7/14/16
Today my cabin hosted breakfast which consisted of cereal, yogurt, muffins, and fruit. Before breakfast however a couple of chickens took interest in us and walked around our porch with us. After breakfast we met Dr. Gore from ARK to give us a presentation about sea turtles and how to catch and tag one since that was what we were doing today. No one really knows how long sea turtles live so for all I know I would be trying to catch a 100 year old turtle. That shouldn’t be to hard. My group went to catch sea turtles first. We had a short boat ride to Little Dix beach and quickly got into the water in groups of three to search for sea turtles. I quickly saw two different turtles within 5 minutes of getting in the water and both times I would get close to catching one someone would make a bunch of noise trying to move quickly and scare the turtle away. At first I thought I could out swim a sea turtle because I’ve never seen one move quickly. I was horribly mistaken and they took of like a torpedo when they got away. After about an hour of everyone only having two people helping each other and having no success we decided to all become on group and after about five minutes of chasing one turtle as a large group we were able to surround one and catch it. After we got the turtle on board for tagging we saw another turtle and me and one other person jumped off to catch it. We were unable to catch it because you need to have multiple people to catch one turtle. After we were done tagging the turtle we went back to the marina and had lunch. It was pretty good. After lunch my group went to Savannah beach to look at different invertebrates. The different ones we looked at were sea urchins, sea slugs, starfish, and a fireworm. The only way I can describe a fire worm is that it’s a red cactus that moves through the ocean. I learned that not all urchins are venomous and that they actually move from place to place slowly. We snorkeled around for awhile and I saw some squids that changed color kind of like chameleons to blend into the ocean floor. After snorkeling we played some team games on the beach and then had delicious lasagna for dinner.
