Hi friends,

Wow, and one week has past. It’s a weird feeling of sadness knowing that I’ll leave this place at the same time I’m pretty excited to be checking out the rainforest. What to feel?

We started the day checking out three different reef types: one on the channel, one called The Aquarium and a deep patch reef off Middle Caye. I was expecting The Aquarium to be the prettiest one with the most organism variety but apparently not. The channel reef was the one that impressed me the most, with magnificent stacked coral reefs that looked like mountains underwater. It was fun swimming around and through it observing all the organisms in their natural habitat. I finally got to see a full nurse shark and followed it for a little bit. It exuded silent charisma as it swam about slowly and menacingly. I followed a school of blue tang around for a bit and that was fun too, picking out the non-blue tang species swimming with them.

In The Aquarium, I was slightly disappointed as the standard was set too high from the first reef. I guess the lack of species variety was due to the shallowness of the area, which prevented the corals from forming intricate structures where species can live in. It was still cool finding new organisms around, and there were many more of my taxon species there compared to the channel reef. I saw a lot more Christmas Tree Worms (Spirobranchus giganteus) and some hugeee Magnificent Feather Dusters (Sabellastarte magnifica). And apparently another nurse shark was hanging out around sipping tea but I wasn’t there to see it.

In the last deep patch reef, there were only a few patches, but there were similar to the channel reef in that they were very tall and the corals were all big. There was one particularly big one which looked like a comfortable bean bag which everyone took turns taking pictures with.

After lunch, we did presentations and then dissected the Lionfish. It smelled like a fish market for a little bit and I gutted fish for the first time which was fun. We rushed through making the poster to report our findings on the Lionfish measurements as we really wanted to visit a neighboring island, which was the reward for finishing the poster quickly. Eventually we did visit the other island which was a chill time and we relaxed for the rest of the afternoon and enjoyed the last day here. I’m gonna miss the quaint little village which has been my home for the past few days, the relaxed vibes of sun, beach and snorkeling, and last but not least, Clivus. It’s been an unforgettable time for sure. Here I come, Las Cuevas!

Till then,

Damien