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