Today, we ate breakfast at the seniors house. We had cereal and juice again. After breakfast we left for the harbor and prepared to start our experiments. Our experiment was to determine if different colors would affect if fish would come into a designated area with food in it or not. We had a blue, yellow, and red shirt along with our control which was no shirt. Once we arrived at the dive site we began constructing the designated area with PVC pipes. After we made the squares out of the PVC pipes, we got our gear on and descended to the bottom. On the ocean floor at about 25 feet we placed the squares and continued to set up the rest of the materials. One square had just tuna fish in it, which was our control, and the other had the blue t-shirt with tuna fish in it. We waited about 2 minutes and then started recording. After the 5 minute span were we video tapped the fish, the fish avoided the blue shirt, and mainly ate at the square without any color. We repeated the steps with the two other shirts and at the end of the dive we that the fish were more likely to eat from the square with either no shirt, or a lightly colored shirt. Once we recorded all of our data, we had a few snacks and left for a coral nursery that is managed by Dive BVI. At the coral nursery we cleaned the stands that supported the coral and also cleaned the coral that was eventually going to be part of a larger coral community. Then we got out of the water and headed over to the salt ponds. The salt ponds are basically natural barriers that prevent erosion and silt from leaking into the ocean and suffocating coral. The ponds were almost completely dried up because of the current drought the BVI is going through. Once we left the salt ponds we headed back to Virgin Gorda, where we had burgers for dinner. After dinner we did a night snorkel. By far, I think this was the most interesting thing we have done. We got all of our snorkel gear and a flashlight and headed into the water. In the water we looked around giant boulders to find lobster, squids, and even octopi. While I was swimming in between two boulders I noticed a 4 foot nurse shark on the ocean floor. I approached the shark and it began to move, but I continued to swim along side it. Then once the shark vanished into the darkness, we began feeding the coral. Mini krill were attracted to the flashlight and we were shining it on the coral they would hit the coral and immediately be sucked up. The night snorkel was one of my favorite activities so far.
