Hello hello hello!

Directed research is in full swing these days! We've been diving every day after lunch, at 3 different site, a low-diversity site, with very few fish, a medium diversity site and a high diversity site with TONS of fish.

Monday we went to the high diversity site, The Plane, and did a REEF survey, which basically means we just ID everything we see and then later put them in different abundance categories Single-1, Few- 2-10, Many 11-100, and Abundant >100. It was a really nice dive. Unfortunately, since we're doing research, I can't bring my camera as much as I'd like, but I'll try to sneak it in again soon.

Tuesday we started transects. Not nearly as much fun as REEF surveys. For a transect, you lay out a 50m tape measure and count each fish you see 2.5m on either side of the line. We went to the Plane on Tuesday and it was CRAZY. Neil and I had completely different numbers at the end of the dive. There were so many fish it was nearly impossible to count them all! We did look up from the transect long enough to see a small school of eagle rays (4) and a green sea turtle. During the transects, we spend most of the time looking straight down at the line and the fish near the line....I feel like a whale shark could be doing backflips around me and I wouldn't notice! Haha.

Yesterday was another transect at Mid-Cut, the medium diversity site. It went much better than the transect on Monday! There were less fish and we had a better idea of what we were doing. We saw some HUGE snapper...the biggest one was probably like 5 - 6 feet a weighed at least like 120-150 lbs. No kidding. HUGE fish. It was really intimidating.

Today was transect number 3 at the Blow-Out, the low diversity site....its basically solid rock bottom with a little bit of algae and soft corals, but there's still some fish. I saw a little reef shark cruising by today and a baby Coney (which is a type of grouper) that was about as long as my thumb!

During the time we're not diving, we're around the center doing research. We've had consistant internet, so we look up papers and read other research about our topic or similar research. We have a project proposal due saturday which is basically a 5 page paper talking about what we're doing and why we're doing it...so that's been taking up most of our time....

Tomorrow we're back doing REEF surveys, but I dont know what site yet, because the water's been pretty choppy lately. If it's really rought, we'll probably go to Mid-Cut again because thats the closest site.