This week has been very laid back. Every morning my research group has gone out and done field work, and we have usually been back by 10 AM. Then the rest of the day has been free to do whatever. I've done a lot of exploring, reading, and the only responsibility I've had is to write my research proposal, which was due last night. I'm really happy about how my proposal turned out. Our group of 12 is all using the same methods to collect all of our data, which we share, but we all individually use some of the data in our own projects. Personally, I am going to look at three benthic attributes at the sites we survey: rugosity (a measure of topographical complexity), vertical relief, and live coral cover. I want to see what correlations there are between these factors and the abundance of larger size classes of resident reef fish, as well as the overall estimated biomass of the area. Basically, I want to see what structural elements of the reef influence greater fish assemblages. This is important for management purposes, in doing reef recovery and similar things. So sorry if my writing is a bit dry, I just finished nine pages of scientific writing.
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| Our dive group, one of the interns took this picture. |
Anyways, I just got out of the water from my first rec dive since last saturday. I've been diving throughout the week for research, but this is the first time we've all gone out on a "fun" dive. The surface conditions were really choppy, and we were in the small zodiac, so we just put our gear on in the water and descended as soon as we were ready. The noise and partial chaos of the waves vanished instantly as we went down into the silent, still underwater world. We went to this site that I hadn't been to before, called The Warhead. It's the nose of the crashed drug plane, further down the wall. It is wedged in the rocks about 80-90 feet down, which is deeper than we can go, but we hovered out over the wall and looked down at it. The drop off really just takes my breath away every time I dive, especially when I hover out over the wall. Its a ridiculous sensation, to be floating there and looking out into an increasingly deep blue. Back over the shelf, I've really been enjoying looking at the corals and sponges at the depths we dive at. In a garden on land, flowers catch our attention because they add color and organized form to a confused green background. Underwater on a reef, the corals and sponges do the same, except the background is just the substrate, perhaps with some encrusting algae. The corals and sponges, instead of being organs of plants, are entire organisms, and colonies of organisms. Some colors are muted at 60 feet, but the deep greens and maroons of giant sponges are very impressive, and the rich purples of sea fans stand out well. These sessile animals have a ridiculous variety of forms as well, there are hard stony corals, fat cylindrical sponges, branching corals that look like antlers, sea rods that look like a soft cluster of tubes blowing with the current, and really deep on the wall I see crazy thin spiraling sponges. So cool. The setting of every dive I make here is this amazing garden, and that is just the backdrop for the fishes, sharks, sea turtles, and other cool things we encounter while diving. I hit my 10 hours of bottom time mark on the dive today.
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| Me, upper left. Sea turtle, lower right. |
While I was eating after hopping off the boat, people brought in an injured flamingo to the center, hoping we would know what to do with it. I got to see it, it is in pretty bad condition, a small wound on its neck and a larger one on its chest. We think a dog attacked it, hopefully it wasn't a person that did it since that is a $50000 fine. Kind of like killing a bald eagle in America. Anyways, I'm going to go get lunch and then get back in the water to do more filming for our coral reef movie.
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| Just hanging. |
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| Dolphins! And thats my hand on the left. |
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| Shark Bay in the foreground, then East Bay, then Long Cay in the distance. View west from Pete's Point. |
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