Hi everyone! It’s day 3 on the reef and I hope you can sea it was a good one : ) We started our first project today using a technique called “fish follow.” This is essentially when someone follows around a fish for a given amount of time (5 minutes for us) and observes its behavior. We decided to use this technique to determine what different species of parrotfish are eating on the reef. My snorkel buddy Ian and I decided to follow striped parrotfish. Other groups observed redtail, redband, and stoplight parrotfish. We swam out to the patch reefs near the station in the morning to sample for 45 minutes.

While snorkeling, Ian spotted something remarkable hiding in the coral — a white-spotted toadfish! These fish are super cool because they can produce calls that sound like a hum that can be heard even from out of the water. I would encourage you to go look up what they look like at this time if you haven’t already. They are very hard to spot (it took me three duck dives to see what Ian was pointing at).

After lunch (pizza!) and a brief nap in a hammock, we headed out for two more snorkels in the boat. While snorkeling, we found the angelfish trifecta — 2 queen angelfish, 3 gray angelfish (2 feet long), and 1 gray angelfish (2-2.5 feet long). It was amazing to see! I look forward to seeing what else we can find as we explore the mangroves tomorrow. That’s all for now! – Elise

Please note that from now on, I will be using some of my classmates images (like the one above) for this blog. The GoPro has still not woken up : (