I started the day off today at 6:30 A.M. before heading to breakfast at 7. Once I finished breakfast, my classmates and I headed out to our first of two morning dives at what is called “Big Tunnel Reef”. During that dive, my partner Alex and I encountered many different marine creatures including fish, sea worms, and lobsters. Of all these creatures, however, my favorite of that dive was seeing a big nassau grouper getting its mouth cleaned by a smaller fish. This altercation between the two fish represents a symbiotic relationship. This idea of a symbiotic relationship where two species mutually benefit from each other is a concept that we talked about a lot during our classes back on the main campus. In the case of the grouper and the smaller cleaning fish, the grouper is getting his mouth cleaned, while the fish gets a free meal. After the first dive ended, we took a short surface interval before embarking on our second dive. During this dive, my partner Alex and I saw a lot of the fish species we had seen in our first dive, however, we also saw a school of Jack that we had not seen previously. After completing our second dive, we headed back to the resort as we unfortunately could not go to Stingray City today because of strong winds. Despite the conditions, my friends and I decided to go on an afternoon snorkel after some down time. During this afternoon snorkel, we saw a variety of fish such as pufferfish, jellyfish, and parrotfish in what was my favorite snorkel so far. In the evening after dinner, we watched a documentary on a famous oceanographer and listened to discussions about human impact on the ocean and how we can efficiently push to combat it. This human impact aspect of the documentary is a subject that we often discussed in the classroom as we always look to see how we can improve the world around us. Overall today was amazing despite the unfortunate weather conditions and I am looking forward to some more dives and the Sea Turtle Conservation Site tomorrow!
Till tomorrow,
Ben Levis
