Today we started out by measuring coral density inside and outside the Marine Protected Area (MPA). The island we are currently staying on, called Middle Caye, is on Glover’s Reef inside of an MPA. This area is patrolled by the Belize coast guard, especially at night. Commercial fishing is not allowed in the area, and part of the point is to prevent overfishing and coral damage in the protected area. We tentatively found that the MPA patch we surveyed had about 28% live coral over total area and the area outside of the MPA had about 18% live coral. That would seem to suggest that the MPA is protecting the corals and allowing them to grow. However, we identified some improvements we could make to our methods and will repeat the assessment tomorrow.
When not measuring, I saw a few distinctive corals, including Acropora cervicornis (staghorn coral).
In the afternoon we walked out to the seagrass and mangroves and collected some small animals, plants, and other living things to look at in the wet lab. We kept them in buckets of water to preserve the creatures. We found a wide range of creatures in nearly everyone’s taxon ID groups, and Kaela even picked up a fireworm. It stung her and released stinging hairs, but she brought it back to the collection bucket anyway. Other creatures we saw included an Atlantic Pygmy Octopus, which could change color and tried to hide under the conch shells, live Queen Conchs, which have a beautiful sunset pattern inside their shells which unfortunately attract collectors (often overharvested and picked up by tourists), a West Indian Sea Egg, which is a kind of urchin that is dark with white spines and covers itself with sea grass, several other urchin species, three-finger leaf algae, other Halimeda algae, Pearl algae, and a ton of hermit crabs.
In terms of coral, we picked up a Porites species and a Siderastrea species. Porites is a branching coral with corallites that are generally flush with the surface of the coral (they don’t stick out like Acropora, which include Elkhorn and Staghorn corals). This one branches near the tip and is probably P. divaricata due to that characteristic and thin branch size. The species is also called Thin Finger Coral. The Siderastrea are called starlet corals, and the one we picked up I think was S. stellata.
