Día diez: el último viaje en barco

I woke up to the sounds of a heavy downpour in the night, as most of us did. The following hours were filled with the faint hum of the fan in our room and intermittent dreams of ocean animals playing across my sleepy mind, a mix of dream and memory. It is a wonderful thing to earn your sleepiness, and your hunger, and to really savor food and sleep the way you do when you work hard and long, as we have been, kicking around in the water most of our days.

After thoroughly relishing a cup of coffee and fresh, cold pineapple (the pineapple here is the best I’ve ever tasted, so watery and sweet and nourishing), I took a brief stroll around the beautiful rainforest that surrounds us here at STRI before plopping myself back into the water to chase more fish. Everything was a bright, soggy green, the raindrops pattering on the leaves even hours after the rain had stopped. The air was full of forest music, birds calling, sunlight streaming through the foliage.

A turtle hiding from me on the lawn

 The forest has been awake so many more hours than I

This morning we all worked on our projects. Haley, Mack and I snorkeled over to House Reef to follow some more parrotfish around, Molly and Erin checked their transplanted mangrove roots for signs of predation on the sponges (in their own words, scoping for spongophiles), while Ellie and Emily troubleshooted some problems they had with the water quality measurements they are taking.

Haley laying transect tape like a pro

An ophiroid inside of a sponge on a mangrove root

It's fun to work in the field so much because you encounter all kinds of other stuff while you're doing what you went out there to do. Highlights of my morning included hanging out with a jellyfish (Chrysaora sp.?), watching the teeniest angel fish swim about the reef, watching a featherduster worm spawn (releasing a large cloud of purple/grey/white material into the sea in the middle of our parrotfish range), and of course, swimming with our study animal and my human friends.

Our time in the field was followed by a quiet couple of hours in the lab, with everyone trying to pull their data together and organize their posters. This quiet, studious mood was occasionally shattered by bursts of laughter or an eruption of song. It's so nice to work with people you can laugh and play with. Research can be very challenging, and it's good to have some way to lighten the mood when things get stressful and overwhelming. 

The photo we took before departing on our afternoon snorkel. So much cheese! and: pretty much the coolest group of people ever

After lunch, we departed for the last boat trip of our stay here. (It may be no coincidence that the group sap is writing one of the last blog posts, but I’m holding the floodgates of nostalgia back for another day (like, maybe tomorrow)).

First we went to Cocos 2, a site south of STRI that we have visited before, though today we snorkeled at a new spot in the same general area. 

Immediately upon entering the water, we were greeted by a sea of moon jellies which felt like a greeting and a blessing. I found out for the first time that the moon jellies don't actually sting you, and many of us took the opportunity to interact with them more closely. The texture of the top of the bell is among the most incredible tactile experiences I can remember having; it was so soft and smooth and fluid, and it felt as close to a hug as you could give a jellyfish.

We saw a lot of hugely dominant taxa we have become accustomed to seeing: Porides porides, the finger coral; Millepora alcicornis, the fire coral; Zoanthus pulchellus, the blue/green zoanthid; and the green algae Caulerpa sp. Here is some other stuff we saw:

some bleached Acropora cervicornis

Mack found a basket star!

He also found some beautiful squid

A school of juvenile striped parrotfish, Scarus iserti (I can't help it...even when I'm not working on our project all I want to do is follow parrotfish around)

The brittle star Ophiothrix suensonni hugging the erect sponge Aplysina fulva

A can growing out of the reef

After Cocos 2, we went to Punta Almirante, a site Deyvis (one of the awesome people who works at STRI) recommended to us.

This site was really cool and different from other places we have been. A lot of it is really shallow, so we could hover directly over the reef and get a really good look at things without having to dive down and hold our breath. This helped me appreciate how much there is to see in teeny crevices, hiding in little nooks and crannies, and to actually see it!

What was really interesting to me was the way different habitat types co-occured together -- seagrass started growing right out of all the coral in a way I hadn’t seen before. The corals, grasses, and algae all seemed to exist right alongside each other, without obvious boundaries in some places.  

The coral and the seagrass led right up to a small mangrove island whose roots exhibited incredible species richness. Molly was very enthusiastic about the quality of these mangrove roots, and the diversity of things living on them (particularly the sponges) Lots of the roots were covered by large anenomes, tunicates, and of course, bivalves, hydroids and sponges.

I really liked the algal fluff that was coating everything. It had a remarkably soft texture and pulsated in the water in an incredible way, light and dreamy and reddish green. I loved it for itself, but the abundance of the fuzz in that environment was alarming -- it seemed to coat everything, from the seagrass to zoanthids to corals to the carbonaceous sediment on the ocean floor. Anytime you see tons of algae on a reef, it is troubling. Algae grows much faster than corals do and can often outcompete them for space, growing over them and snuffing them out. 

Here's some other stuff we saw at Punta Almirante:

Montastrea annularis

A beautiful anemone shrimp

A nice brain coral head, Colpophyllia natans

The algal scuzz coating everything

Including the seagrass Thallassia

A cool anemone I had not seen before this visit

After our return to STRI, some of us paid a visit to our favorite brown pelican who hangs out across from where we sit at the dock. It's a nice place to go to at the end of a long day to talk, and to watch the sun start to make its slow set.

Tomorrow is our last day of field work. We'll be collecting the last bits of data, trying to pull our posters together, and in so doing, attempting to tell a coherent story about what we’ve been doing the past week and a half (having also spent the last few months preparing for this) and how it fits into a larger context in marine science. It has been such a privilege to be here; to work in these waters, to learn so much, to see and experience such extraordinary beauty, and to collaborate with and spend my days with this amazing group of people and scientists. (See!: group sap) I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone has to report on tomorrow!

Buenas noches,
Tina