The last night of our trip came too quickly. This atoll we came to so many days ago still doesn’t feel like a real place to me. It’s like this has all been a never-ending movie. Despite that it will end tomorrow. We will pull into Rice tomorrow night and it will all be over.

Enough sentimentality though, let me recap the day. Morning was spent returning to a very special spot on the back reef to collect specimens for a final display of marine organisms. Algae, crustaceans, and even box jellies were all represented in this summary of our taxa. I found a sponge in this area of the reef but was unable to identify it. It was soft, green, and encrusting but it didn’t look like any of the sponges from the Glover’s ID guide.

After the last of the lecture topics, we analyzed the data collected yesterday on percent cover of live coral on colonies measured last year in order to basically start a longitudinal study. This would be a great opportunity to look at coral colonies over the years and how they change in shape and size.

The afternoon was spent dissecting lionfish we had caught this week at the various sites we visited on the reef. Sam and I had the littlest guy, which was too immature to determine its sex. But we did open up its stomach and reveal a gross fish mush. I don’t know. It was gross but in the end we got to use the filets to make ceviche so it was all worth it.

I’m trying to make the most of these last dozen or so hours here at Glover’s. I think exploring the island a little more is in order. Sleep will certainly not come easily tonight despite the work we’ve been putting in all day. I can’t let this experience slip by too quickly.

Our morning activity today was sobering. Our task was to design an experiment that would answer some question about marine debris. We chose to analyze the composition of the trash washed ashore on  the windward side of this island, Middle Caye. Simply, we would collect refuse and sort it to find out the percent by weight of each kind of material (plastic, foam, etc). What lay before us was hundreds and thousands of scraps littering the pristine rocky beach. We only searched for one hour, but we accumulate, as a group of fourteen, more than ninety pounds of debris. The majority of the volume was styrofoam and hard plastic, with total plastic weighing more than double the total styrofoam (naturally). We learned from the staff here that this type of cleanup is a weekly occurrence, which made out efforts seem like casually shoveling your driveway in the middle of a blizzard. Sobering.

Among the styrofoam debris, some of my classmates collected some spongy objects that actually tuned out to be the siliceous skeletons of actual sea sponges! PSA: Dead sponges do not float, or at least the two or three we collected alongside the garbage.

The afternoon passed quickly with another quadrat survey of coral cover. After dinner we heard a bad-ass lecture from the fisheries managers who regaled us with the ins and outs of their job including threats from fisherman, bribes, and what seemed like the closest things to espionage in the conservation business.

After that we did a night snorkel which represented the first time I’d ever been in the ocean after sundown. I has always heard this was primetime for shark activity, although we didn’t see any near the patch reef we visited. On the list of things we spotted at night were: a cute little slipper lobster, a yellow stingray, many sea cucumbers, a nassau grouper, and corals with their tentacles extended! I expected to be terrified by the abyssal darkness, but instead I was intrigued by what I was seeing and surprised by the variety of nocturnal sea creatures. Just like the night hike at Las Cuevas, the night snorkel at Glover’s taught me to appreciate the daily cycles of activity in any ecosystem.

Today was an exhausting day of snorkeling. We boated out to the reef crest, where the wave action from the ocean meets the high island of the atoll. Here we experienced the windward fore reef. This area of the reef is characterized by high wave energy, resulting in larger, more robust boulder corals. The depth of this area was a significantly greater challenge to traverse than the reefs in the lagoon yesterday. At first I could hardly stay under water long enough to even get close to the corals and other creatures below. But as the day went on my lungs stretched and I surprised even myself by free diving more than twenty five feet to snap a video of a large spotted eagle ray on the ocean floor. I’m no fish, but I certainly improved today!

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As far as sponges go, I’ve been seeing most of the same stuff I mentioned earlier this week on every reef. Today was an exception, I saw Xetospongia muta the Giant Barrel Sponge. This guy lives in deeper water, so today was the first opportunity to see it. I’ve also been seeing quite a bit of the boring sponges of the genus Cliona.

After the fore reef in the morning, the majority of the group had gotten a bit sea sick, so we stuck to the shallower back reef in the afternoon. Here we saw the most concentrated variety of life so far in the atoll. Anemones, giant spiny lobsters, and so many fish you would swear we were diving in an aquarium. Here Dr. Solomon showed off his manly prowess by spearing three lionfish. While you might be thinking this to be some mark of hubris, it was actually quite selfless to do this, as lionfish are an invasive species whose extraction spells good news for any native fish in the area. I’m sure they’re delicious, so more people should be removing these nuisances from the Caribbean and turning them into ceviche.