Storm Chasees

While the level of Lawn Lake has receded somewhat, the storm or series of storms (we can't tell which it is) refuses to leave. We did manage to head out and tag the urchins on Friday night during a brief lull, but had to end the tracking phase of our night a little prematurely when the thunder and lightning kicked up around 4am. Last night we tried again, but a huge electrical storm rolled through so that was nixed. The storm was pretty impressive, too - bolts of lightning (or at least flashes) every second or two, sustained over a couple of hours. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I looked online to see how to take good lightning pictures with my camera. Unfortunately, by the time I got the long exposure thing worked out and my camera's battery recharged, the storm had moved over the hill a little. I still managed to get a few decent shots of the hill silhouetted against the storm.


This picture was taken with a 15 second exposure. Aside from the flashes of lightning and the lights across the bay, everything was pitch black. You can actually see a very small, yet distinct, bolt of lightning just to the right of the main peak. The "streaking" of the lights across the bay is their reflection off the water, unlike all of my other shots where the same effect was achieved through the blur caused by me trying to prop up and hold my camera without the aid of a tripod.

Today is already blue-skied and sunny, though, so we should be set to finish up our tracking over the next few nights, and hopefully be done with all data collection by the weekend. If we get stormed out again, though, at least now I'll have something to do...

Reappearing Acts

We figured out how to safely and effectively tag the urchins. We're staying with the little colored squares of rubber glove skewered onto the spines, but this time we're holding them in place with super glue. We pull them out of the water for a couple of minutes, tag them, let the glue dry, and put them back in. Trust me, the urchins have yet to pop off a single tag. Best of all, we can simply snap the spines (they're very brittle and spines snap on a regular basis) just below the tags when we're done with our project, and the urchin looks like it was never touched, though the urchins might argue that the "best of all" would be better applied to the lack of fishhooks in aboral pores.

Our project, however, is officially on hold. A pretty big storm has settled in for the week, with torrential rains, strong winds, and the occasional thunder and lightning. We decided to postpone our three nights of testing to Sunday through Tuesday nights for safety reasons. Most of the other groups have done the same, so there's a bunch of cabin fever-ridden people running around here.

Unfortunately, we can't do too much running (or walking) about in the yard outside, as the septic system seems to have gone on strike. The soil is so saturated that the contents of the leech lines have started seeping to the surface. In some areas of the lawn there are standing pools of effluent up to a foot deep. Inside the house, every flush of the toilet is now like a game of Russian roulette - will it go down or come back up? Worst of all, the lawn is upwind of the house. Everything here literally smells like crap. Ahh, paradise.

In our attempts to escape the muck and mire, we went to Death Snorkel again. Remember from the Cheating Death episode that big storms make big waves which make for a very strong current. It was indeed quite the sleighride. Since I wasn't out collecting this time, I could just ride the current and weave around coral heads and other obstacles. As usual, I stopped every so often to take a few pictures, so here we go:


Christmas Tree worms - here you can see just a taste of the variety of patterns and colors of their feelers. Almost every one I find seems to be completely unique. You can also see how the coral that the worms are burrowed into looks a little fuzzy. That "fuzz" is what it looks like when the coral polyps are extended. It was overcast when I took this picture, so I guess the polyps felt comfortable enough to come out a bit.


Another rainbow-ey parrotfish.


If you look closely, you can see a few needlefish just under the surface of the water. The water itself looks pretty cool, too.

Jungle Fever

So I ended up not going to Papeete on Saturday. Instead a bunch of us went on a grand tour (read: joyride) of the island, picking up a bunch of souvenirs here and there. Some of my readers will be very gifted upon my return... We also dropped by a pearl place that some of my classmates had found on a previous excursion that had relatively cheap pearls, so I picked up a nice one for myself. Unfortunately, this was also the part of the trip where the title of this post came into play, and I started feeling rather sick. Long story short (and icky details omitted), I spent the rest of the afternoon and late into the night with a bad fever and just generally feeling like crap. (For the record, fevers in the humid tropics are really not that fun.) Luckily, it was a fairly short illness and I was back to about 85% by morning. A few of my classmates have also had this mysterious bug which we've dubbed the 24-Hour Dengue (it is NOT actual Dengue), and we've all come out fine in the end.

Sunday was the official kickoff for Project 2. My groupmates, Wil and Skye, and I will be studying Diadema setosum, the same type of sea urchin you saw in pictures of Death Snorkel (the big, black spiky things). Anyway, urchins are nocturnal and each one has its own home range which it traverses every night, foraging for algae and defending its territory by getting rid of any interlopers, then returning to the same crevice every morning to hide from predators during the day. We're trying to see if the size of the urchin's home range is dependent on the quality of its chosen habitat. For example, if there's plenty of good algae for the urchin to eat, does the urchin feel the need to defend a huge territory and get as much as it can, or does it only claim as much land as it needs to sustain itself? We'll also be looking at the interactions between home range size and urchin size (see if the big ones need more space), as well as home range size and damselfish distribution. Damselfish are the ones that aggressively defend a section of rock with algae on it in order to impress females. They eat the same kinds of algae as the urchins, so we want to see if the urchin range sizes compensate for any damage the damselfish do during the day.

Sunday afternoon Betsy, Nate, and I went out with the professors and TAs and Dr. Fong's daughters, Kendal and Jordan, to scout for good algae study sites. Dr. Fong studies algae, so she was on the hunt for an area with tons of algae but no damselfish - virtually unheard of around here, but we gave it a shot anyway.

This picture was taken at a site where we jumped in the water, saw the reef just a few hundred yards away, and started swimming. And swimming. And swimming. Turns out we had misjudged the distance a bit and the reef was really rather far away. We did swim through some amazingly clear blue water, where we could see 80-100ft down to the bottom. We college kids had fun taking pictures in the deep blue while the rest started swimming back. And no, we never found that perfect algae study site.

Last night we collected six urchins from the reef (and I gave Kendal and Jordan a quick tour) to figure out a way to tag them effectively. So far they've had more success in skewering us than we've had in marking them, as any tags we put on their spines are subject to removal. They can feel if there's something stuck on them and can consciously use the other spines to work the tags off. Of the 15 tags we put on them last night, only one remained this morning, so we obviously need to try new methods. We'll be going to the hardware store later today, so maybe we can find something there. We read one paper where it sounded like the researcher got just as annoyed at the urchins as we are, and resorted to inserting a fishhook into the "aboral pore" of the urchin with a fishing line and floating marker attached to the other end. For those not up to speed with their scientific euphemisms, "aboral" means "not mouth", and "pore" means "hole", so... yeah. We've been threatening our sample urchins with promises of fishhooks in their aboral pores, but they still won't cooperate. Cheeky little buggers.

I Don't Like Plankton Anymore

Ugh. Three hours until we can officially put Project 1 to rest, and frankly, it couldn't come soon enough. We've all been hunkered down indoors for the past week, frantically processing the last of the data (which meant counting thousands of tiny plankton for our group) and writing up with final report that's due at midnight tonight, just a little over three hours from now. We're pretty much done at this point, just trying to play it safe and having one of the TAs look it over one last time before we send it on its merry way and join the compulsory party (marine bio types know how to have a good time).

If anyone wants a copy of the final report, leave a comment and I'll email it to you, but I warn you that it's written in mind-numbingly-boring scientific style (my previous attempts to breathe some life into it were nixed in earlier reviews by the other TA). Here's a quick recap for those who appreciate their bullet points:
What We Did
1. Built our own light traps out of glowsticks and Coke bottles with a device (made of pantyhose!) that allowed us to seal them from the boat to keep critters from getting out as we pulled them up.
2. Put these light traps out on a long (30m) line in the middle of Cook's Bay to catch plankton. Traps were located every 5m from 0-25m as measured from the surface.
3. Set this entire contraption out every two hours from 6pm to 4am for 45 minute periods each time.
4. Got the traps back and counted everything in them. By hand. I like my iPod.

What We Found
1. Virtually no plankton was ever found in the top layer of water (the 0m and 5m traps were always practically empty).
2. Plankton below the 10m mark showed a nightly migration up from the depths just after sunset, then descended again a couple hours later. Copepods (one of the most common types of plankton worldwide) also migrated upwards one more time just before sunrise, then descended again for the day.
3. Our traps allowed us to catch the more fragile organisms and keep them alive, unlike the more traditional plankton nets that tend to crush everything together into one congealed mass.

If you want more detail, I'll send the paper along to you. At this point, I kind of don't want to see this stuff for a while.

Tomorrow I'm going to Papeete, Tahiti with a few friends for a day trip and to relax a little before Project 2 starts up on Sunday. Mayhaps I'll have some pictures for you all. Until then, I'm off to finish up this paper and... um... have some fun. Heh.

And Now for the Thrilling Conclusion!

(Part two of a two-part series chronicling the holidays in May my mom gets to enjoy.)

I know it's sort of old hat at this point, but...


Happy Birthday, Mom! As stated in the prequel, I love you very much and I can't wait to see you (and those other people) in June! (Oh and as you may have guessed, your gifts will be coming home with me so you can re-celebrate in June.)


And here's what the dawn on May 16th looked like on our side. A little ominous if you remember your nursery rhymes, but it's actually turned out sunny, warm, and very humid since then.

Happy Mother's Day!

And now for a very special Postcards from Moorea event (part one of a two-part series)...



(Aww look - I even got you a rose from the Rose Garden.)

Happy Mother's Day to Mom, Grandma Crawford, and Grandma Robertson. Thank you for all you've done for me in the past, present, and future. I love and miss all of you, and I'll see you soon!

Boobies!

Yes, you read it right. Boobies. But more on that later. It's been quite the crazy week, so here's a day-by-day recap:

Saturday
I went to the abandoned hotel across Cook's Bay from the Gump Station with the two TAs, who were working/collecting for their respective research projects. The reef over there is much nicer than ours here at the station (clearer water, greater diversity of fishes). Here are a few pictures from that excursion:


This was an extremely friendly pufferfish. As I was the only person in the area on the reef and I was just floating there on the surface, the puffer felt safe enough to come right up to me - within about a foot, where he sort of peered into my camera. I was taking video of him at the time, so I'll show the footage to those of you lucky enough to see me in person in June.


There were tons of planktivores out that day; the water seemed to be full of them, and if I held my breath and just floated there, I could hear hundreds of little smacking noises as all the little fish around me chowed down.

Sunday
Sunday was spent studying for Tuesday's fish test (we had to know 85 fish from over 20 families at the genus/species and family levels). My roommate Romina and I got tired of this after a while and kayaked across the bay back to the abandoned hotel. I didn't bring my camera with me which is a pity, since we saw the first sea turtle of the trip!

Monday
More studying, more abandoned hotel. This time a bunch of us went with Prof. Vance, the one giving us the test, as a way to study. Or "study". Either way, here's some "documentation":


These are needlefishes, which are commonly seen just under the surface of the water. Or rather, they're commonly there but they are surprisingly hard to see unless you're looking specifically for them, as they can change from blue to silver to grey depending on what suits the current water and sky conditions. These particular guys were in rather large schools, which I guess made them feel comfortable enough to descend a bit.


Here's a type of boxfish, related the puffers we've already seen. This one was cruising around the reef, as fish are wont to do, and finally pulled into a cleaning station. Cleaning stations are set up by cleaner wrasses, which are small, skinny fish that swim all over their patrons' bodies, eating ectoparasites. And I do mean they swim all over - I saw wrasses climbing into the boxfish's mouth and even its gills. All of the surrounding reef fish know the permanent locations of the wrasses' stations, and can be observed forming lines to wait their turn for a cleaning.

Tuesday
Tuesday was the day of the big fish test, which took up our first couple hours of the day. (It went fine, since I know some here will ask.) Afterwards, a group of us went with Sandy to the Rose Garden. The Rose Garden is a dive site just on the other side of the reef at the mouth of Opunohu Bay, so named for its coral, many of which have grown to look like roses. The Rose Garden has also become somewhat famous for sharks, as a couple of local operations conduct shark feedings there. Sure enough, as we pulled up to the buoy, a dive boat full of tourists pulled in as well, which means...


...sharks! This is a black-tipped reef shark, one of about 8 to cruise around the area that morning. Evidently that's a pretty low number, too. Our group got in the water first, so they swam by and sniffed at us to see if we were the ones with the food. As you may or may not know, sharks typically have smaller fish called remoras stuck to their underside as they swim and eat, getting a free ride and a free meal out of the bargain. Well the remoras at the Rose Garden were also very friendly - they routinely swam between us, and one actually stuck onto Holly's leg for her full 40-minute dive! (She was the only one of us wearing a wetsuit, so we think it may have been attracted to the neoprene.)


Here's the coral at the Garden - small, multicolored heads as far as the eye could see and the legs could swim. Very pretty.


We also saw a group of fish that were schooling in a very tight formation - it really reminded me of the school of fish in Finding Nemo that played charades.

Wednesday
In the early morning (as in 1am to 7am), my group and I went out light trapping for our project, setting arrays of traps at 2, 4, and 6am. We caught quite a bit of stuff, so we're pretty happy about that. Our professors have told all of the groups to include at least four photos of our projects in our final reports, so I brought a camera along on the boat. I don't actually have any pictures of the traps themselves, but...



...I got some pretty good pictures of the sunrise. These are the two least crooked pictures I have, since I took them while lying down in the front of the boat.


I obviously wasn't the only one lying down on the job. Here's a picture of Antonio and Mark, a picture we fully plan on including in our final report as it is very representative of what we do while we're waiting for the traps to finish up. That and playing cards.

Thursday
We took an all-day trip to Tetiaroa, an atoll about 80km directly north of Tahiti. We had been told horror stories of getting there, since it was a 90-minute boat ride across the open ocean, followed by a swim from the boats onto the reef. That swim is no simple endeavor, either, since the top of the coral is at the highest level of the swells that wash over it. To get on, you had to ride a wave up and over the reef crest, and plant your feet on the coral before the wave recedes and drags you across the sharp coral and rocks. Fun! Luckily, we went on a very calm day - very little swell on the open sea, and a relatively easy clamber up the reef face. I'm happy to report that no one got any significant scrapes from the entire excursion, and I'm also very happy I went - have a look at these pictures and see if you can figure out why.




Such stuff as postcards are made of.

The coolest part was the reef we swam through towards the end of our trip. There was one section that was chock-full of about 4 or 5 different kinds of fish. Best of all, they were friendly fish! When I first got to that area, the fish swam right by me, some of them as close as 6 inches. I began to notice, however, that they were all swimming somewhere behind me, so I turned around to see where everyone was going.


It turns out that all of the fish were grouping up in a big school behind me - yes, that is my leg in the photo. I'm not sure if I actually kicked the fish in this picture, but I do know some others got in the way at times.


These guys all happily swam behind me when I was kicking to maintain position in the current, or swarmed around me when I just floated there during the lulls in the current. I swear, I felt like the Pied Piper or something.

And here you go, the aforepromised boobies:

If you're having trouble checking them out, there's a big one on the right side of the highest branch. Giggidy giggidy.

A Whole Lotta.... Nothing

Frustration abounds here in our camp. We set out for our first official field test on Thursday night, with two of our Coke bottle traps and two of Prof. Hamner's traps on a line to be tied to our boat. We deployed the four traps for 45 minutes, as planned, but when we reeled them back in.... nothing. All four traps were completely empty, which is virtually unheard of around here. We asked Hamner what the problem might be, and he suggested that the flow was too strong for the plankton to fight and get into the traps. We decided that later that same night we'd tie the four traps to the same rope again, but this time just let the rope drift along with the current, allowing plankton to get in. Just as we were about to commandeer the boat again, it started to rain. It was already late and we didn't want to spend our nights getting rained on, so we decided to postpone the mission until Friday night. On Friday, we were going to head out just after dinner, but in the last 5 minutes of dinner the skies opened up and it started to pour. No way were we going to go sit out in the heavy rain for an hour (besides, the new layer of fresh water at the top can drive plankton back down to greater depths, so we wouldn't have gotten much anyway). Hopefully tonight the skies will remain clear enough for us to do our tests. There's also a huge meteor shower going on in the Southern Hemisphere which was supposed to peak last night, but we should still be able to see something. We had originally timed our tests to be able to go out on the boat and watch the showers while we waited, but I guess we ended up with a slightly different kind of shower...

Since we have no data to work with at the moment, I've spent my days identifying the most commonly caught organisms from our first trial runs so our later analyses will go more quickly. I've also continued my daily snorkeling, so here's picture time from the Gump reef:


Here's what happens to cinder blocks when they die on the reef.


A bunch of fishes: the big one on the right is a Moorish Idol (Zanclus cornutus and you should thank me for not inserting an American Idol joke right here), and the blue guys with yellow tails are Neon Damsels. I'm not quite sure what the black and white fish at the bottom is, though note how you can only see the white tail - disruptive coloration in action.


A roving herd of Yellowstripe Goatfish. They have two "whiskers" on their chins that have organs to detect chemical and electrical signals given off by their prey, usually worms and crustaceans, hidden under the sand. Other types of fish typically follow them around and pick off any organisms that may have been kicked up into the water in the cloud of sand the goatfishes' hunting produces. In the upper center area of the picture, the fish without the yellow stripe down its body is just such a freeloader.

And The Award Goes To...

The bottom of my foot, for being the worst place to get a mosquito bite!

That is all. (For now.)

And They're Off! - Now Updated

Project One has officially begun. We're going to study the nocturnal vertical migrations of plankton, so yesterday morning we went to the hardware store and stocked up on 300m of twine. We've been drinking a lot of Coke for the past three weeks so we could use the bottles for the traps, and the school is supplying the rest of the materials. Yesterday afternoon we motored out in one of the boats and deployed our own buoy, which now bobs proudly in the middle of Cook's Bay. We're using it to mark an area with the proper seafloor depth so we can return to the same place every night. After some daytime preliminary testing to make sure the bottles don't flush all of their occupants when we pull the traps back up, we modified our trap designs a little and redeployed them with a series of new trial designs. Our most successful traps were one with a weight at the bottom to keep it upright on both descent and ascent, and the other with a tube of pantyhose at the top that we trigger from the surface to seal it shut so the critters don't escape on their way back up to the boat. We also realized last night that we need to put something reflective or sparkly on the top of our buoy so we can find it more easily at night, after we spent about 10 minutes driving in circles, trying to find it with flashlights.


Way off in the distance you can see Mark and Antonio, my two groupmates, taping tinfoil to the buoy to make it a little shinier - hopefully that will help.

Here are a few pictures of what we caught last night. Even the traps that were deemed failures were just crawling with plankton when we brought them back up!


Plankton, actual size - my hand is in the picture for scale.

The contents of that very same cup.


More critters. Just think about this next time you accidentally swallow some seawater... eww.


A very nice close-up of a pair of amphipods, relatives of those jumping sand fleas that cover the beaches in California.


The round series of white stripes in this picture is a ctenophore (pronounced "teen-oh-four", which is close enough to the pronounciation of "10:04" to have to endure any of a series of many MANY lame biology jokes whenever you ask someone what time it is) - essentially a miniature comb jelly. The stripes are actually rows of tiny cilia, hairs that the ctenophore beats in sequence to propel itself through the water. We caught three ctenophores in one of our traps, which we're calling a fluke right now because it is extremely rare to catch even one of them. Another group has been doing a complicated series of blue water dives to catch slightly larger versions of these guys, and here we are just tossing Coke bottles overboard and then playing card games on the boat for 30 minutes while we wait. There may or may not be some gloating going on in our camp...

All of our samples are dead and preserved at this point so they don't start rotting and stinking any more than they already do, but they were literally crawling when we first pulled them out of the water last night. The long wormy-looking ones with many legs were zooming all over the place, gobbling up all of the copepods (that's the other reason we preserved them - we don't want them eating our samples), and the copepods moved around by twitching their bodies (which is probably why they kept getting eaten). Very cool.

In other news, we can no longer have baguettes at every meal, as we have been doing for the whole time we've been here. It seems that all of French Polynesia has run out of flour. Literally and no joke. The ladies cooking for our group are still making all sorts of great food, but we can no longer get our morning delivery of 20 baguettes for the day.

I Hope You Have A Fast Internet Connection

Sorry about the delay in writing. We were all working on our research project proposals, so I've been keeping busy. That, and I've been going on many excursions, as illustrated (that's right! new pictures!) below.

Wednesday night I went on a night snorkel on the Gump station reef with Dave, Ashley, and Nate. Last time I went on a night snorkel, there was great visibility and the water was very calm. This time, there were a lot of particles in the water and the sea was very bumpy due to the wind, which made it very hard to take pictures. In the end, we all got a little wigged out with the low visibility and high urchin and creepiness content, so it was a short trip.


This is a lionfish, though I'll admit he looked a lot less blurry in person. If you don't know about lionfish, the red and white striped spines are very very poisonous (kind of deadly, actually), while the rest of the spines are more or less decoys. There are 4 or 5 resident lionfish in the area just offshore from our station, so we see them around quite often. They're pretty friendly, and as you might have guessed, they're really rather hard to miss.


This is some kind of eel. I'm not sure why I keep posting eel pictures, but they do make for rather dramatic photography. (I believe the drama comes from the fact that they always look simultaneously pissed off and moronically happy.)


A soldierfish I cornered in a hollowed-out coral head. They're typically plentiful in the area but rather skittish, especially around giant creatures chasing them with blinding lights.

On Thursday we went scuba diving on the point across Cook's Bay from our station. No one in our group had ever been there, so it took about 2 minutes for us to realize that it's a far better site for snorkeling than it is for diving since many more of the organisms grow and live at the top of the reef, but whatever. We still saw some cool stuff, and we'll probably end up making a return trip later in the week.


This species of sea anemone was first discovered and described by one of the professors on our trip, Dr. Hamner. He didn't go on this dive with us, but he certainly recognized them in our pictures. These anemones are unique in the fact that they will catch and eat entire fish. Their surface looks like any other sea anemone, so anemone fish (clownfish, etc.) see this and decide to make it a home. They cozy up to it and start getting comfortable in their new digs. Meanwhile, the anemone slowly starts to curl up and around the fish. Its walls are entirely clear, so the fish doesn't realize it's being enclosed until it's too late. At that point, the only exit is up, but fish instinctually look for exits to the side whenever they're evading prey. It obviously can't find any, and the anemone eventually smothers the fish and eats it.


The butterfly fish in this picture are an excellent example of disruptive coloration. They have dark blue or black faces which disappear in front of a dark backdrop like deep canyons or the open ocean. Predators will either see a headless fish or they'll aim for the tail thinking it's the fish's head, and the fish will be able to swim away.


This is a view of the edge of a reef from a depth of about 30 feet. The top of the reef flat itself is only about 2-3 feet underwater, so it's a long way down to where I am. As you can see, even the deep water is very blue in Moorea. (While these pictures have been color-corrected on the computer, there wasn't enough light for the camera to record much besides blue. Luckily it's a very pretty blue.)

Yesterday morning we went snorkeling in Opunohu Bay (the next bay over from ours). Dr. Jacobs of Transect of Tears and Snorkel of Stings fame said he heard there was a great reef out by the navigation markers in the middle of the bay. Fifteen minutes of swimming later, there was no reef to be found. We swam all the way back and instead putzed around the little reef on the shoreline while one of our TAs, Sandy, gathered coral and crab samples for her doctoral research. We're still in the process of coming up with a cute name for that little excursion (Foray of Futility?).


If you've ever wondered what a pufferfish looks like when it's deflated, here you go.

They're really rather cute - chubby cheeks and a bashful little smile.


The green stuff in this picture is Halimeda spp., a type of algae that can actually contribute more to reef-building than the corals themselves. Halimeda spp. has a calcareous skeleton under that greenery - think of them as little photosynthetic chips of chalk. They grow faster than coral and leave hundreds of calcium carbonate flakes behind when they die, which then get cemented into the reef along with the coral.

Last night the station put on a Polynesian feast for us, where they cooked a lot of traditional Polynesian dishes for us (very good, though their cuisine is quite heavy on the starches), kicked our butts at volleyball (a Polynesian pasttime - makeshift courts are all over the island, including in our front yard), and taught us how to do Polynesian dance. Or at least tried to teach us Polynesian dance. I really don't think any of us could get our hips going as fast as even the six-year-old girl.

Today we went to the giant waterfall on the other side of the island.


It was about a 40 minute hike through dense rainforest and rather high humidity.


It was, obviously, worth it. There was a small pool at the base of the falls that we frolicked in, despite the fact that the water was freezing.


If you've ever wondered what looking up a waterfall looks like, here you go. Of course, I was busy shielding my head from the pounding water with my other arm when I took this - you saw how tall these falls are!

I can't post a lot of the pictures with people in them for various reasons, so perhaps you can see them when I get back. Perhaps. I assure you, however, that much fun was had by all.