Today
was my second day working with Lillian out on the patches. Before we headed out, Lillian needed to
figure out which sites she wanted to visit for the day so instead, I went with
Stephanie to work on the lionfish prey response experiment. We sat down with the head of the lionfish
research program here at MSI to discuss logistics related to the project. Stephanie during the meeting mentioned me as
the head of this project after she leaves which I was very happy to hear. This will give me a great opportunity to
execute an awesome study and potentially have some sort of authorship on the
resulting publication. I am very excited
to see how this study progressed over the course of the summer. Once Lillian was ready to go, I went with her
to go out to the patches while Stephanie stayed behind to set up a trial for
our experiment.
The
weather could not have been more different from yesterday. We made our way out under sunny skies and a
light breeze. Once we got out there, we
discussed what I would be doing for the day.
I was surprised to find out that I was going right into doing fish
surveys with Lillian as the second observer.
We discussed the general plan of how we would survey the reef and got
right to it. Once we got in, I was blown
away by the patch reef. It was teeming
with fish and I must admit that it was completely overwhelming for me. I identified and sized as many fish as I
could and then stopped after I realized I was causing Lillian to wait for
me. When we came up, I was happy to hear
that many of my fish length estimates matched up well with Lillian’s. It was clear however that I had a lot of work
to do in order to improve my speed and observational skills. I will certainly never forget that reef.
As
we did more survey’s, I began to get the hang of what I needed to do in order
to effectively estimate the number of fish and their sizes on these patch
reefs. By the end of the day, I felt
much more confident. My last reef we did
was pleasant despite its size. We saw a
cute little nurse shark hiding in the middle of this cave in the reef. Since I was in reef fish counting mode, I
totally forgot to take a picture of it when I had the chance. After we finished up, we went back to CEI,
had dinner, and did our logs. When we
finished, Stephanie, Alex, and I headed over to the tanks to check up on our
lionfish prey experiment. We noticed
that the night vision feature of the security camera system CEI researchers had
setup for the trial were not nearly good enough to visualize the prey and the
lionfish at night. This is actually ok
because we will not be doing trials at night but rather at dawn, during the
day, and dusk when they are most actively hunting. Regardless, we are thinking about using GoPro
cameras for the whole project because they have a much greater field of view
and produce much higher quality of video.
Once
we finished up, I turned on the Kings game to watch with Stephanie and
Lillian. We all had our dark and stormy
adult beverages to drink and enjoyed some intense Stanley Cup hockey. Both Stephanie and Lillian were not able to
hang around for the whole game since it did go to double overtime. Eventually, the Kings won the cup and it was
awesome to see it end in overtime in Los Angeles. It was an amazing celebration for an amazing
playoff run by the Kings. Wish I could
have been there to see it. Being here in
the Bahamas doing what I love though is not a bad alternative. It is super late now so I best get to
bed. Until later.
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