Cabin Fever

Alright, I have no idea why blogger decided to delete my post from earlier today, so here we go again.

It's been raining here for the past four or five days, so the water quality isn't so great (in terms of particles in the water, not bacteria - this isn't California, after all). As a result, I have no new underwater shots.

On Sunday, one of my classmates found a couple of kittens swimming in the water near the docks. According to some accounts, the kittens sort of toddled in on their own, while others say someone dumped them, but either way they're now safe and sound with us. They're two females, both calico, and look to be about 5 weeks old. We decided to name the one with more grey on her head Ma'ao ("crazy" in Tahitian, since she's the more rambunctious of the two), and the one with more orange on her head Ma'o ("shark" in Tahitian). It's mostly become an exercise in how not to name virtually identical cats, because we keep getting them mixed up. A few of the people here at the station have come forward to say that they'll take the kittens once we get them spayed, so at least we know they'll go to good homes.

This is a picture of Ma'ao, who was napping on my lap when I first wrote this post. Her nose is a little dirty because she had misjudged a jump down from a step a little earlier and had instead done a rather bewildered faceplant into the mud.

Aside from rescuing kittens, we've mostly been spending our time indoors for the past few days because of the torrential rains. I did get a little more kayaking and snorkeling in during the lulls of the storm, but the rest of the time has been taken up with writing research project proposals, watching movies (Zoolander, Flight of the Navigator, Eddie Izzard, and Narnia so far), reading old Cosmopolitans someone found laying around aloud during lunch, and just generally hanging out. On Monday night my computer power cable finally died on me, so the following morning I cut it open to find that the wires in the innermost layer had somehow been completely severed. I MacGyvered a fix using generous amounts of electrical tape and a scalpel from my dissection kit (by the way, Dad, scalpels totally work better than the wire cutters/strippers you use), and now it works fine, at least for the moment. I'm planning on getting a new compy when I get back anyway, so it only needs to survive for a couple more months.

Speaking of MacGyver, toilet paper has become a bit of a hot commodity here. With 24 people using 3 toilets, the stuff practically flies off the rolls. In fact, it is not unusual for Sundays to pass with no TP, as all stores are closed that day. As some of you know, I recently got a shirt from Threadless that really addresses the issue quite nicely, so we decided to have a little photo fun last night. Observe:

If you can't read it, the shirt shows an empty roll of toilet paper with the words "What would MacGyver do?". What indeed.

To make up for the lack of new photos, here are a few I took on our trip to the motus that didn't make it into the original post. Enjoy.


Here's another juvenile fish relying on a coral head for protection. I like this one because the fish looks like he has a mohawk, the little punk.


This depicts a fierce battle being waged between two types of coral. On the left is a colony of Acropora spp., a (relatively) fast-growing coral, while on the right we have a colony of Pocillopora spp., a slower-growing but sturdier coral. In between the two, you can see a thin white line that basically acts as a demilitarized zone. If a polyp from each coral were to touch, they would immediately recognize that they have encountered the enemy, and would proceed to sting each other until one of the polyps dies. This war will continue polyp by polyp until the head is covered in only one of the two species. My money is on the Acropora spp. because it can easily outgrow and overgrow the Pocillopora spp., but if a storm comes through it could turn the tables and give the sturdier Pocillopora spp. the advantage. The only way to know for sure who will win is to return in 10 years or so and find out. Looks like I'll have to take one for the team and come back again...


Most eels are pretty skittish in general, but I had to get a picture of this one because rather than ducking and covering, it instead looked like it was posing for a grade school portrait with its head tilted just so.

Cheating Death, x3

Sorry for the recent lack of posts. Here's the last couple days in review:

So we've started naming our various dive sites according to what happened the first time we went there. The sediment-gathering fiasco at the outer reef a few days ago has been dubbed the Transect of Tears (the Moorea version of the Trail of Tears). Well on Friday we added the Snorkel of Stings along the shore of the bay just south of the Gump station. Dr. Jacobs wanted us to snorkel from the mouth of the river towards the opening of the bay to see how the sediment type changes and the coral cover and composition changes with it. No one else in the class is really that interested in sediment, but we decided to humor him, especially considering the trip was mandatory. We drove to a church parking lot near the mouth of the river and got ready. When we jumped in the water, all we could see was murk, so we swam out far enough so we wouldn't accidentally run into anything hidden underwater. Of course, at that depth with a lack of visibility there really weren't any observations we could make. We started swimming toward the station (about 1-1.5 miles away), trying in vain to see anything we could. Suddenly something started biting us. At first it was little stings here and there, but soon we started feeling stings all over. Our little observational swim became a sprint to the station to get out of the water. A few people actually got out in peoples' backyards and walked back to the station, but I was far enough back in the group (my buddy and I were the last pair of students before Dr. Jacobs himself) that I didn't realize people were jumping ship, so to speak. Anyway, my buddy and I swam all the way back to the station, getting stung all the way there. The stinging wasn't that bad, actually - like little pinprick bites on any exposed skin, though the full-body diveskins some people were wearing turned out to be too thin to block it. Luckily I was wearing a long-sleeve rashguard and long board shorts, so all that was really exposed was my face, hands, and shins. I certainly felt bad for the girls who thought they'd just wear a bikini...

Yesterday was just as eventful. We've been having a rainstorm here for the past couple days, so we were all cooped up indoors working on our research projects. It looks like my first group's project has changed to building a better mousetrap - we're trying to come up with improved light traps to catch plankton while minimizing the risk that they'll eat each other, which is a rather common phenomenon. While they're all in the same trap together, tiny fish eat the zooplankton which eat the phytoplankton, and in doing so they all screw up the data. We're trying to come up with something that will allow for separation based on different size classes. All this project topic switching makes me feel like a freshman again, switching majors weekly (hi Moss!).

In the afternoon, Jess and I went with our TA Sandy to Death Snorkel to collect invertebrate samples for class while Sandy collected crabs from corals for her own PhD research. Remember that Death Snorkel is named for its abundant urchins and fire coral, and especially for its strong current. There was hardly any flow at all during our first visit with the rest of the class, but there's been a huge storm south of us in the middle of the Pacific, so the south of the island was being hit with huge waves on its southern shores. Well, big waves mean big flow at the Death Snorkel, and we got hit with it pretty hard. After the first 15 minutes of panic, Jess and I got the hang of it and it got pretty easy to maneuver and collect organisms. I'm happy to report that there were no injuries, and I managed to get a brittle star, two sea pearls, a snail, a few hermit crabs, and a bunch of empty shells that we can ID later.

After our little snorkel, we climbed back in the station truck to drive back to the station. About halfway back, there was a funny sound coming from the left side of the truck. Then there was a funny smell of burning rubber. Sandy pulled over, and sure enough, we had gotten a flat tire. The problem was, our truck was missing its spare, the jack didn't work anyway, we were still miles away from the station, we didn't have a cell phone to call back to the station, and we didn't know the station's phone number anyway. Oops. After a passing cyclist tried to help us, we decided to walk back and see if we could hitch a ride or borrow a phone. (A note, primarily for Mom's benefit: the Moorean people are extremely friendly and helpful. We routinely leave doors unlocked and gear laying around because no one thinks to steal anything. Everyone on the island knows each other and is interrelated, so it would be quite hard for someone to do something and get away with it. They're basically the opposite of Americans.) After walking for a few minutes, we reached the Moorea Pearl Resort, borrowed their phone and phone book, and reached the dorm phone in the station. Professors Jacobs and Hamner drove another truck to come get us and our gear, and we made it back to the station without further incident.

So yeah, it's been a rather eventful couple of days. I don't have any new pictures (though I was seriously wishing I had brought my camera when we got a flat), but perhaps I will in the next post - there are rumors of going to see the waterfalls later today.

The Motus

[The internet was down last night, so consider this yesterday's update.]

Today we went to the motus to do some snorkeling and walking and baking in the sun. A motu is a very small island built of ancient coral reefs that have since solidified into calcium carbonate rock. Trees and other plants have since grown up on it, adding to what little soil got blown over from the big island of Moorea. There is a small channel between the two motus filled with living coral and other organisms. Observe:


On the way to the motus, our boats stopped at a sandbar where local tour boats feed the stingrays. Since the stingrays have begun to associate motorboats with free handouts, they came over in huge swarms. Although this picture does have some panicky-looking legs in it, I only included that for scale - the rays were huge (well fed!) and actually quite friendly. On the way back to the boats, I also saw a black-tipped reef shark, but it was a little too far away to take a good picture.



The channel seemed to be some sort of nursery for young fish, as there were many coral heads full of juveniles. The fish would use the crevices for protection and shelter if anyone got too close.

After swimming around in the channel for a while, my snorkel buddy and I decided to head out to the ocean edge of the reef to explore a bit. When we got there, we were suddenly surrounded by literally thousands and thousands of convict tangs (their striped pattern looks like prison jumpsuits). We were surrounded by walls of fish.

Very cool.

Sedentary Sediment

Well we started today off with a rip-roaringly adventurous time. Sorting sediment. How does one sort sediment, you ask? One sorts sediment by picking through each and every large sample with tweezers, separating rocks from coral bits from shells from live animals from calcareous algae flakes. We're still not done after three and a half hours working at it, but we decided to mutiny at that point and go have lunch.

After lunch and a nap (the whole island takes two-hour siestas every day, by the way - the schoolkids even get bussed home for lunch and a nap, then bussed back to school at 2pm), the class decided to go snorkeling. Our site ended up being the same site a few of us had found on our own when we had hijacked the truck, but whatever. And here come the pictures:


A cushion star at the base of a large coral.


Here's the shot of the bottom side of the very same cushion star.


Here's my best picture of a rainbow parrotfish my buddy and I tracked (chased) for a while.


Proof that Finding Nemo was really quite accurate. This is an anemone fish facing off against a damselfish in its living home.

This evening we heard a lecture from one of the most accomplished coral researchers in the world, who happens to work at a research station in Oponuahu, the next bay over from ours. He talked to us about his research methods in the study of coral growth and reproduction and how they are affected by temperature. He was really interesting and amazingly smart and knowledgeable about the reefs.

Tomorrow we're headed out to the motus, two islands on the northwest corner of the island that were formed by the buildup of coral and sediment. There are rumors of possible turtle action, so both camera batteries will be making the trek with me.

The Real Death Snorkel

Today Prof. Jacobs got the bright idea to do a series of sediment samples in an area of high flow, from the reef crest to the lagoon between the reef and the shore. Well, he wasn't kidding about the high flow - it was clocked at anything from 30cm/sec to 5m/sec, and pretty much no one in the class swims that fast, even the water polo girls. It turned into a bit of a fiasco, the details of which I'm too tired to discuss, but suffice to say that we all made it back more or less alive and Dr. Jacobs has been dropped from the majority of our Christmas lists.

After we made it back, Wil and I set up the lab while the rest finished getting sediment samples from the reef site or went to the bank. After lunch, it was my turn to go on a bank run with a bunch of other people. Originally, the plan had been to quickly go to the bank and the supermarchet and then come back to the station for another trip to Death Snorkel, but we quickly vetoed that when my companions and I saw the store, ice cream stand, pastry shop, post office,, fruit stand, and, of course, the grocery stores. So we ended up not going to Death Snorkel, which explains why I do not have any pictures from today. Instead, I have some pictures from yesterday's snorkeling joyride, taken on the north shore of the island between Cook's Bay and Oponuahu Bay.

So we were snorkeling around, all of us taking pictures of whatever we saw, when someone found a hitchhiker on a floating piece of coconut shell. The fish is obviously a juvenile, but I haven't been able to figure out exactly what it is yet. When Mark held the shell for me to take the picture, the fish refused to leave its shelter. In fact, as Mark kept screwing around with the shell for a few of his own pictures, the fish finally got fed up enough and attacked. Of course, for a baby fish like this one, "attacking" pretty much entails swimming straight at Mark for a little bit, hoping that he might startle him. It worked.


This guy was burrowed into a hole in a little patch of rock and coral in only about 10 feet of water. Pretty cool.


That's about it for now. My computer battery is running out of juice, and I broke the plug by my bed (long story), so I have to go. I'll try to have a longer post and new pictures tomorrow.

Photo Fun

Today we went diving on the outer reef, the area that is directly exposed to the ocean's fury. Or something like that. Actually, we only really felt surges going through, which moved us around a bit, but it wasn't too bad. Once again, I took pictures, so here we go:

First off, let's talk physics. As you know (or should know), blue light waves penetrate the deepest through water. As a result, everything tends to have a blue cast to it. The tint wasn't this noticeable to our own eyes, but the camera definitely saw a more drastic coloring. By sending my pictures through Photoshop, however, I was able to adjust the picture so everything looks as it would in 5 feet of water, instead of the 30 feet at which it was taken. So for example...

This is the most dramatic change in the pictures I took:


You can see how color really doesn't matter at depth. Many red organisms look gray or black, camouflaging them despite the pigment that would otherwise make them stand out.

And this one's my favorite because the fish finally cooperated (one more reason why I like invertebrates better - they tend to sit still):



This afternoon a few of us stole one of the trucks and went on a snorkeling joyride (no, we didn't really steal them, and yes, everyone knew where we were going). I took a bunch of pictures, but I think I might hold them in reserve for a day when I'm running low on new shots. (I'll starting research in 11 short days, so the fun and random picture-taking will stop soon enough...) Suffice to say the expedition was a lot of fun. Oh and tonight we went on a night snorkel and saw tons of urchins, a lionfish (extremely rare, especially at night), shrimp, cushion stars, and a huge pufferfish - deflated and about 18 inches long. Very awesome stuff. And now I'm off to bed.

Death Snorkel

We took a grand tour of the island today to get ourselves acquainted with the whole place. Our first stop of the day was Death Snorkel, which is a stretch of reef that has quite a strong current when it gets up and running. It wasn't too strong when we went, since it was still fairly early in the morning, but we definitely noticed it.

As meanacing as currents are, though, it's really the urchins you've got to watch for. Case in point:


These spiky little bundles of joy are there waiting if you screw up and don't watch where you're going.


Fire coral too.

Even still, the place was awesome. The water was clear and warm, and fish and other organisms were everywhere.


Corals with a butterfly fish (yellow) and a damselfish (black).

A wrasse (I forget what kind) and the omnipresent urchins.

Butterfly fish amongst the coral.

A coronet fish above some coral.

Christmas tree worms. I saw blue, white, pink, orange, and red versions of these, but this picture came out the best. The "tree" portion is actually feathery feelers that filter water to feed.

You all are in luck, by the way - I've been nominated official picture-taker, as I have volunteered to update the photo database of all of the organisms commonly found here in Moorea. As a result, you'll probably be seeing a lot of the critters. But that's why I'm here in the first place, right?

Anyway, tomorrow is our first scuba dive in the outer reef (so far we've only been snorkeling). Hopefully I'll get some good pictures there too.

We made it!

Greetings from French Polynesia! This is a picture of the Faaa airport on the island of Tahiti, where we landed at approximately 5:45am local time after an 8-hour flight from LAX. At Faaa (PPT airport for the aeronautically inclined... i.e. Dad), the runway is literally 5 feet from the ocean and at an elevation of about 2 feet above sea level. It was built over two old reefs that they filled in to make one long landing strip, so it's pretty picturesque/unnerving when it's time to land.

After we landed and successfully made it through security/passport check, we lugged all our belongings to a bus, which took us to the ferry at the Papeete harbor, where we unloaded and then reloaded onto large luggage carts for the ferry. When we made it to Moorea harbor, it was time once again to unload and reload onto the Gump Station's trucks.


Between the 25-ish people, each of whom can have only 3 bags, we had over three truckloads of luggage and research gear, but we made it!


This is a view from the trucks on one of the first turns out of the harbor area. There is only one road in Moorea, which runs around the perimeter of the island for a total of 37 miles. Everything is small here - tiny cars, tiny road, tiny shops everywhere. It's really laid-back and the people are awesome.


This is a view from my dorm room window. Note the kayaks in the foreground, ocean in the back (it's only about 20 feet away from my window, and I can hear it now). We got the the Gump Station at around 9:30am local time (assume from here on out that all times are local from here on out - we're 3 hours behind Pacific Standard). After an orientation and lunch, a few of us went kayaking and then we all went snorkeling in the reef that runs along the station's beach. I didn't take the camera with me this time, but I plan to tomorrow - we're taking a grand tour of the whole island and looking at all the different types of habitats that it has.

And with that, goodnight to all - I've been up for quite a while now, so it's time for bed. Even if it is only 8:30.

The Blog is Officially Open

Ia orana!

Time to officially kick off the start of the blog with an update (but sadly, no pictures). Classes have been good though rather intensive. The class as a whole is getting an average of about 5 hours of sleep per night, weekends and myself included, with all of the papers we have to read and the all-day classes. Still, it's kind of fun spending the whole day with such a cool group of people - we've even taken one on as a houseguest for these two weeks, so she's been camping out in the living room since last Sunday night.

In Moorea we'll be doing two original research projects in different groups of three people each. So far it looks like the first project will be a study of tourist impacts on coral reefs, particularly in areas around Moorea's coastal hotels. We're hoping to find some sort of connection between the level of education regarding the reefs that is provided at the hotel and the level of damage that is seen in the reefs where the hotel guests tend to go. We recently changed our second project from a study of the effects of mangroves on soil and species composition to a study of sea urchin home ranges and whether the ranges' sizes are affected by their quality (good/plentiful algae, predators, etc). The cool thing about that project is the fact that urchins are nocturnal, so we're going to have to go snorkeling at night to track them. It's been done before, so it won't be too bad. Hopefully everything will go according to plan...


In other news, my post-graduation future looks pretty set. Check the links on the left (under "Post-Moorea") to see what's in store!

And with that, I'm off to do more research and write a project proposal. What fun.