On our fifth day of the trip we went and did our project dives and presented the projects today. For the first dive of the day we went to West Dog reef. This was used as our “healthy reef” for our project. The reef there was beautiful, it had tons of parrotfish and grouper. For our project we set up the perimeter then counted the number of herbivorous fish and herbivorous non-fish (ex. urchins) and took pictures of the reef and our marked off perimeter. The group counted 68 fish and 43 urchins for a total of 111 herbivores in the reef. We finished that with about 2000 PSI left so we swam around exploring the reef. On our way back to the boat I saw two amazing juvenile spotted drum. For our next dive we went over to the Jesuit MPA where we have our coral nursery. We used this area as our “unhealthy reef” for our project. We got in the water and did all the same set up steps as we did at the last reef. We counted 43 fish and 0 urchins for a total of 43 herbivores in the reef. Even if there was about 43 fish in that area they were mostly very small, such as wrasses and juveniles, as compared to West Dog. We swam by the coral trees on our way out. I found those to be very cool. They mostly had staghorn coral on them. After that we drove to Savannah Bay and ate lunch on the boat. After lunch we swam to the beach and made our way to the salt lake with Gaz and Beth. Along the way Beth told the group about how termites were very nutritious, so she gave me one and I ate it. We got to the dry salt lake and walked around a bit. Then after that we had a race between the Sea Monkey and Sea Dragon to see who could make it back to the boat the fastest and the Sea Dragon won sadly, so my boat got to go last at dinner. When we got we had a little time to prepare our projects. At 5 we all met at the commissary and presented our projects to Doc, Casey, Jeff, Gaz, Beth, and Becca. Right after that we all went down to the beach and ate dinner. After dinner I had to act out a leatherback sea turtle coming from the sea and laying eggs as punishment for loosing a dive slate underwater. Overall I found today to be a great learning experience and a very enjoyable day.
