Happy New Year!

More like Happy New Year Plus A Week, but who's counting?

Anyway, play-by-play and commentary for last week's video is up, so scroll on down to that post if you'd like to read it (the link is just below the video).

New Year's was pretty fun this year. CAOS put on a variety of kids' programs to keep young ones entertained while their adult entourage partied. While I normally work with older kids (ages 8-18), I was with the younger set that night (ages 4-7), and let me tell you, that was definitely the place to be! We started out the night with dinner with the kids at one of the hotel restaurants, which was pretty tasty. The best part, though, was that they turned our section of the restaurant into a kids' buffet - the food tables were about 2 feet high, the hamburgers were all in miniature (patties, buns, cheese squares, tomatoes, etc were all half the normal diameter), all foods were your typical kids' menu standards but obviously cooked by chefs, and the brownies... oh, the brownies... let's just say that the fact that the brownie tray was equidistant between the dining tables and the restrooms was not overlooked by the CAOS staff as we eagerly volunteered to escort the little ones to go potty.

After that was a scavenger hunt through the hotel, which was very similar to what I imagine herding hyperactive kittens to be like. There were two naturalists assigned to every group of seven kids - and you would think that would be enough - but every group came back with stories of The One That Got Away. Our kids, for example, read one of the clues, which started out by informing them that the next clue would be upstairs, and by the end of the clue had gotten it in their minds that NO! THE CLUE WAS TRYING TO TRICK THEM! In a valiant effort to outwit said clue, they took off sprinting into the fine dining restaurant behind us where people were enjoying very expensive meals in an otherwise intimate setting. It took two naturalists and two increasingly aggrieved waiters to round up the children, who had been eagerly running from table to table to see if someone was perhaps hiding the clue under a tablecloth, or maybe the centerpiece instead. The best part? On the way out the door, one of the waiters smirked at us, saying that we were actually the third group that night to lose kids into the restaurant.

The night finished relatively uneventfully, rolling in the sand with the kids, being chased down the beach with sparklers (I had the sparklers, which we weren't planning on giving the young kids, so they got to try to outrun me instead, and I'll admit that after the restaurant incident, I was definitely not underestimating my foes, small as they may have been), rigging all of the clocks in the kids room to read 11:59 at about 9pm and then doing a countdown, and finally seeing all of them conk out during the opening minute of Finding Nemo, which the rest of the naturalists and I happily watched amid 40-50 unconscious little bodies. I actually made it back to Port Royale by 11pm and watched fireworks and counted down on the beach (in shorts and a tank top, just to rub it in) with everyone else. Happy 2007!


More of those Corky Sea Fingers, this time in full sun mode (all of the polyps are retracted, which is proper daytime procedure). There is also a Flamingo Tongue Snail on one of the branches, as well as a few small wrasses in the background. Pretty much I just liked how the things were growing.


This picture, primarily of French Grunts, was also taken during a CAOS underwater photography program. Grunts are related to snappers, as evidenced by the slope of their heads, and cluster together in the shelter of coral heads. I really haven't seen them do too much else, so aside from clustering, I'm not really sure what they do all day, if anything.