Sharks, Hurricanes, and Other Normal Topics of Conversation Here

I haven't had time to write much lately. Probably the most notable thing that has happened was me being able to hang out with a reef shark for most of my last dive, to The Grotto, an awesome dive site. I got in the water and started to put my BC on, since we were in the Zodiac and there wasn't room to do it in the boat. I looked down and there it was, circling 50 feet down. We descended and it swam away. Then as we were making our way to the wall it came back, swam right by us and hung out with us for a while. We saw a couple reef sharks that dive, and a turtle, but that one decided to make several visits to us, it was the first thing I was when I got in the water and the last thing I saw before getting back on the boat. That was the closest I have been to one of those, closest I have been to any shark except for a nurse shark that I saw the very next day.

We had been doing filming for our coral reef movie project, and had been to a couple sites. There was a reef shark that we saw at Sharks Alley, and then at Admirals Aquarium I found a huge nurse shark hiding in what looked like a small opening in the rocks but what actually ended up opening into a sizable cave. At first I thought it was a ray in there covering the sand on the bottom, but it turned out to be just the caudal fin of the shark. There was some bladed fire coral around the entrance, but I could swim down and approach it from the right angle enough to grab some free rock and hold myself down enough to stick my head inside, and watch it sleeping.

Besides that I've been doing a lot of projects. There was a tourism assessment presentation and paper, a lobster management presentation, a marine ecology research proposal, all due in the time since I got back from break. I've still got a reef survey to complete, a cultural reflection to write, and a seagrass monitoring data analysis project to do before the week is over too. Then exams, then directed research starts. More on that later. I'm looking to either do research on the correlation between substrate topographical complexity and fish population size, or to do research on lionfish, catching them and recording locations and stomach contents.

Right now we are keeping an eye on Tomas, down in the southern caribbean. Its projected to hit haiti at a cat 2 force on friday, after that the current projected path is right over us. Haiti has had so much to deal with lately, there are still like a million people living in tents there, and they are in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Its a really bad situation, hopefully the hurricane gives them (and us) a miss.


Here are a couple pictures from my last dive.