This morning we woke up to the sound of raindrops and Mr. Kirby knocking on our door. My roommates and I had slept in. We went down to our taxi to begin the day! We went out to Mountain Point and did a practice dive just to get the hang of where we were going to do our transect. When doing this dive, as soon as we jumped into the water, we were surrounded by moon jellyfish. This was quite a sight. Throughout the dive, there were moon jellyfish above us. We saw trumpet fish, a sea turtle, a few yellow headed jawfish, an several others. After this, we started on our transect. This was divided into five jobs: laying the transect, counting the fish, counting the invertebrates, substrate (measuring the amount of damaged coral, and algae growth), and reeling up the transect. My partner, Rob, and I had the job of counting the number of invertebrates. From what I saw, there were a lot of long spine sea urchins. However, I also saw a flamingo tongue, two hermit crabs, and two queen conches. This was very interesting, and I felt really good about my observations. These findings will be sent into an organization called reef check that helps to conserve these beautiful ecosystems.
