Cleaner Goby Collections Day 21

Today was a very productive day for the OSU research team.  It started off with me thinking that I slept through the weekly CEI staff meeting that our group attends but thankfully it got moved to tomorrow.  Since I was still up a bit before I usually would be, I took care of Erica’s expenses for staying here at CEI before heading off to breakfast.  Today Alex, Tye, and Stephanie stayed dry to work on our lab lionfish prey response experiment while Lillian and I went out to work on collecting gobies and working on the patches.  Our task for today was to catch gobies and transplant them on Lillian’s patch reefs.  We went to a site called Tunnel Rock on the deep side of the island to collect cleaner gobies.  The cleaners are interesting in that they hang out on coral to present themselves to potential client fish.  When a large fish stops near the goby and opens its mouth, the goby will swim into the mouth of the fish and clean the gills of the fish of parasites and other materials.  This is important for larger fish like grouper who can be significantly hindered by parasites in regards to their physical fitness if they are not periodically cleaned.  The fact that the cleaner gobies lay on the coral made spotting them easy but catching them was a whole different story.  They are very quick and small which makes it difficult to catch them.  We used small aquarium nets to try to herd them off their coral perches and into plastic bags to be removed from the reef which worked reasonably well.  Additionally, Lillian caught a trumpetfish while we were at Tunnel Rock to use for our lionfish prey response experiment.  After the dive, we headed back into CEI to drop off the trumpetfish and eat lunch.

After we finished lunch, we headed back out to the patches to release the cleaner gobies we caught on some of Lillian’s experimental reefs.  At each of these reefs, we needed to remove all lionfish present before we added the gobies.  We used the typical method of large hand nets and dry bags to clear out the lionfish.  After the reef was clear, we added the gobies to particular coral heads on the reef and waited to make sure they stayed in place on the reef.  Often gobies that don’t belong will attempt to flee the reef and look for where they came from.  It is funny to say but we had to babysit them for a bit at Lillian’s reefs to make sure they did not try to flee away (pictured here).  We did this at a few different reefs.  One reef I accidentally caught a mutton snapper in the net instead of the lionfish I was going for which was surprising and funny.  I stuck my net into this cave to coax out the lionfish when my net was pulled from my hand and a huge plume of sand arose from the hole.  When the sand settled I reached in to grab the net and realized that I had inadvertently caught a snapper in the net.  We let it go quickly to make sure it was not too stressed out and then we began to add gobies.  We continued this operation at a few sites, with the last being the most interesting.

On the last reef, there were three lionfish that we had to clear before we released the cleaners.  They were a cunning bunch that avoided our collection nets at every turn.  The second lionfish kept hiding away from Lillian but when she finally got it away from the reef, it bolted right into my open net (which I was not planning on happening or prepared for).   It was certainly the luckiest lionfish catch I have had so far.  We placed each lionfish one by one into a dry bag to be able to transport them back onto the boat (pictured here).  After this site, we headed over to one last reef to catch some small prey fish for the lab experiment before heading back in.

Once we got back to CEI, we took our bounty of 6 lionfish and a dozen or so prey fish over to the water tanks in the wet lab.  We met up with the rest of our team to look at the tank they set up for the experiment which looked fantastic.  We certainly have set ourselves up for success on this particular project due to Stephanie’s great planning and coordinating.  At dinner, we placed the trumpetfish inside the aquarium tank at the dining hall since it was decided that we were not going to use it.  It turns out that all the animals, even the lobster, in the tank were extremely hungry because they all started to attack the poor fish.  I would imagine even if they were not hungry, they might have had similar reactions to today because of the confined space and territorial nature of the fish.  It made me feel terrible about ever having an aquarium like that.  Sure it looks nice but these animals are meant to live with other animals on reef structures with very different community assemblages than what is available for fish tanks.  The only way I would ever consider having a tank like that would be if I made it into a functional replicate of a coral reef where all the organisms in the tank live as they would in nature (normal community interactions between species).   We are hoping to get our first trial running tomorrow to test out the tanks and our methods for conducting the experiment.  We had a long discussion tonight about this study and the details that are involved with executing it.  Now a bit past 11 but I am beat tired from the long day and lack of sleep.  Off to bed I go.  Until later.