Lionfish Hunting Day 4

Today, the true lionfish research began.  Tye and I were tasked with mapping out her ledges where she will be monitoring her basslets for the basslet-lionfish experiments and transplanting lionfish from one reef to another.  Tye took care of the mapping on her own today because it is time intensive and a little complicated.  I was in charge of catching lionfish on the first dive and counting the total number of lionfish present/releasing them on the second dive.  On the first dive at DP-T08, I started off well.  First catch of the season is pictured here.  This little one had no idea what was going on until it was too late.  But after the easy first one, it got much harder.  I saw a couple at the end of the reef hanging out in the open.  When I got to them, they were slowly creeping toward cover.  They knew what was up and I couldn't catch them before they swam under a hard to reach ledge.  I'll be back to get those suckers soon.  Most likely we will have to spear them now that they react to seeing the hand nets.

The next dive at DP-T09 was at a high density lionfish reef.  The goal is to stock this reef with lionfish from other reefs so that they are more likely to stick to the ledges they are released on.  The idea is that when a lionfish is released onto one of Tye's ledges that have basslets, they will stay and feed there.  In practice, this does not always happen.  They tend to roam around the reef or leave it all together.  This makes stocking it even more important so that the densities of lionfish stay at high enough levels for the experiment even with some lionfish emmigration.  While I was searching for lionfish, I saw a really large sting ray buried in the sand near the reef.  I took some cool pictures and included one of them here.  They are such amazing animals to see when they are that big.  The eyes peering from the sand watching your every move...simply awesome.  After I finished up my search, I took some pictures of Tye at work, her ledges, and the reef in general before we released our lionfish we caught before.  Strangely, I went into deco without notice and had to do a few minutes extra at my safety stop.  Still getting used to the new computer but that shouldn't happen again.  When we got back topside, Tye wasn't feeling well so we decided to call the day short. 

We wrapped up the day back at CEI doing our logs as we do everyday.  When we started, Tye told me she received an email from Mark saying that he will not be coming down to the Bahamas this summer.  This is unfortunate because I was really looking forward to spending some time working with him and getting to know him better.  Tye originally encouraged me to come early so that I would be able to work with Mark but unfortunately, his surfer's ear issues popped up and he is going to have surgery.  Regardless, I am so happy to be here working with Tye and soon Lillian, Alex, and Steph on this awesome project here in the Bahamas.  Right now I am watching the Kings game so I am a bit distracted.  I will sign off here.  Until later.