Hi everyone! Today, I checked “swim with sharks” off my bucket list! We started the day with a morning snorkel out to a patch reef to test our gear and make sure that we remembered how to swim (all good there) and ended with a snorkel at a large reef called “the aquarium” to observe our taxon group. 

I was incredibly excited to get in the water after seeing so many species just from the dock yesterday. While snorkeling, we saw (get ready, this is a long list) a lemon shark, two nurse sharks, 4 species of angelfish (gray, french, flameback, and rock beauty), sea cucumbers, a porcupine pufferfish, 2 manta rays, 1 stingray, 2 rainbow parrotfish, many large groupers, a large predatory jack, and almost every species of coral that you could think of.

It was especially cool to see the angelfish species in the wild after reading so much about them. I thought that the flameback angelfish in particular were very interesting, and I even observed one digging in the sand with its caudal (tail) fin.

I am very excited to see what we find tomorrow out on the reef. I’ll keep you posted with more fin-tastic updates! That’s all for now! – Elise

I’m very sorry to have not gotten a picture of the fish I saw today! My GoPro was not turning on : (