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.