We had an awesome first day on the island. Today we had our first snorkel off of the pier by the resort.
One of the first things that I noticed about the reef was that it is different from what I am used to seeing in Hawaii. There are mostly small caribbean sea fans with some brain coral and star corals interspersed in between. One of the things that I noticed was that all the sea fans had oriented themselves in the same direction, and they swayed back and forth facing the current. This makes sense because coral polyps feed on passing phytoplankton and bacteria. All the colonies seemed to have developed a way to use the current to their advantage.
I also saw a bunch of fish. Some of the most interesting were the filefish, the barracuda, and the bar jacks.
The filefish was acting somewhat strange. Even though it was out in the open, it had its horn raised. Normally filefish do this when predators are nearby. I had also heard that they will swim into crevices and then raises it’s horn to make it impossible to be caught by bigger fish. However, I didn’t see any obvious predators. I think it’s possible I may have been a little bit too close and I had scared it.
When I was swimming near the boat I noticed the silhouette of a much larger fish than what I had seen on the reef today. I didn’t get too close but I saw that it’s long, slender body and sharp pointed teeth. I’m pretty sure it was a barracuda. It was about two feet long, and it had very big eyes. This is mostly likely because barracudas rely heavily on their eyes when hunting. This one seemed to prefer the shade of the boat, and it wasn’t too active.
Finally, I saw a fish that we hadn’t learned about in class. I looked it up and I found it was called the bar jack. I saw them in a pretty large school. They all were about five inches long with a shiny blue stripe running down their bodies. Off all the fish I saw on the reef today, they were the ones that were least bothered by me. In fact, at some points, they would let me get within a few inches of them as I was swimming.
