(EDIT:REVISED AGAIN, it’s back up and running)(EDIT as I’m in the process of writing this, the power tripped again and so we don’t have lights or fans right now either 😢)
As my title punn-ily states, today was a mixed bag. No pictures on this blog post because my camera took on water and killed the screen, and I’ve yet to see if any of my pictures from the past 4 days can be recovered from the SD card. And I had some really good pictures on there too 🙁
We were supposed to go to the fore reef this morning, but it was too windy to go out there safely, so that got postponed to another day (tbd, hopefully tomorrow morning). Our night snorkel has also been delayed because of it. The wind, despite its faults though, has made sleeping in the AC-less bunks so much more tolerable, because, you know, airflow! (I’m much too spoiled to air conditioning, I’m realizing). But today really was a beautiful day, perfect weather, and the water was stunning teal!
Our first activity was a brainstorming session to come up with our next experimental design proposal. After that we ventured out for an hour of specimen collection in the shallows behind the kitchen. We found some really cool little creatures, including a mantis shrimp (which, did you know, has 16 cones in its eyes, meaning it can probably see things and colors that we can’t even imagine), some crabs, some urchins, and in my taxon, a few queen conchs and a milk conch (which was a first for me so far!). Here’s the mixed bag part: awesome creatures, but the water smelled like poop. Straight fish manure.🤢 I was so happy to get rinsed off once we got back.
The second part of the day is where the interesting snorkeling takes place! We took a boat off of the Marine Protected Area to the West reef to execute the first part of our experimental design, data collection with transects on the reef, which was certainly interesting. We were trying to answer the question of what is the correlation of sea urchin presence and percentage of live and dead coral, and how does that change between the MPA and non-protected areas.
We don’t have a conclusion yet, but we did do the first part of data collection there. That non-MPA section was honestly really sad, with rampant disease, lots of coral rubble, and shallow waters, and my partner and I had to omit 2 of our planned measurement sites due to 1. Being unable to take the measures without brushing against fire coral, which I accidentally touched with my thigh, and 2. Our quadrat is completely broken . We also collected some sea urchins to measure and speciate them once we got back.
We then went onwards to a MPA reef, which was so much deeper and nice and much more alive. Scott speared one of the invasive lion fish. This part of the trip was amazing! I got to dive some in the beautiful water!
See what I mean by mixed bag? That describes today well. Of course, we still had our daily lectures to expect, which I made it through tho!