Only 2 days left :-(

Hola,

On Saturday for the "Sea Day" only 4 kids showed up. I was actually pretty happy about that, I wasn't in the mood for children. We ended up having sea cucumbers, sea stars, two kinds of conch, hermit crabs, pea crabs, sea biscuits, and sea urchins....it was pretty cool.

Sunday we just worked on our presentations and our posters all day. Yesterday we had to sit through 27 15 minute presentations....it was a long day. We started at 8:30 and got done at 4:30. Some of them were actually pretty interesting. Today we are having 1 person from each project present to the public. Nick is going for our group. Tonight the grade school and high school are putting on a Christmas pageant, I'm pretty excited for that. Tomorrow we have site clean up all morning long to get rid of our stuff and pack and clean up the place. In the afternoon we're hopefully going to go to a beach, but there is a big storm system moving through here, so that might not happen. I just looked at the forecast for Chicago and got severely depressed....I don't want to go home to ice and snow :-(

Tomorrow night "the boys" (the group of locals we hang around with) are throwing us a good bye party on the beach. They are going to grill chicken, lobster, and conch for us....it should be fun. I can't believe there's only 2 days left! Sorry I have no pictures to put up, we haven't been doing much lately. I hope all of you are doing well and surviving the winter weather!!

Love,
Michelle

Shark Dissection!!

This is the lemon shark we dissected. It was a 6 foot pregnant female.

These were the babies. Steve said they were only about half way through gestation. There were 12 babies total.

Hola,

On Wednesday when the fishermen came in, one of them had a 6 foot lemon shark that he had caught. Steve, our director, asked if we could have it for dissection. The fisherman agreed so on Thursday, we got to see a shark dissection. The liver of a shark is HUGE, it makes up 1/3 it's total body weight. The shark was pregnant so we got to see her 12 babies. One of the babies was much smaller than the others which isn't normal, Steve thinks that maybe that baby was in a different state of development than the others. If that's true, we were witness to a scientific breakthrough. We went through the shark's stomach, but there wasn't much in it, only a few small bones. Once Kristine started going through the shark poo I left because it smelled so bad.

During the day on Thursday and Friday we just worked on our papers. Some people went gill netting on Thursday. I didn't go because I think it's mean. They stretch out this net and sharks get stuck in it. A lot of times they die since the need to be moving in order to breathe. It turns out they didn't catch anything so it was a win win situation for me. I ended up turning in my paper a few hours early yesterday and took a nap....it was glorious.

Last night a few of our local friends, Michael, Amyth, Audi, and Conrad threw a party for us. They cooked lobster and conch which was absolutely amazing. I couldn't tell if people were happier about the conch or the fact that there was a couch to sit on (none of us have had a couch to sit on in 3 months).

Today for community outreach we have "Sea Day" for the kids. I am leading one of the snorkels which should be fun. We're also going to have a "touch tank" for them with sea cucumbers and starfish and stuff. There are going to be activities as well that center around turtles which I think will be cool. That's about it for now, I hope all of you are doing well.

Love,
Michelle

DR is winding down

Hola,

The past few days we have been finishing up DR. We were in the field on Monday and Tuesday, but now we are done with data collection so we've all just been writing our papers. On Tuesday we did more beam trawling which was actually very hard this time because most of what we were trudging through was muck up to our knees. In the afternoon we did sand netting again, but this time I think we got a grand total of 5 fish for the whole time, which was pretty disappointing.

For my paper I have to analyze seagrass patches within Bell Sound. I have to compare the density of the patches and then the health of the seagrass within each of those patches. Unfortunately there was only one major patch that I was able to get seagrass samples from, so this comparison should be pretty interesting.

Our paper is due tomorrow, then we have presentations to the class on Monday and presentations to the public on Tuesday. After that we are pretty much done. I can't believe how quickly this went by, it still seems like I just got here.

Last night we had the Conch Invitational Volleyball Tournament. Last time we had a vball tournament people thought it was unfair that a few teams were full of volleyball players so this time Kate (the student affairs person) picked captains and we drew names out of a hat. I got Devon, Britta, and Margaret. We did pretty well in our first game and won like 21-3 or something ridiculous. In our second match we lost pretty badly so we were out. Colby's team (3 men and a baby) won the whole thing. Unfortunately Kyle, the one that gave me so much garbage about beating my team last time, won again, so he's pretty content with himself right now. I told him next time we'll play with real rules and then he'll go down big time.

Sorry this is a short one, but I didn't have much to write about. I hope all of you are doing well.

Love,
Michelle

Church anyone?

This is the church I went to. It had probably 8 rows of pews on each side....each pew could fit 4-5 people.

This is a dog I named Ethel. She hangs out with us at Trench Town (one of the bars) and I, of course, always pet her.

This is down by Regatta, we found some cool shells here.

Hey Everyone,

Yes, you read that title correctly....I went to church yesterday....willingly. Mass started at 5 and was over by 5:40, there were about 20 people there. The priest said most of the mass in English but said the important parts in both English and French (for the Haitians). His homily was about how only God can give you a brand new heart and spirit as well as how pride is the worst sin. I thought that was interesting. He was saying how people shouldn't be arrogant and look down upon other people. He also said that when priests do it, it is worse than when regular people do it since they are "married to God" and when Bishops do it, that is the worst.

On Saturday I was on dock duty for site clean up so I had to scrub the bottom of the boats. It wasn't too bad....you get to be in the water so it is the only job you don't sweat doing. For community outreach I was supposed to be on games with the kids but only like 4 kids showed up so I got put on sand sifting duty. We just got a pile of sand in for the vball court, but it's full of rocks and shells so we have to sift it all.

Sunday I went with a few people to East Bay and Regatta to look for shells. It was fun until I stubbed my toe on a rock and sliced the tip of it off. Don't worry, I cleaned it out 2 hours later when I got back. There were a ton of shells at Regatta...I found some baby conch shells which are quite possibly the cutest things in the world. After that was when I went to church.

Today in the morning I had to help out with mangroves. By the time we were done, Liz and I looked like we had chicken pox from all of the bug bites. It was kind of creepy working in the roots of the mangroves. It's really quite and you can hear when a fish eats something and when the donkeys yell at you. It also rained on us 3 times so that didn't help the spooky feeling dissipate at all. After Liz and I finished the mangroves, we had to walk 2 miles to help the beam trawl people. Once again it rained on us. We tried to take shelter under some "trees" but it was raining too hard so it all came through anyway....so we decided to rough it and walk in the rain. The bugs were no better by the beam trawlers so we all continued to suffer.....it was great.

When we got back from Bell Sound Courtney and I took a walk around town. We haven't been in any of the "fashion stores" so we tried a few out today. They surprisingly have some nice stuff in them. Granted it's $50 for a shirt, but they look pretty nice. They had shoes and accessories and my personal favorite; a palm tree bathroom set complete with rug, toilet rug, and shower curtain. I now know how I am going to decorate my bathroom when I move out.

The Net Finally Came!!

This is a brittle sea star. We saw tons of these today when we were beam trawling.

This is a shrimp. We were finding baby ones when we were beam trawling. The ones we found could fit on your finger tip.

This is a donkey dung sea cucumber. As you can see, it looks like poop. When you pick it up, it gets stressed and squirts water at you.....they're so cool

This is scavenger hunt night. One of the things was guys had to dress in drag, hence Kyle and Scott in my dresses. Another thing was breaking a rule. We killed two birds with one stone because the guys are in drag and a staff member and student were drinking together AND we were in Kyle's room which is also against the rules.....we were awesome.

One of the things we had to take a picture of was someone wearing a cowboy hat. No one has one, but I have one tattooed on my back, so that's what this is.

Another item on the list was a picture with a cop. Sanchez is a cop, but we couldn't find him, so Katie replaced him. We tried to replicate the unibrow and poofed up hat to our best abilities, I think it turned out pretty well.

Hola,

Yesterday the net for beam trawling had not arrived, so we went sand netting instead. It's easy to do but hard to explain, but i will try. Three people string out the net which is 50 m long. Three other people start splashing and running around like 20 or 30 m in front of the net to try to scare the fish to swim towards the net. While the splashers are doing their thing, two people take one end of the net and loop it around to the other side of the net to make a pouch. Then, the person standing by them self starts walking and pulling the net tighter to try to make the pouch smaller. Once the pouch is small, one person dives down and closes the bottom of the pouch and we dump the contents into a bucket. Turns out we're not the best at it. We were really good at catching small fish, but the big ones always got away. I caught a barracuda between my butt and the net when I was on the "make the pouch smaller" job and i threw it in the pouch part, but it ended up getting away. Catherine, our DR teacher, saw a few larger fish burrow under the net to get out, so we like to think that is why the fish got out, not our inability to master sand netting. We did end up catching over 6,000 baby fish. A lot of them died which I was very upset about, so my mission today was to keep everything alive. When I was in charge, we only lost 2 fish so that was nice. Before we left yesterday it started raining while there was still bright sunshine and it made the biggest rainbow I have ever seen. It went from the public dock all the way across the island and you could see it's beginning and end....it was awesome. That little shower set the pace for the day.....it rained on us 3 times over the course of the day in the field.

Wednesday night we had a scavenger hunt for activity night. It was soooooooo much fun. Some of the things we had to take pictures of were a donkey, a horse, a bull, a chicken, people breaking a rule, guys in girls clothing, someone eating either a pickled egg or a pickled sausage (two very popular foods here), and other fun things. My team was Kyle, Katie, Scott, Britta, and myself. We had sooooooo much fun. We couldn't find a cow so we took a picture of milk. We couldn't find a chicken either so we went to the store and took a picture of some chicken tenders. One of the things was we had to take a picture of a famous movie scene. Since we are over achievers, we took several. Kyle and I ate the pickled sausage like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp, we did the scene in the gazebo from Sound of Music (the one with Ralph and Leisle), AND we did Jesus on the cross from Passion of the Christ....

Today the net finally arrived so we got to go beam trawling!!! We caught a TON of invertebrates but not too many fish. Of the inverts, we caught a crab, lots of baby shrimp and lobster, sea cucumbers, snails, slugs, worm things, clams, brittle sea stars, and starfish. To find the shrimp and lobster, you have to go through all of the Laurencia (algae) strand by strand and pull them out. The big ones that we found were only about a centimeter long and the smaller ones were probably half that size. When we were looking through the Laurencia we also found baby lobster and brittle sea stars. The sea stars are supposed to have 5 arms, but we found some with 2 or 3....we're hoping those injuries weren't our fault. Don't worry though, their arms grow back.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I finally found a seagrass bed the other day so I got to do some seagrass analysis. I had to cut 2 patches of seagrass from my quadrat which sounds quite easy, but it wasn't. Because I was wearing my wetsuit, it was really hard to stay under the water (wet suits make you float), and I'm not the best free diver and of course the seagrass was in the deepest place we had gone to. But I did it, don't worry. When I finally got the seagrass, I brought it back to the center and laid it out to dry. Then I had to measure the length and width of each piece as well as weigh every piece. Luckily I only had to do 100....there were probably 500 blades.

We have started a game that is going to go until the end of the semester, it's called assassin. Everyone is assigned a person and they have to "kill" them (by throwing a sock at them) when they are alone with them. Once they kill a person, then they have to kill the person that the now dead person was supposed to kill. Eventually it's between only 2 people. I think it will be fun. Well I think that's it for now. I hope all of you are doing well!

Love,
Michelle

Attack of the Cassiopea

This is pretty much what I look at every day for research. The circular things in the middle and right in the front of the picture are Cassiopeia. They are "upside down jellyfish" that swim around or stay chilling at the bottom.

Hola,

Yesterday we just did transects all day again. We had to walk quite a ways this time.....we weren't too happy. The truck almost got stuck in the road so we had to walk all of our gear the rest of the way....through brush....full of mosquitoes.....and mud. It was great. We actually found a seagrass bed so I had to cut samples of the grass. Then when I got back to the center I had to measure the length, width, and weight of each blade. Turns out that isn't as fun as it sounds.

Today we were supposed to do beam trawling, but our net still hasn't shown up. Instead we did some work with red mangroves in the afternoon. It was high tide so we were up to our knees in muck, but luckily the bugs weren't too bad, the Cassiopeia were. Cassiopeia are small little jellyfish that can shoot pneumatophores (stinging cells) into the water column. I got stung 3 times; once on the back of my knee, once on my thigh, and once in my armpit....it was glorious. I wasn't the only one that got stung, most of us got stung. Don't worry, the stings aren't so bad. They are just kind of annoying. They don't hurt too bad, it's more like a dull sting. In the morning I got to sun bathe which I haven't done in forever, so that was nice.

Right now Termario, one of the local kids (he's 7) is showing me that he knows how to braid hair better than I do. I wish I could show you a picture of what he is doing to my hair. Termario comes around a few times a week. His parents play volleyball on our sand court and he just chills with us. His favorite person is Mitch who is 6'7. It's quite funny to see them walking around together.

Tomorrow we are hopefully starting the beam trawling, if the net shows up that is. When we do that we drag it along the bottom to collect the organisms. Then we record what organisms we caught and let them go (hopefully). That's about it for now. I hope all of you are doing well.

Love,
Michelle

More DR

This is everyone from the school that turned out to watch the bball game. A few locals showed up as well, but they sat on the other side to cheer their team on.

This is our team getting their butts kicked. The high school team all rolled up in a car with the music blaring and got out in what seemed like slow motion. It was at that moment we realized we were doomed.

This is Rachel and I at the invitational dinner. We were clean, it was nice.

This is my gang....everyone's all dressed up. Left to right: Courtney, Britta, Katie, Scott

From left to right: Laura, Kenny, Christina, Erica, Lacey.

Hola,

Thanksgiving dinner was awesome. They made turkey, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, walnut pie, and more. We were all so full after dinner we couldn't move. They definitely did everything they could to make it feel like home.

Friday it was back to the grind. We did more transects that we had to swim 45 minutes to get to.....it was a long day.

Saturday we had our normal things; site clean up, meetings, community outreach. Before community outreach though, our school put together a basketball team to play the local high school's. I don't know what's in the water here, but the high school team was HUGE! We never got an official score, but it was a very little to a ton. We left with a few injuries as well. Mitch sprained his ankle and Gabe banged up his knee. Although we got slaughtered, the game was fun. After that, we had community outreach. I was supposed to be on games with the kids, but since most people in town were on the bball court, only 1 kid came, Nick, and he swam the whole time, so instead the people that were on games ended up setting up for the invitational dinner.

This dinner was for anyone that hadn't been invited to one yet. The only person I actually knew that came was Ganger aka G. He brought his kids and his wife which was nice. We had a nice dinner and then went out. It was a pretty uneventful night.

Yesterday I was on kitchen crew. When you have it on Sunday, you have to cook brunch and dinner for all 40 people. For brunch we made breakfast burritos, muffins, and oatmeal. I made the hashbrowns to go along with the meal, but for some reason they turned blue.....I have no idea what happened. For dinner we made chicken fettucini alfredo. I had to mince 50 cloves of garlic which was awesome. I tried to do it like they do on the Food Network and it actually went pretty well. My fellow crew mates were impressed with my skills. Juston found the recipe for the alfredo but I was in charge of cooking it. It started out a little rocky, there wasn't enough butter.....we had checked the stocks of butter saturday morning, but they ended up using most of it for dinner, so we were a full cup of butter short. But we cooked it anyway. After everything was added, we had something that resembled very think cream of wheat. Even the guy in our group couldn't stir it at that point. So I had to think fast. I decided adding milk should help. We ended up adding 3 boxes of milk (yes, our milk comes with boxes and does not need refrigeration). After that though, it was PERFECT!! I was so proud of that sauce I couldn't stop smiling. Everyone loved our food so it turned out to be a good (but long) day.

This week we just basically have DR. I don't know what we are going to do though, because we don't have a net for our beam trawl (a net is pretty much the only part of it we really need). I really don't want to do transects for another week, but we'll see. I'll keep ya posted. I hope all of you have a good week!

Love,
Michelle

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is where our boat pulled into Ambergris Cay. As you can tell, it's a relatively small boat and the sun was still rising when we got there.

This was today's field trip group. This area was a historical site. It has an old cistern, but I don't have a picture of it.

This was looking out from the area that the pic above this was taken. I just thought this was a really cool pic with the sun coming through the clouds and everything.

This is what sewage looks like. Too bad it's not a scratch and sniff pic....

This is the beach we went to right before lunch.

Here's the whole gang on the beach. There were some amazing waves.

This is the view from the awesome restaurant we went to.

This is what we saw the whole boat ride home. This part is shallower so there weren't as many waves, but there were white caps for most of the way......it was an awesome roller coaster.

Hey Everyone,

I hope all of you are having a wonderful turkey day!! Today I got to go to Ambergris Cay. We took a boat that left at 5:30 this morning. It is the boat that takes workers everyday from South to go to Ambergris for the day, then it comes back at 4:30. We got to Ambergris a little after 6 this morning and were met by the daughter of the owner of the Island. Her name was Lindsey and she's a naturalist. We also met the other naturalist on the island, TJ, who actually went to SFS on South Caicos (the same program I'm on now). They took us on a tour of the island showing us the power plant, the water purifying center, the sewage treatment center, all of the major development areas, a beach and a really nice restaurant. The power for the island is generated by 2 generators. Only one runs at a time and every 48 hours the generators switch automatically. They have a desalinization plant for the water and they use reverse osmosis to purify it. We also got to see a "state of the art" sewage treatment plant that uses membranes to filter the sludge instead of just letting it settle. Turns out sewage smells really bad.

They have created a few lagoons by blasting apart the rock with dynamite. I was not too happy to hear about this. They did, however, survey the areas before they blasted them away so they could replant all of the vegetation that was on the destroyed part. Ambergris is home to the very rare Rock Iguana, some of which used to live on the areas they blasted. To save the iguanas, the naturalists collected all of the iguanas they could find and kept them for 2 days before re-releasing them. They also showed us an area that they are going to clear to make a marina. They are going to use the same blasting technique used for the lagoons to make the marina and then take all of that rock to fill in part of the island. They say they are "only losing a few reefs" and that they will "transplant the reefs" but I don't know how successful that is. They are making an effort to replant things by adding mangroves and seagrass, so that's good at least.

After the tour of the island, we got to go to an AWESOME beach. There were huge waves that people were body surfing on. I chose to lay out and get a tan since I'm in a full length wet suit everyday, I don't get much sun anymore. After the beach they took us to an amazing restaurant. They had a bar but we weren't allowed to order anything with alcohol, so we all got pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris. We were served a gourmet meal with real waiters. They put our napkins in our laps, poured our drinks and everything. The seats had cushions on them which was pretty awesome. None of us wanted to leave. After our meal, we barely made the boat in time to get back, but we did, don't worry. Turns out some people can't eat and then get on a bumpy boat ride. No one actually puked, but some were hanging their heads over the side. I chose to look at the boat ride as a roller coaster, so Courtney and I rode the whole way back with our hands up.....it was pretty amazing. We got back around 2 this afternoon.

Yesterday we did a record number of transects in record time. We left at 8:45 and got back at 4:30, taking like an hour lunch break, but we got 7 full transects for each team in. In the morning we were only planning on getting 4 done per team, but we got 5 instead. In the afternoon we did a transect in 15 minutes which was monumental. The first day it took us a full hour to do one transect. On the way to the last two transects, A baby (2 foot) lemon shark came within like 4 feet of me which was really cool. I can handle the babies, it's the ones that are as big as me that get me. So we counted up how much swimming we do in one day for these transects, and came up with a rough estimate of 3500 m which is roughly 2 miles. Anyone want to race when I get back?

Last night for activity night we had Casino Night. We had paper money all with different pictures of the staff on it which was pretty cool. We all started out with $2,000 and could play a variety of games; craps, blackjack, texas hold em, poker, or keno. There was also a "lucky/unlucky card" draw thing where you could either win or lose money. I played all of the games except for poker and texas hold em since I don't know how to play either. I ended up having $3990 at the end of the night and was in 9th place with earnings. The top 16 earners got prizes. The first six winners got to choose between a shark fishing trip, doing a load of laundry, and going wake boarding. The next 10 winners either got a treat (chocolate or ice cream) or a freshwater shower. I chose the shower.

Because of the holiday and our field trip this morning, Catherine gave us the afternoon off which was sooo nice. We don't really get to enjoy it though because we have a paper due tomorrow. I'll take writing a paper over more transects any day though, so I'm happy. I hope all of you are doing well and have a happy Thanksgiving!!

Love,
Michelle

Sorry it's been so long

Hey,

Sorry it took me so long to write again. I have been BUSY!!! We started our directed research (DR) projects yesterday. As we were getting ready to go, our instructor, Catherine, informed us that her nickname with her old research group was "Slavedriver". Had she mentioned this when all of the projects were presented to us to pick, I would not have chosen to be with her. For the next 3 weeks we are supposed to leave at 8:30 in the morning and get back at 5:30 in the evening....we have to bring our lunches.

So yesterday since it was the first day, we didn't head out to Bell Sound until 9:30. It was a cold, overcast, windy day. We have to lay 100 m transect lines and do a 1 x 1 m quadrat every 10 m. Each transect has to be laid 200 m apart from the last one. Because we have no boat (John's DR group is using it) and no truck (only one is working right now), we have to swim and walk everywhere. The original plan was to do 10 transects in each of 12 areas (each area being about 5 square km). After yesterday, Catherine decided we may only get to 4. Anyways, so we were doing our transects and we were cold, and we kept getting waves in the face, and we kept losing things because we had to carry everything (2 quadrats, 2 tape measures, 3 buoys, slates, mask, fins, and snorkel) to each transect. I lost my snorkel, one girl lost her slate with all of her information on it, Kyle, our TA, lost the thermometer, and the other girl in my group lost our algae sample. All in all, yesterday was terrible and we were all regretting our project choice.

Today has been much better. We got dropped off on the other side of the Sound so we didn't have to swim (Christina and I attempted it yesterday, got about 1/2 way in a half hour and decided it wasn't worth it) to the other side of the Sound. The waves were much better on this side, and although it was raining when we started, but late morning it was bright sunshine. This afternoon we are going back out to do more transects, hopefully in the second area. Well, that's about it for now, have a happy Thanksgiving!!

Love,
Michelle

Field Exercises are finally over!

Hey,

Yesterday was quite the day. In the morning we went seahorse hunting in Bell Sound. Turns out the water there is FREEZING. None of us wore our wetsuits because we figured the shallow water (3 feet-ish) would be relatively warm. Well we were horribly wrong. We all had goosebumps and chattering teeth by the time we were done. We started out by using quadrats. Ours were 1m x 1m squares made with PVC. There were strings strung on the inside of the PVC to make a grid (10 x 10 squares). You swim along and randomly place the quadrat over the substrate and, using the string squares, estimate percent cover for each type of substrate. We mostly saw seagrass, macro algae, and sand but we were looking for those plus sponges, coral, and turf algae. After we did that, we swam around for a half hour looking for seahorses. Unfortunately no one in our group saw any. Only one group the entire day saw a seahorse which was kind of sad. I think because of our disappointing morning, the professors decided to spice things up in the afternoon.

In the afternoon we went on manta tows. We were in pairs and held onto this board that was being dragged behind the boat. As we were being towed, the first 3 minutes we had to count as many Nassau grouper as we saw (we didn't see any) and for the second 3 minutes we had to count conch. It may sound easy, but the board doesn't float on its own so you have to try to tip it up the entire time, otherwise it takes you under the water. Only two groups had problems with this: mine and my friend Katie's. It was very entertaining. After that, we did behavioral observations. We had to pick a surgeonfish and a parrotfish (one at a time) and follow each for 10 minutes, marking down every time they took a bite of something. Apparently fish are incredibly hungry organisms because in those 10 minutes, both our fishes took over 200 nibbles of things. We ended up losing our surgeonfish twice so we had to start over. We stayed with our parrotfish the whole time, but he did NOT like the fact that we were following him. It reminded me of Dori in Finding Nemo when Marlin is following Dori at the beginning 'cuz she said she saw a boat. But anyways, our parrotfish kept darting around and hiding under ledges, but we stayed with him.

Last night we finally got to go turtleing. Turns out I will never go again. We saw a turtle within like 5 minutes of jumping in the water and chased it for a good 10 minutes, but when Devon, our staff member, dove down to get it, the turtle bolted and we lost him. After that we were lost and Devon couldn't figure out how to get back to the boat. Katie and I took charge and lead us back, but not before Devon had us swimming all over the place. Because we spent the rest of the time trying to get back to the boat, we didn't get a turtle. One of the groups did get a turtle though so when we got back to the boat, there was a turtle on there for us to see. To keep them calm, you lay them on their backs. We had to wait for the third group to get back because they were chasing a turtle for 20 minutes before they lost it. When they came back, their staff member, Christine, had caught a baby nurse shark so we got to see a week old shark up close. Once everyone was on the boat, we "worked up" the turtle. We took down his tag numbers and different measurements of his shell. At this point I felt bad for the turtle and wanted to throw him back. He did not like being handled and tried to bite and smack everyone that came near him. People were getting their pictures taken with him, but I just wanted him to get back home. (I now know I could never do any testing on animals, even if it helps them in the long run....I just feel too bad). After the turtle was finally put back in the water I was happier and we got to touch the shark which was cool. It was a little boy and director Steve said he was between a week and a month old. It was the smallest shark all of us had ever seen. Only Steve had seen sharks smaller than that one. After we let the shark go, we came back, it was like 10:00 pm.

Today we just had a study day. Turns out I have a massive case of senioritis and am having a hard time studying. Don't worry mom, I'll end up studying eventually. I just have 3 more tests to go in my college career!!! Well, that's about it for now.

Love,
Michelle

Second Invitational Dinner

This is my gang on the invitational dinner night. From left to right: Britta, Courtney, Katie, Scott, and Colby
This is me and Nick all dressed up.

This is Alyssa, Britta, and I after we put on normal clothes and went out.

Hola,

On Saturday we had an optional deep water snorkel. I did not go so I could get my literature reports done. That turned out to be a good decision because everyone froze their butts off and they didn’t see much. One group saw a reef shark and we all know how I reacted to that last time, so I am happy with my decision to stay and do work. Saturday night we had an invitational dinner for government employees. The only people that I actually knew that showed up were Sanchez, one of the policemen, and Michael, one of the firemen. The speaker that was supposed to come ended up not being able to get a flight, so we had no speaker.

Yesterday we finished up our paper for our aquaculture project. Some of us also attended a softball game. Three students (Mitch, Gabe, and Steve) and one staff member (Kyle) play with the locals on Sundays. This was the first time I went and it was hilarious. There was a guy that was like 80 years old and he was amazing. Then there was Sanchez, who is probably late 20’s early 30’s and he tried to copy how your typical major leaguer plays the game, but he was awful, it was quite entertaining. Almost every game ended with a yelling match. All of the guys that play are Dominican so there was a lot of Spanish flying around. Turns out they don’t teach you enough Spanish slang in school….I didn’t know a single word that came out of any of their mouths. Gabe ended up splitting his pants during the first game, but continued to play 3 others after that (each game is only 3 innings).

Today we finally had our field exercise with John. We had to lay 4 30 m transects with a tape measure. For the first two I had to note the substrate cover at every 50 cm. If you do your math right, you can see that that adds up to 60 different tallies for each transect….it helped me learn that I do not want to do scientific research for the rest of my life. For the second two transects I had to count parrotfish, surgeonfish, and damsel fish in a 5 m radius of where I was on the tape. That was better, but the trick with that one was we had to do it in 10 minutes exactly. Turns out that is an INCREDIBLY long time to do it in….I probably could have completed it in 2 minutes, but that would create biased data so we had to do it very slowly.

Tomorrow we get to go look for seahorses which I’m pretty excited about. I do not know exactly how we will be doing it, but I haven’t seen a seahorse since I’ve been here so I’m looking forward to it. Wednesday we have a study day with a possible snorkel lined up, then Friday through Tuesday we have finals, then it’s DR time from there on out. Well, that’s about it, I hope all of you are doing well!!

Love,
Michelle

PRESENTATIONS ARE DONE!!!

This is Catdog, the resident pet. He was curled up sleeping during activity night, it was cute. I have not gotten hives from this cat, so I think I'm just allergic to American cats.

This is one of the giant moths that flies around. Scott is on the left....he's very photogenic. That's Kenny's hand just to give you a reference as to how gynormous these moths are. It may look innocent there, but not when it's flying 50 mph at your face.

Hola,

As you can probably tell from the title of this blog, my presentations are finally over!!! I don't know how we did yet, but the presentations seemed to go well. We still have several assignments due on Monday and Tuesday, but they aren't group work so I'm incredibly happy. We do have one paper left to write for one of our projects, but we figured out a way to write it to keep us all sane.

We were supposed to go on a deep water snorkel on Wednesday, but one of the boats was taking on water so we couldn't go. Instead, we are doing that tomorrow (hopefully). We have community outreach tomorrow as well, but I don't know what I'm doing for that yet. Tomorrow night we are having an invitational dinner with all law enforcement people. This means that the very entertaining police chief will be back with his sidekick, Sanchez. It turns out Sanchez is pretty fun, we've seen him out at the bars a few times and he always comes up to talk to us.

I don't know if I've ever told you guys about our resident cat; Catdog. He hangs around Marta (the staff person from Italy). Marta has been at a conference all week so Catdog has been very lonely. He's been begging all of us for food, following us everywhere, and trying to get us to pet him. Speaking of pets, I haven't seen Josie lately. I'm very worried about her. I did, however, find another awesome dog. We named this one Franklin. He looks like a golden retriever and he's a sweetheart. Yesterday he came with us for part of our run, then I realized he had a gimpy leg so we stopped and he laid down, it was cute.

If you can't already tell, I really don't have much to talk about. We've just been working our butts off on our projects. In our free time we've been tanning and just putzing around. Oh, for those of you who don't know, I got the internship at the Shedd Aquarium that I had applied for. I start January 8th and I'll be working in the marine mammals department. Other than that, there's not too much going on. I hope everyone is doing well!!

Love,
Michelle

Ding Dong the Roach is Dead!!!

Hey Everyone,

So Evelyn, my very brave roommate, killed the roach (with a dustpan and my flip flop 'cuz it was THAT BIG) that had been living in our bathroom since the day I found it in my pants. Needless to say, I was very grateful and offered to buy her some candy. I don't know why it started, but the bugs are out in force. The moths that are the size of birds have taken residence under the benches around the complex. One flew at my head today....during the day!! It probably has rabies. There are also giant beetle things with pinchers that even the director had never seen before. One of these giant beetles was standing guard at the door to my room, not letting anyone in, including me. So Devynn, another one of my very brave roommates, saved the day by attacking it with a broom. The "Belongers" have noticed the ridiculous amount of bugs so a man is driving his pick up truck around spewing some sort of insecticide into the air. I'm sure it's really healthy for everyone. We all try to not breathe as long as possible when he comes around.

Our window has not been fixed so every time it rains, I also get a shower. I love waking up on the lake, but not when it's in my room :-/ The reason our window hasn't gotten fixed is because Alan, the site maintenance guy, has been busy repairing the boats. They are finally going to put the boats back in the water tomorrow so we can go snorkeling!!

All of our projects are coming along nicely. Very soon I will be an expert in conch aquaculture so if any of you want a place to spend some money, let me know. I can advise those interested in growing conch and possibly lobster or grouper. For our ecotourism assignment, my group decided to put a camping ground with cabins and campsites on North Caicos. It actually kind of reminds me of Wildcat Lodge, just on the ocean so there's a few more activities (I'd go if it were a real thing). My ecological footprint paper is done. All of the statistical tests I did just ended up confirming what I had originally thought; students spend the most on airfare and alcohol while they are here. But now that I backed it up with chi squared and z-tests, it's official.

After this week of projects and presentations, we have one more week of classes which should be pretty low key, then we start DR (directed research). I still don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I do know for sure though, that it involves seagrass and Bell Sound. Well I hope everyone is doing well at home.

Love,
Michelle
ps: it's like twice as warm here as it is there....hahahahaha

The Sun is Finally Back!!!!!!!!!

These are pics from Noel, they just show what happens when you leave your boats in the water.

Both the Seafox and Cassiopea broke loose and ended up on the dock by the girls wing. The Cassiopea is under the Seafox here, the pic was taken at night 'cuz it happened at like 8.


This is what John's boat, the Cassiopea looked like after they got the Seafox off of it, John was very upset.


This is the Seafox once they got it out of the water. You can see the holes in the side and the twisted metal on the front of it.

This was the 19. It's mooring line broke from the dock and it ended up getting flipped upside down and getting wedged under the seawall. The steering column and motor both got broken off. We recovered the steering column, but the engine is long gone.

Hey everyone,

The past few days have been pretty busy. We have had classes and projects since Thursday. We have an economic footprint project, ecotourism project to do for our environmental policy class, an aquaculture project to do for resource management, a data collection project for marine resources, a culture reflection, and literature reports all due next Friday. Luckily, today they agreed to push the culture reflection and lit reports back to be due the following Monday.

Thursday afternoon we had directed research time. For our group, we built a beam trawl which we will use to collect fish and invertebrates (don't worry, we'll release them again). To build a beam trawl, we had to bend a metal rod into a 1 m section with 1/2 meter sides. Then we used a table saw and a jigsaw to cut curved pieces of wood so the whole thing will slide easily in the water. We attached the rod to the two wood pieces and once we find a net, we will attach that to the rod so when it's dragged in the water, it will catch all of the organisms that are around. There will also be a chain between the pieces of wood that will actually be the thing dragging along the ground.

This is what a beam trawl looks like, my description wasn't very good.


Yesterday we just had class and then worked on our aquaculture project. Today me, Nick, and Erica visited a processing plant to interview the owner, Jim Baker. He turned out to be really nice and knowledgeable. His office was pretty impressive; he had a leather couch, a big screen tv, 2 computers, a mahogany desk, and a GIANT turtle shell.

For site clean up today, I was on dock duty. Because of the storm, all of our boats are out of the water being repaired so we had to scrub all of them down on the driveway. Some people in our group were in charge of cleaning up the rocks that resulted from the sea wall crumbling. Other people were in charge of moving rocks that are in the water away from our pier area. While we were cleaning the boat, we find a tiny fish living in some of the water pooled up in the back of it. Don't worry, we saved the fish. After site clean up was over, we all (all 27 of us) jumped in the water. Yesterday was the first day we were allowed back in the water so we were all quite happy. We were all going through sea bath withdrawl.

When I woke up this morning, I had a ton of bug bites all over my legs so I think there are bugs in my bed. Don't worry though, I stripped my sheets, shook them out and put bug spray all over my mattress pad. I heard that febreeze kills bugs too so I sprayed some of that as well. It better work 'cuz I don't like the idea of things crawling on me at night. Speaking of which, I found a giant cockroach in my pants the other day (don't ask me how it got there, I'm just as confused as you are). Needless to say I panicked, but all of my roommates were sleeping so I couldn't scream. I handled my nightmare on my own in silence. That roach, however, has now taken up residence in our bathroom so I try to spend as little time in there as possible at night since that's when he decides to come out.

Today for community outreach I am on arts and crafts with the kids. I'm pretty excited because we are painting the leftover coconuts and I absolutely loved that when we did it before. We were supposed to go camping tonight but because of the storm, we are just having a cookout here. Everyone was pretty happy about since we have so much work to do. Well, that's about it for now, I hope you all are doing well.

-Michelle

Happy Halloween!!!

These are some of the coconuts we painted.

This is Gabe, he was hurricane Katrina.

Kyle, one of the interns, was a tennis player.

This was one of the "scary trees" and our painted coconuts.


This is the bar looking amazing.

Katie was a conch boat, Liz was a pencil tree, Danielle was from the 80's, Britta was a rubix cube, and I was someone that just woke up.

Mitch was a palm tree and Steve was a girl with coconuts and a grass skirt.

These are the coconuts I painted. One is a pirate and one is Stewie Griffin from Family Guy.

This is the staff here. They were all sorts of fun things.

Happy Halloween Everyone!!!

So yesterday was just a chill day. We looked at all the damage from the storm; 3 busted boats and several chunks out of the pier. The storm wasn't as bad but the waves were still rough and it was still windy so we couldn't go in the field to do anything. Instead we just had class and then time in the afternoon to plan for the Halloween party and get some work done. I am on the Celebration committee so I was in charge of decorations. We made signs with fun Halloween facts and hung them around. We also put up streamers and fake cobwebs and Halloween lights. I had to go help Kate, the student affairs person collect coconuts yesterday so we could paint coconuts today for Halloween. While we were at East Bay doing that, we found some "scary trees" to put around the place.

Today for our Halloween party we had coconut painting, a Halloween charades game, a costume contest, lots of fun snacks, fun music, and capture the flag. For my costume, I was someone that just got out of bed. I had bed hair, messy make up and I had my pj's on with a sheet wrapped around me. Two of our professors; Richard and John, went as the Cassiopea, one of the boats that got ruined in the storm. Steve, the director of the school, went as a creepy old man and was very successful at it. A few people were sharks, one guy was Hurricane Katrina. When we did our coconut painting, I made a pirate and Stewie Griffin.....they look amazing. Some others were a mouse, a hedgehog, an elephant, some pumpkins, some ghosts, Frankenstein, and a monkey. We still don't know who won the costume contest....I think most people forgot about it.

For class tomorrow, we are giving presentations. My group is presenting on sediment; the basic problem with it, types, sources, and the situation in the Caribbean. I know so much about sediment right now, I could probably bore someone to death. Bottom line though, is it's bad. That's pretty much all you need to know. Well, that's about it for now. I hope everyone had a great Halloween!!!

-Michelle

Tropical Storm Noel

This was on the way to Provo from S. Caicos. As you can see, it's a very small plane. We all thought it was funny that Mitch, Gabe, and Scott all had to cram into the back 3 seats.

This is at the conch farm. This was Sally the girl conch. They have them trained to come out of their shell like that. The boy was named Larry.

This is the storm. The waves were crashing up over the sea wall onto us and the old hotel that's next to ours.

This is our pier, as you can see, the waves are crashing over the boats. One of the boat lines snapped and the staff had to scramble to make sure the boat didn't float away.

This is the wall right in front of where some of the staff live. This is probably one of the smaller waves we saw. I got a picture of one of the bigger waves, but it's really blurry.

Hey everyone,
So we had break from Wednesday to yesterday (Sunday). I went to Provo and met up with Mom and Dad. We had a lot of fun. We did a lot of shopping and eating and we went to the conch farm as well. Dad and I wanted to go parasailing and kayaking but they said it was too windy. Which brings me to my next point, we are in the process of getting hit by tropical storm Noel!!!

Last night the pouring rain started as did the howling winds. Our window did not get fixed over break so we woke up to a pond on our floor this morning. During class today the power went out so we had to postpone things until the ceiling in the classroom stopped leaking and the power came back on. There are puddles inside every room here, turns out the roofs all leak. The power came back on after about an hour so it was a nice little break.

We were supposed to be doing a field exercise today and tomorrow, but that has been postponed since the waves are like 8 feet high. Instead of doing work, most of us have been taking pictures and videos of the storm, it's pretty exciting.

Other than the storm, there's not too much going on. We have classes for the next two weeks and then another set of finals, then we get to do our directed research projects for the rest of the time. I hope all of you are doing well!!

-Michelle