Connor Beach '12

After participating in our last dive yesterday, today consisted of community service and reflection over the week. We woke up this morning and took our taxi to to the marina to help clean up the VISAR boathouse. VISAR stands for Virgin Islands Search And Rescue. We cleaned out the boathouse, scrubbed the boat, the actual boathouse,...

This morning we woke up to the sound of raindrops and Mr. Kirby knocking on our door. My roommates and I had slept in. We went down to our taxi to begin the day! We went out to Mountain Point and did a practice dive just to get the hang of where we were going to...

This morning, we woke up and went directly to the marina to get started on a long day. We had two dives this morning followed by lunch on Cooper Island, and in the afternoon, we snorkeled off the coast of Cooper Island. In our first dive, we dove a wreck site for the first time, and learned...

This morning, we broke routine by taking a day off from diving. Instead, we learned about a transect that we were going to be doing. A transect, in this case, is a 100 meter section of a coral reef that we as a class will be studying. We will be counting the different species of fish...

This morning, our second day in the British Virgin Islands, we got to sleep in, but not by much. As we went down to meet up with everyone, it seemed like everybody was waiting on us. Will Schneider, Alec Sellick, and I approached the group and we realized that we were waiting on our friend and brother,...

It's the fourth of July! And it's my first time to celebrate it outside of the United States. How did we celebrate, by scuba diving in paradise. After a day of travel, we all got a good night's rest, and woke up to head over to breakfast. We had breakfast and spent the morning in class,...

It's the final day in a classroom, and it is buzzing with excitement. This Sunday we leave to study organisms in paradise. Today, we started off class listening to two more presentations on articles. The first was about the Blenny fish. The Blenny fish has adapted and evolved to have the ability to not only swim...

Today, we began class finishing up our shark dissections. Hector and I studied the shark's brain. We then went back to the classroom to discuss a couple of articles that we read last night. The first presentation was about echolocating porpoises. We learned how these porpoises use supersonic screeches to find their away around...

Today's class dove right into discussion about the Indonesian Mimic Octopus. My classmates, Rob and Nick, talked to us about how these octopi can change their shape and color to mimic other species. It's top layer of skin is transparent which allows for it to change color. It is able to mimic lion fish, flounders, and...