More Recon Day 3

We started off the day right today with a nice bowl of traditional Bahamian Souse for breakfast.  The broth is like chicken noodle but way better!  It was amusing to hear Island School students and researchers talk about how they don’t like to eat that kind of meal for breakfast.  I guess it’s a white people thing...breakfast food only at breakfast J. 

Today we checked out the sites we didn’t get to yesterday.  My job today was solely looking for lionfish on the patch reefs we went to.  There were not as many as I would have thought.  At the 6 reefs we visited, I saw a total of 8 lionfish.  This is both a good and a bad thing.  It is good because that means the local dive and fishing operations are taking a toll on the population and driving the abundance of lionfish down.  Less lionfish is great news for the reefs since they have been implicated for being able to reduce the abundance of fish on these patch reefs by up to 90%.  This is bad news for us however because we are trying to manipulate lionfish densities for our basslet experiments and that requires a few lionfish to make it possible.  At this point, it looks like we will need to transplant a good number of lionfish from reefs that are not going to be used for the experiments themselves.  This is extra work for us because we have to go out of our way to find lionfish at other reefs as opposed to grabbing them from the reefs that will be made into the low lionfish density treatment reefs.  But at the end of the day, this is good news that forces us to work more.

The last two dives of the day were on dive site reefs for the recreational dive boats.  Cathedral and Tunnels were both awesome to dive because the had a ton of deep cracks and caves to explore.  This made looking for lionfish a bit more difficult and time consuming for me but it was a great deal of fun to be honest.  I included a cool video of our safety stop at Cathedral at the bottom of the post.  On our way up from Cathedral, I started to think about my GoPro setup and how it was not really as secure as I would like it to be attached to my BC.  The second I started to think about that, the strap slipped and it fell off my BC.  Lucky for me I was on top of it and was able to snatch the tray and camera before it fell 50 ft to the bottom.  That certainly was a close one today.  After we got back from our dives, we had a fried chicken dinner, finished up our dive and boat logs, and headed back to our rooms.  Now that I am finishing up the blog, it is time for me to retire.  I need a good 9 hours of sleep tonight to try to catch up from the lack of sleep the other two nights.  Until later.