island turned out to be 2460 pieces (18.46 kg) of plastic, 488 pieces (3.98 kg) of foam, 36 pieces (5.80 kg) of glass, and a few more kilograms of rubber, fabric, metal and wood. It was really impactful to actually go out and try to clean up all the litter on this environmentally protected island– imagine the total amount of trash in the oceans if 11 of us were able to pick up 25+ kg within 30 minutes on Glover’s. And it shows how much sanitation depends on a country’s wealth and infrastructure, because clearly Americans produce much more trash per person than the inhabitants of Glover’s.  It makes me wonder where all of our trash goes in the US?

After dinner, We had several hours of free time (whaaat) and played beach volleyball, caught up on journals and blogs, and at around 8, we hung lights off the dock into the water to watch the ocean nightlife. It was the most relaxed night I’ve had in a long time, watching the glow of the light through the water and swarms of silver fish, while being cooled off by the strong breeze.

As for my brown and red algae, I unfortunately didn’t notice any in the back reef as I was too focused on not bashing against the corals; sorry corals!!