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.