2017

Synopsis Today was the start of the more scientific and experimental part of this trip. As a group, Jack Bandiera, Patrick Keyes, and I put our hypothesis to the test. To start off, we followed accordingly to our planned procedure in which we searched for three different staghorn corals of different health and compared the amounts of fish that interacted...

Synopsis: We woke up exhausted from yesterday's dives, but we pushed through.  Our taxi driver glen drove us to the boats where we were put to work lifting the tanks into position and getting out gear ready.  Today we started our project dives. Our project is determining if there is a relationship between the percent of healthy staghorn coral to...

My second day at Guava has been great. We started the day off with a filling breakfast served by our seniors, at 7:45. Our pal Glen picked us up at 8:30 to take us to the boats so that we could start our second journey out into the clear blue ocean that surrounds our island. I boarded the boat...

Today we conducted our research projects and tested our hypothesis during our dives at both sides of Ginger island to see if parrot fish visit "cleaning stations" - an area in the coral reefs with dense groups of cleaner fish that remove parasites and other harmful organisms from larger fish - less frequently than other fish. From our dives,...

We woke up at 7:15 for breakfast at 7:45 in another groups cabin. After breakfast we went back and Grabbed our scuba gear for the project dives.  The two dive sites we went to were Ginger steps and Ginger's backside.  One of my favorite parts of the trip so far is traveling out to the dive sites because of...

Woke up around 5 a.m. to a blistering hot room. Got up and cleaned for our cabin for the breakfast we were going to serve at 7:45. Totally didn't wait for any chaperones and didn't say a prayer before we ate so oops. Got on the boat around 9 and went to a very wavy dive site. My first...

Today was the first day of our project dives with the first site having these massive waves that made me and several others feel sick immediately with us going to snorkel immediately. We went out very far with the sea floor right below us being barely visible and seeing very brown and looked like dead or dying or coral...

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....

Today the two dives we took were geared toward for our project, which is determining if a larger diameter in sponges means a faster speed low process of water. To test this we had planned on releasing a tracer dye into the water around the sponge and timing how long the sponge took to start excreting the dye; however,...