Today, turtle taging was our big project. Our group caught a Hawksbill sea turtle, and almost caught a Green sea turtle. When we were out there, some people held onto ropes tied to the boat looking for turtles while some stayed on the boat to help spot turtles. After the turtle was caught and brought aboard the ship, we got walked through on the process of taging the turtle. After making sure it wasn’t already tagged, we took measurements of its fins, head, shell, and tail. After taking down all of the data, we tagged each front flipper and injected another tag into its neck. They tag them for the purpose of tracking both migration patterns and growth rate. After releasing it, we left to go to our next activity of the day, learning about invertebrates. We learned about a Queen Conch, fireworm, sea slugs, urchines, crabs, and types of sea stars. We categorized them all into categories such as echinoderms and annelids. We then got to snorkel to look for some of the new things we learned about. After snorkeling for an hour, we went back to where we are staying and got to relax for a couple of hours. Then we went to dinner and talked about our coral replant project. We ended the day on learning how we are going to collect the coral and how we are going to plant it. The two types of coral we are planting are Elkhorn and Staghorn.
