Since the last time I’ve posted I have gone on five more dives. Three of them consisted of collecting data for our projects. My specific project is identifying coral bleaching by running 10-m transects and identifying the coral that is underneath the transect and giving each coral a bleach index. My group submitted our proposal on Tuesday morning and we are in the midst of making our poster for presenting next Wednesday. The other two dives we planted coral in substrates for new coral colonies to grow. Today we dove to clean the coral nursery where scientists try to grow new coral so we can plant them out in the substrate. Tuesday was a stormy day so we stayed inside to learn more about invasive lionfish and actually got to dissect them to analyze their stomach content. Tonight we are going on a night snorkel to see the bioluminescent and biofluorescent species. I’m really excited to see what everything looks like at night 😀 Sometime next week we will be going on a night dive and netting lionfish to remove them from the reefs. I still have a lot of cool things to look forward to.
P.S – We had a huge dodgeball tournament on Tuesday with all the interns and research assistants. We all have battle-wounds from the intense experience and rematches have yet to come.
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