After spending the past few days mostly in the ocean, it was nice to spend today doing some non-snorkeling activities.  We waded in the shallow parts around the dock, just trying to catch anything and everything we could. Our coolest and scariest find was definitely a box jellyfish, which has one of the worst stings. Somehow, no one got stung, and Elise caught it! It’s crazy how something so unassuming can be so powerful. 

We also walked to the coral graveyard. The whole island is covered in fossilized corals, but this part is a particularly large mound of them that has built up over a long period of time. These calcium carbonate fossils are still in very distinct shapes, so you can kind of tell what species they are. I saw elkhorn, staghorn, finger coral, lots of brain corals, maze coral, mound corals, and others that I couldn’t even identify. Hard corals secrete calcium carbonate to make a skeleton, which builds the coral reefs. This process has been happening for billions of years, and when they day, they become fossilized and eventually get compressed into limestone, which we see as the predominant bedrock of many areas in the Belize forests. It’s this limestone that led to the formation of the giant cave structures that we explored. The geological time is incomprehensible to me, and it’s amazing how it is all connected.

At night, we all went to the dock and shined light into the ocean to watch sea creatures. We found a really cool squid, which we caught, watched ink, and messed with it to see it change colors. This was so fun, but I wish it had jumped out at us, which is apparently one of their defensive mechanisms.