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