"Is that your real hair?" - Sea Day and 90s Prom

I have to admit, I'm surprised we are alive after yesterday. Not only did we finish data collection on Friday (no small feat), we had the busiest Saturday of all time. But how can a day go badly if it starts out with petting a sea turtle? Answer: it can't. And yes I did pet a sea turtle on my dive, it was a hawksbill.

Photographic evidence by my lovely roommate Juli

Yesterday afternoon we had Sea Day at the center, and spent most of the morning prepping. Organisms were collected, touch tanks set up, signs made, and costumes donned (no joke) in preparation for the invasion of children and their families coming to learn about the ocean. I was stationed at the mangrove station, obviously, and we had a baby mangrove tree, a sea cucumber, a sea biscuit, a sea urchin, a clam, and my favorite: upside-down jellyfish! The kids loved it, and got a huge kick out of learning about all the animals. We also had a live turtle, and a SCUBA demonstration!

Mangrove team, looking super psyched

My babies! So beautiful!

Learning all about seagrass ecosystems

Quality photo ops all around

So Sea Day was a great success, and of course culminated in cake. I believe everything in life should involve an elaborately decorated cake, it is a positive addition to any gathering. And yes, a fair amount of the girls asked me if my hair was real, and were then extremely doubtful when I said that it was! They pulled on it to make sure. 

Then in the evening we prepared for...90s Prom! This is not a joke. Throughout the semester we've had this joke Sigma Turks frat thing going, and have had many "pledge events." This one was obviously the best. We drew dates out of a hat, had to ask them creatively, and then come up with matching 90s costumes. Given our limited supplies, this was actually one of the most impressive groups of costumes I have ever seen. My wonderful data Aurora and I were Beanie Babies, and our costumes were pretty sweet. We also had Powerpuff Girls, green slime, Friends, Mary-Kate and Ashley, and lots of others. Prom was a major success, but now we are all exhausted. 

You bet there are poems inside those tags

The whole crew: can you guess who everybody is?

So after a weekend full of fun, we're going to have to buckle down to work on our final presentations and papers. I have to start wading through mountains of numbers related to jellyfish, and trying to figure out if those numbers actually mean anything at all. And then write a paper about it. And make a presentation about it. And give said presentation. And relish my last week and a half in this amazing place by snorkeling and diving whenever possible. And hopefully sleep somewhere in there too. Yeah, we'll see how that goes...

Three Weeks and Near Death Experiences

I was almost eaten by a shark yesterday. Well, not really, I'll explain later, I promise. But first...yesterday marked exactly three weeks until I leave South Caicos! Which is crazy. On the one hand, that seems like forever from now. On the other hand, it seems like tomorrow. I have come to the conclusion that time follows entirely different rules down here.

We are halfway through data collection for DR (Directed Research, in case I didn't tell you before), and my project is actually shaping up pretty well. Lots of jellyfish to measure! But thankfully not as many as at that first site. Otherwise I'm pretty sure my group would have (understandably) rebelled. Yesterday we collected muck to plant mangrove seedlings...which are not doing well. Apparently baby mangroves do not like being ripped up and then planted in five gallon buckets. Who knew? But don't worry guys, it's for SCIENCE. This afternoon we're heading out to an old US Coast Guard station, one of the most beautiful spots on the island, to get more data. That is, providing the road isn't washed out from the rain storm yesterday!

But about that shark. If you have ever met me, you will know that I have an overactive imagination, and that it sometimes gets me into trouble. Yesterday was one of those times. We were on one of our lionfish hunts yesterday afternoon, with six students and five staff (which is a lot of people, in case you were wondering). We dove The Grotto, which is a fantastic site along the wall, so you're almost guaranteed to see at least one reef shark. We saw two, plus a bunch of eagle rays, throughout our dive, and we caught six lionfish, so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We'd been down there for about 40 minutes, and a couple people were getting low on air, so we started ascending to make our safety stop. That's when the shark came back. In case you forgot what a six-foot-long reef shark looks like, here is a picture (courtesy of the inter-webs):

Your neighborhood-friendly reef shark

So we were all just floating there in the water, between 15 and 20 feet down, and this reef shark came and started sort of circling us. It would swim towards us a little bit, then swim away, then come back, then swim around us, then swim away, and so on. It never went out of sight though. I wish I could tell you that I was floating there thinking something along the lines of "Wow look at that amazing creature, it's so majestic and beautiful" or even something intense like "It's the shark or me this time" (bonus points if you get that reference). But no. I was floating there like "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THAT SHARK WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" and imagining all the shark attack stories I had ever heard of (thanks a lot, Soul Surfer). Turns out the shark was actually interested in our little buoy, not us, but it was still pretty insane when the thing took off towards the surface ready to attack what it thought was a fish. It realized it wasn't a fish at the last minute, and dove back down and swam away (for real that time). Thankfully for my blood pressure, we finished our safety stop at about this point. 

So just to reiterate, everyone was totally fine, and I was the only one who was even nervous. Apparently my eyes were bugging out of my head. And we weren't actually in any danger. The shark didn't really care about what we were doing at all. I am an idiot. 

...I still sort of feel like I cheated death though. I do not plan on doing that again.

Happy Easter!

Creative title, I know. But it is Easter, after all!

This morning, after I finished helping to make brunch, three other girls and I walked over the local Baptist church for their Easter service (I had the rest of my kitchen crew put aside some food for us for later, since we would be missing brunch!). It was so wonderful. Everyone was so glad to see us, and asked us where we were from, and everyone was wishing everyone else a very happy Easter. All of the kids (and adults, for that matter) were in their Easter best, with the little girls practically wearing princess dresses. We felt a little underdressed in our sundresses and salt-water-washed hair! One of the little boys gave us hymnals and Bibles, and the pastor came over to say hi and welcome us to the service.

The service itself was great. Two hours, but it didn't feel that long at all. We sang and sang and sang, which I obviously loved. It being Easter Sunday, we obviously sang Christ Our Lord is Risen Today, Crown Him with Many Crowns, and other standards. A group of women even sang a song for everyone in Creole! As I was sitting in my seat listening, I suddenly remembered a story that an old choir director once told me. When she was in college she had travelled with the college chorale to Africa to sing with a local choir there. No one spoke the other's language, but soon they started teaching each other songs and dances, and only remembered they couldn't speak to each other when it was time to say goodbye. Obviously the situation here isn't quite so extreme, as everyone speaks English and we are here for a much longer period of time, but I think it still applies. We may not understand each other's cultures perfectly, but we can all sing those songs on Easter Sunday. Oh, and the sermon was nice too!

So now that I've finished being sappy about music and singing, a little update on what's going on at the center: we finished finals! Thank goodness! So classroom time is over, and Directed Research data collection has begun. If you think this means that we have more free time, you would be completely wrong. The opposite is true! We're all running around like crazy people, between collecting data for our own projects and helping with other projects, such as turtling and sharking. For my project I'm looking at the presence of the upside down jellyfish around mangroves and how that relates to nutrient levels and the health of the ecosystem. My group of four went out on Friday to one of our sites, which happens to be near the dump, to collect data. It was disgusting. Muck everywhere, and jellyfish literally everywhere you wanted to step! My poor group members had to help me measure them, and we measured over 700! Luckily that is the site with the most, so other days shouldn't be as insane.

I also got to help out one of the other groups with a lionfish hunt! Lionfish are a Pacific fish that are invasive to this area, so one of the other projects is looking at encouraging the creation of a lionfish fishery to get rid of them. So a few of us went diving with nets to catch them. While I personally did not catch any, the group caught five, and it was amazingly fun. And I'll get to help out with that for the rest of data collection time! But tomorrow it's back to the mangroves.

Yesterday we had our recreational dives, and since we are all advanced open water certified now, we could go to a site called The Grotto. Definitely my favorite dive (after the whale, obviously!). We dove along the wall, and saw two sharks, a turtle, eagle rays, and a bunch of queen angelfish. But that wasn't even really the best part. The coral formations at this site are incredible, creating cool formations and passages to swim around. I don't think I've ever felt so thoroughly like I was in another world, it was amazing. Luckily it's a favorite lionfish hunt site!

It's back to work tomorrow, and full speed for the next two weeks, so I'll need to get some sleep tonight! Have a wonderful Easter everyone, and go listen to Godspell or something.