Lionfish Dodging Day 6

The tasks laid out for us today were very similar to yesterday.  We needed to go to another reef to prepare more ledges for Tye’s basslet competition experiment.  The reef we worked on today is paired with the reef we went to yesterday as the high lionfish density reef.  This experiment we have been working on will look at basslet competition between the two species (fairy and black cap pictured in an earlier post) at low and high densities of lionfish.  To make this possible, we must use isolated reef pairs (1 high density and 1 low density) to understand how the presence of lionfish alters the competitive interactions between the two basslet species.  My job today once again was to remove the fairy basslets from Tye’s black cap only ledge.  I started to get noticeably better at capturing the darting fairy basslets over the course of our 3 dives today.  By the end of the 3^rd dive, I felt pretty good about my fish drugging abilities.  This increased productivity however was partially negated due to the presence of lionfish near the ledge.  Every time I would duck under the ledge, I would have to keep an eye out for lionfish to make sure I would not get stung.  Even though they don’t actively attack, they can sting if they are accidentally touched.  At one point, there were 3 lionfish near the ledge I was working at and I had to poke them away with my net a number of times to get them out of the way.  They are certainly persistent animals as I have found out first hand.  In the next couple of dive days, I plan to take some pictures and videos of this operation to post on the blog. 

After we finished up, we came back to CEI and released the little basslets under the dock.  Some of them may have been gulped up by snapper or small groupers soon after they were released but for us, we don’t feel too bad doing this because there is certainly no shortage of fairy basslets.  They are one of the more abundant fish on the reefs we survey so our removals are not affecting the population as a whole significantly.  After a long day of work, it was nice knowing I have tomorrow off to relax and recover.  The first 5 days of diving have been a bit taxing on me in part because of the number of dives.  You definitely get exhausted after diving that often due to your increased metabolism underwater.  When you factor in that most of our dives have been between 40 to 60 ft of depth, the level of exhaustion is magnified due to these greater depths.  I felt no reservations about staying up later to watch the Kings game knowing that I could sleep in tomorrow.  It was awesome to see the Kings pull off the series against the Blackhawks.  I was on the edge of my seat the entire game despite being dead tired.  Now I am going to try to calm myself down for a good night sleep.  Until later