2nd snorkeling day

Today was more of a work day than a play day. Following Tirzah’s blog I was in Sascha’s group. He pointed out several different types of rock corals including one of the most abundant corals in Dominica called Mustard Hill Coral. We saw several types of fire coral which are an important part of the reefs and brain coral. Brain coral provides a home for many different creatures. There were Christmas Tree Worms and even a Redlip Blenny living in this brain coral. He showed us a red alga called reef cement that grows on the rocks with these corals. It is a white/pink calcium looking coral that encrusts the rock. We also found a Red Heart Sea Urchine burried under the sand. He picked it up and I got to hold it. We also found a basket star curled up in a ball on a sea fan. They are nocturnal and only feed at night. During this time we also got attacked and stung my ctenophores. The second part of the snorkel was our experiment. The group I was in did a blet transect. We randomly picked an area and layed down the transect line. We used a t-bar to create a 1 meter by 1 meter square for our sample area. We took 10 samples. We recorded the type of species of rock coral that was in the sample area and the number of individuals for each sample. We were able to create 2 graphs with this data to represent species richness and density. After all this hard work with transects and sample areas the best part of the day was seeing the Heart Urchine and an Ocean Surgeonfish that was about 8 inches long. The coral reefs here are so unbelievably beautiful. It is amazing here and I can’t believe this trip is half way over.