Busy, Busy Day!

Good evening everyone! Today was an extremely busy day here at the research center. To start off, for breakfast I had banana bread, mmm :) After breakfast we had lectures all morning! The first one was "Ecological Concepts of Marine Protected Areas", where I learned the life cycles of Lobster, Conch, and Fin-fish (don't worry, I am discontinuing the scientific names after each organism, at least until I can start naming some fish!). After that lecture we had an hour break to study for our ID exam today. Following the break was another lecture on Social Traps, which isn't really biology related...it is more an environmental concept (totally does not hold my attention). The morning seemed to go by soooo slow, but eventually it was lunch time, and shortly after it was time for me to head down to the dock for my exam.

I have been studying my butt off, so I was really pumped to head out and take the test. I had one of the intern's here as my teacher, and she just swam around randomly pointing to 20 organisms, and then I would right it down on my underwater slate. I knew every single one she pointed at (at least I think), and I'm pretty sure I spelt it all correctly as well. We find out in the next few days how we did, so I will keep you all posted! :) Tomorrow, we start learning the scientific names of all of the fish, I can't wait for that! Anyway, I am super bummed about what I'm about to tell you next, but I'm going to tell you all anyway. So all of us cannot fit on one boat, so we take separate boats out to the snorkel site. On the way back from the site, my group had reached the dock and we noticed the other boat going in a different direction. Come to find out, they saw a HUGE tiger shark in the clear water and were following it! It was about 12 feet long (almost 3 times the size of me!) and it was so thick that the students on the boat said they wouldn't be able to wrap their arms around it! I am SO jealous that I wasn't on that boat! Not only are tiger sharks rare to see here (none of the staff who has been here for 2 years has seen one), but on a boat would be the most ideal situation to actually see it (because who really wants to be in the water with that? LOL). I guess they were all sticking their heads in the water with their masks to get a closer look, and they were only about 2 feet away from it! One of the students said it looked like a great white shark. Ahhhh, it makes me so mad!!! But at the same time, I'm a little nervous to dive tomorrow, haha! Mom don't worry, I dive with the Dive Safety Officer, and I already told him if we see anything I will be hiding behind him the entire time!

Once everyone was back from our exams and the exciting shark encounter, which they would not stop talking about :( most of us did some homework readings for a little bit and then headed down to the dock again to tan and swim to cool off. It felt great! Dinner rolled around, and after that I did a little more reading, and once it got really dark here a group of us went out to night snorkel! This was my first time doing this, and it was absolutely amazing! It is so crazy how much different the sea critters are compared to during the day. Here is a list of everything I saw: a baby squid, an octopus (very beautiful green/turquoise color and then it would camouflage with the rocks), a ton of  spiny lobster, a sea conch jumping across sand, upside down jellyfish, a huge puffer fish, a tiny sea cucumber, weird snakey things (none of us knew what they were, they looked very alien-like), a ton of sleeping fish, a lot of various anemones (very colorful), and plenty of sea urchins. I took some pictures, but it is a disposable camera so I won't have them until I get back, however, one of the students has a digital camera so I will put up a few pretty pictures so you all can see! :)

I had a pretty successful and fun day! Like I said earlier, tomorrow I get to dive again, so I hope I see some more cool stuff! I'm going to end it here so I can stop procrastinating and finish my readings due tomorrow. Have a good night everyone!

 So beautiful, huh?

 Can you see it?

 Gorgeous!

:D