Day 2

Lionfish

Coral and Fishes at Dave's Patch Reef

Today we spent the day on the boat. First, we rode out to Dave's Patch Reef and did some snorkeling. There were lots of fishes and varieties of coral, and I took a lot of pictures with the underwater camera. I even got a few pictures of a lionfish. The lionfish are not supposed to be in the Bahamas, they were released accidentally during a hurricane, and they've become a nuisance. They have no predators in the waters of the Bahamas, so there are too many of them. But they are really cool looking, even though they are a menace. They have long spines that protrude from their bodies, and they sting anything that touches them. So I took my picture and moved along.

View at Pigeon Cay

Emily and the cushion star

Next we took the boat to Pigeon Cay, where we walked around the shoreline and learned about some of the shoreline vegetation and terrain. We also saw two different species of nerites. Emily even found a cushion starfish!

Angel Fish at South Pass

We had lunch on the beach at Pigeon Cay, then we loaded up the boat and went out to snorkel at the reef at South Pass. The water was really choppy and after a little while, I started feeling kinda bad. I tried to power through it, but when I got back on the boat, I totally barfed off the side. So when we went over to the Blue Cay Blue Hole, I waited on the boat while everyone else snorkeled. I just wasn't feeling it. Everyone who did go out got to see a pair of spotted eagle rays, and I was very happy for them. I was also very happy to get back to the field station and get on solid ground.

We started on our group project on the red mangroves when we got back. Apparently, the guides at Forfar have said that the red mangrove deals with the high salt content of the water that they grow in by sequestering all the salt into one leaf and sacrificing it. The leaf turns yellow and falls off. We collected a yellow leaf from four different red mangroves, a green leaf next to the yellow, and a green leaf opposite the yellow leaf to compare the salt content in each leaf. We used a refractometer to determine the salt content of the leaves. But in order to do that, we had to do some serious grinding up of the leaves, because they didn't want to give up any moisture. We are going to examine the data we collected when we get back home and draw our conclusions then. So stay tuned. On the edge of your seat, right?

After dinner, the staff at Forfar gave a lecture on plants. That information will be very useful tomorrow when we go to Maidenhair Coppice. Coppices are areas within pine forests that are elevated, and they have better soil. Therefore the plants are different. While the pine forests pretty much contain Bahamian pines, bracken fern, palms, and *gasp*poisonwood, the coppices have more tropical type plants. Oh, and poisonwood. It's everywhere. But we'll talk about the coppice tomorrow.