Adam Holtz '16

Today was my last day in the BVI and my last as a student in the Jesuit Marine Biology program. Because we had finished our research projects yesterday, the only thing left for us to do was our service project. This year, we decided to clean up boat wreckage on a beach. The boat itself crashed during a hurricane...

Today we set out to finish our research projects. As I mentioned on one of my prior blogs, we had to modify our initial blue tang behavior project. Now, our project focuses on what generally defines a shallow reef as healthy or unhealthy. For this project, we came up with three criteria: herbivore population, algae coverage, and coral bleaching...

Necker Island is a private piece of land owned by Sir Richard Branson, the owner of the Virgin companies. Today, the marine biology 2 class received a chance to visit his island for the first time since the marine biology program began at Jesuit. Upon docking, we were greeted by an iguana who decided to cross the road before...

Today we explored a ship wreck, faced down sharks, and observed turtles in the sea grass. To begin our day, we dove the Rhone, a British ship once thought to be unsinkable. As with the Titanic, the Rhone in fact proved to be sinkable and fell at the hands of a hurricane in the late 1800s. During our dive,...

Today we went on two dives, one for fun and the other for our research projects, my group's focusing on the relationship between blue tang behavior and reef health. Our first dive was on wreck alley where we explored two sunken boats that were both artificial reefs. Swimming around the first boat, I saw a lionfish for the first...

Blue skies, sunny beaches, curious fish, and friendly people: all signs indicating that I am back in the BVI. After the long flights and wait times in DFW and San Juan, Puerto Rico, we finally landed in Tortola yesterday and were warmly greeted by Casey and Jeff of Dive BVI. Following the cordialities, we were taken by boat to...

Today was our last day in the British Virgin Islands. We had completed all of our diving for the week and we decided to spend the day by cleaning a beach near an airport. When I arrived at the beach, I was surprised by the overwhelming amount of trash in the area. Fishing nets, buckets, boat parts, cans, bottles,...

Today was the day we had all been waiting for, the day we would finally conduct our coral transplantation. To begin the process, we traveled out to Long Bay and gathered chunks of staghorn coral from the area. The reason we were gathering coral from Long Bay was that most of the coral there had been damaged by anchors,...

On day three, we practiced turtle tagging after listening to a lesson from Dr. Gore. During her presentation, we learned about several types of turtles such as green sea, hawksbill, and leatherback turtles. For example, we learned that leatherback turtles can grow up to six feet in length, and that the turtles we'd be catching in the BVI would...