Like always, we started off today with an amazing, but too early, breakfast made by Desuze. Today's itinerary had a slightly different tone to it from the much-needed day off yesterday. Today is all about projects, projects, projects! Shortly after breakfast, everyone grabbed their partners and split, out to make headway on each of their own research projects that we'll be presenting to our advisors, Richard and Maya, at the end of the program.
My partner, Adriana, and I immediately dressed for a day on the reef and headed for the docks to swim to where we would start gathering data. We would be spending most of the day hovering over a small reef located nearby the STRI facility staring at some feisty little fish called damselfish. After a short swim, Adriana and I reached our first fish friend that we'd be observing. Our project is studying how the coloration of juvenile Threespot damselfish affects interactions with adult Threespot damselfish, and to help us, we made models of the fish we are studying. Who said science can't have arts and crafts?
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| One of our project models, a Bluehead Wrasse in the marked territory of a Threespot Damselfish |
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| Our model of a Threespot Damselfish, the subject of our project |
Moving from fish to fish we showed them each the models we'd made and observed how each fish reacted to each one. Among the fish that we were observing, both Adriana and I had our favorites that we'd given names to. Her favorite is a not-so-friendly fish with a very white face named Casper. My favorite is a little fish that's scared of nothing that I've named Jeremy.
After several hours of watching fish, we started swimming back to STRI. Just as we were getting away from the reef, I looked down at the bottom of the bay, and laying under a large rock was a large Nurse Shark taking a nap! I'm sure it was just as surprised to see us as we were to see it. When we were just twenty feet away from the dock, we got another surprise in the form of the largest Whiptail Stingray I've seen since getting here. It even had some hitchhikers in the form of two large Remoras on it.
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| A Whiptail Stringray with Remoras |
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| A Nurse Shark sleeping under a large rock |
Once everyone was back on dry land at STRI, we all met in the classroom for a lecture from our advisor, Maya, on seagrasses. Seagrasses are really important because even though they don't make up much of the ocean, they still provide shelter for a lot of baby fish. We then had a second lecture from our other advisor, Richard, after a great dinner also made by Desuze. Richard taught us more about reef fishes, following up on a lecture he gave us the other day.
We only have a handful of days left in this country and I'm remarkably sad to be leaving it so soon, it's truly incredible here.
-Ryan
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