May 23, 2019

I am currently writing this blog with a small but distinct yellow dot in my vision. This is because I’ve been staring at the light in our cabin for a while, out of necessity of course.

About thirty minutes ago, Kelsey pointed at our light and asked what all the little bugs around it were (there were a lot). We suspected they were sandflies, so Anna, the bravest of us, stepped on a table and used Kaela’s notebook to swat as many as she could. It was confirmed that they were sandflies when Kaela’s notebook revealed about a hundred small smears of blood. I followed Anna’s swatting with lots of clapping around the light to attempt to get the sandflies that weren’t collected on the ceiling. What a day.

Earlier today, we did an experiment involving seagrass and algae competition. It soon became clear that any reef experiment requires strong communication between researchers, so Liz (my buddy) and I developed an underwater language in which the letter “a” in sign language meant algae and using both hands to form the written letter “s” meant seagrass.

No hydrozoa, schyphozoa, cubozoa, or ctenophores spotted today because much of our time in the water was spent collecting data in the seagrass. Hopefully, I’ll spot some tomorrow.