Halfway through! We took our first real data collection today. We went to two different places to collect data, Eiley Rocks and Tuffy. Eiley Rocks is named after our boat captain, Norman Eiley. It is a patch reef system that is a part of coral gardens. We buddy teamed this spot and did two fish counts. For our first count, I counted 49 bluestriped grunts. The second count I counted 78. The grunts were by far the most abundant fish we saw here. When we were done counting, we snorkeled around more and saw:
- 6ft barracuda (with very large teeth)
- mahogany snapper
- mutton snapper
- nassau grouper
- bar jack
- squid
- tilefish
On the boat ride to the next location, Tuffy, we encountered a pod of dolphins. I took a video and will post it when I get back home. They swam along with our boat for a while. Tuffy is named after a shrimp boat that sank in that location. At Tuffy, there is a channel that runs through the reef and we were looking at that channel to compare with the marine park Hol Chan. In the channel I only counted 19 bluestriped grunts. On the back reef we did two more counts, and I counted 9 and 15 grunts. On our way through the channel we saw a very large spotted eagle ray and right behind it was a large nurse shartk. This was my first time to see a shark and I was very excited! We watched it for a little while until it swam away and then continued the counting. I also got to hold a sea urchin while we were snorkeling this place. We saw many different fish and it is also where we are going to go on our night snorkel. A few other things we saw:
- 2 southern stingray
- lionfish
- spotted moray eel
I will have videos to post from Tuffy of the shark and the lionfish. I took a video of Norman's son Jeff killing the lionfish. Lionfish are an invasive species, and Jeff kills them whenever he goes out on a dive or snorkel. Lionfish are predators that eat the other fish, but they are not prey for anything. If left unchecked, they can do a lot of damage to the reef ecosystem. He killed four just today. Each month there is a lionfish tournament and last month they killed 6000lbs of lionfish.
No comments:
Post a Comment