This morning it was
super muggy out. You could feel it in
the air that the rain was coming as it got stickier and stickier. By the time I walked over to the boathouse,
it had started to downpour. As we
gathered our gear for the day before breakfast, we left it all under the
boathouse roof to keep it dry. One
bummer about today was once again I found my mask missing from my storage
cubby. When it went missing a few days
ago, I was super happy to find it and made a concerted effort to keep track of
it. After looking all around the boathouse
and inside all the other cubbies, it seems that someone may have taken it. That mask is my first and only mask I have
ever worn so it has sentimental value as well as just being an awesome mask. I wore Tye’s pink framed backup mask instead
for the day which was certainly a fashion statement.
Although the day started
out on a low note, it was awesome to dive with Steph today. This was her first day of diving as well as
her first time out on the side of the island where we have been working. While Tye and I removed basslets, Steph swam
around to do some predator counts all around the reefs we dove. We dove Cathedral for the first dive to
attempt to finish what we had started with our basslet removals on Friday. The ledge where I was removing the fairy
basslets is quite large and has many small caves and holes for the basslets to
hide in. Not to mention that it is here
you always have an audience of Nassau grouper (one pictured here). I had such a tough time that we decided we
would need one more dive to take care of it.
That means we will have spent 4 full dives attempting to clear this one
ledge which goes to show how difficult it was to do. Topside we decided to move on to our second
site called Shack to take care of the ledges there and to give Steph a new reef
to do predator counts on. This reef was
much easier to clear than the one at Cathedral.
There were maybe a total of 10 fish that we needed to clear there as
opposed to the 25+ we needed to remove from the Cathedral ledge. After a shorter 45 minute dive at Shack, we
took Steph back into CEI so she could finish on some paperwork while Tye and I
finished up. We spent our surface
interval at CEI so that I could look around some more for my missing mask but I
still couldn’t find it. We finished up
Cathedral after another hour long dive and then headed back in for the day.
To finish up the day,
Steph, Tye, and I got together after dinner to speak about the upcoming
lionfish prey response experiment that Steph will be conducting at the wet lab
at CEI. In order to understand how prey
species react to lionfish predation as opposed to natural predators (snappers,
groupers, jacks, etc), we will conduct an experiment where we measure certain
metrics of prey species’ stress responses to predation threat. This is a crucial question in understanding
to what degree lionfish are better and more efficient at eating reef fish than
other native predators. The underlying
problem with lionfish is that they hunt in a manner that is completely foreign
to native fish. To fish like the fairy
basslet, a lionfish looks like a giant piece of seaweed floating toward
them. Basslets have limited visual and
chemical cues that would cause them to have a predation avoidance response. Examining this difference between responses
by prey to lionfish vs. native predators allows us to better understand how
lionfish are so successful here in the Caribbean. We didn’t go completely through the
experimental design and logistics yesterday because Steph wanted to wait for
tomorrow night when Alex and Lillian arrive to explain the project to the
entire team at once. Now I am back in my
room finishing tidying up the room for my roommate who is showing up tomorrow
and finishing my blog. I’m really sun
baked and tired from today so off to bed I go.
Until later.
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