Once again another early morning, we headed off to breakfast and had the same cereal and cold honey buns. After breakfast we headed out to the docks with Glenn the taxi driver, and got all our gear ready for the dives. We hopped on the boat with both our tanks and headed out for our first site, Gingers Steps. This was the first of our project dives and we were on a mission to find a relationship between algae and number and diversity of fish, in specific damselfish, parrotfish, and wrasse. On our first dive we went down to around 40-60 ft and setup our grid and recorded video. We were able to identify plenty of fish, including some rainbow parrotfish, blue parrotfish, and yellow head wrasse, but also we saw sharks, dog snappers, angelfish, and trumpetfish. Once we got up to the surface our boat headed off to the next side just around the side of the island, called Gingers Backside. After dropping anchor we changed tanks and started our dive down to the corals. Once again we saw a vast array of fish including more trumpetfish, stoplight parrotfish, bluehead wrasse, and large samples of coral like staghorn, fire, elkhorn, and brain. As of now we are able to see that there is an indirect correlation between algae and the diversity and number of fish, supporting our hypothesis. If treated properly we can see how coral is such a beautiful part of the oceanic ecosystem. After finishing of our dives and collecting all our data we ate some lunch, just a pb&j for me and then we headed over to the Baths. We joined up with our dive instructors and went on the hike through the park, which I can say is quite easily one of the coolest places I have ever been. We learned about some of history and backgrounds of the name and then we hopped into the ocean and snorkeled back to our beach by the casas. On the way we were able to see and identify 2 massive sea urchins and a lot of other smaller fish swimming in schools. Coming back from the snorkel we went to the commissary to eat some spaghetti and meatballs, and then headed to the beach for a late night sunset and some frisbee. After beach time we headed back to the commissary and watched “Chasing Corals”, a Netflix documentary nominated for many awards. It was well worth our time and gave me insight into the world of coral and how warming in the ocean impacts of half of the world’s coral. Wrapping up I’m sat here writing my blog getting ready to head off to bed and hit the hay.
In the pictures, you can see a shark, a rainbow parrotfish, and a yellow jack.
