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.
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.
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.
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