My first test

Just to give everyone an idea of how hot it is. The last line of this apparatus tells the temperature. This was taken around noon time.

This is a skink. It's the little lizard that we see everywhere. This is the kind that was in our room on like the 3rd day. They can change their color

This was at Ballers. Scott is the guy, the girl in the back is Britta and the girl in pink is Evelyn, the birthday girl

This is still at Ballers. The girl on the left is Danielle, the guy in blue is Steve, the girl in white is Rachel, Britta is in the green and Mitch is in red.

This is at Ballers again. Katie is in red, Juston is in orange, Gabe is the guy in red, Ashley is the girl in the back, Danielle is the one with her tongue out and Rachel is in white.

Hola,

So yesterday I had my first id test in the water. We ended up going to two places; around our pier and then to Moxybush Cay. For the test our TA swam around and we followed him with our underwater slates and pencils. When he pointed something out, we had to write the scientific name, spelled correctly, and we also had to write a higher taxonomic group. I got a 99% because I spelled two things wrong. I also had to give a presentation on seagrass for my resource management class and we all had to write a paper about our first impressions of the culture on the island for my environmental policy class. After dinner we all played a game of human checkers. I was on the black team. Because we have so many people here, we had 15 people from each team start out on the board. Two additional people from each team were the "strategists" while another person from each team was a time keeper (that's what I did). Our team ended up losing after an hour long battle.....it was madness. Oh, and the catch was, if you got kinged, you had to carry someone on your back to show it.

Yesterday was Evelyn's (one of my roommates) birthday so after all of the days activities, we went out to two bars. The first was Trench Town which is basically a hole in the wall and the second was Ballers' which is a dance club kind of thing. It was so hot in Ballers that most of us ended up chilling outside for a lot of the time.

Today we had the highly anticipated "conch lab" where we knock a conch (get it out of its shell) then kill it and skin it. My conch was a male, I forgot to name it though. In order to break through the shell, you have to use the back of a hammer in between the 2nd and 3rd row of spikes. Once you make the hole, you grab onto the perculum, which is what they use as a defense, to prevent them from curling up entirely into their shell. After you have a hold of them, you stick a knife into the hole you made to cut the tendon that hooks them to the shell. Once the tendon is cut, you pull the entire thing out. After it was out, we recorded whether it was a boy or a girl then we dismembered it by cutting off the section with all of its organs. There is a part of it (basically the pancreas) that some people eat because they think its an aphrodisiac. It's basically a long slimy tube filled with neon greenish yellow stuff (digestive enzymes). I chose not to eat mine, but some people ate it. They said it tasted like salt. John, our teacher, said some people also eat the verge (or male apparatus, if you know what I mean) for the same reason. Only Scott was brave enough to eat it. He said it didn't really taste like anything. After you cut off the organs, then you have to cut off the eyes and foot, then skin it. We are going to eat them on Sunday.

This is my beautiful queen conch (Stromus gigas) before I killed it.

This is me making the hole in my shell. No, all of that juice on the pier is not from me, that was from people before me. I should have taken a picture of the conch out of its shell, but I forgot.

It doesn't look like Ingrid came anywhere close to us, so it's still really hot and humid. It has been raining a little bit every night though which is good. Today was only supposed to be 85 but considering the fact that it was 82 at 7:30 this morning, I think the weather people are liars.

Well, that's about it for now. I hope all of you are doing well.