Mantas and Plagues

Day one of our projects have finished!  I am working on plankton populations in different habitats in the reef lagoons.  We were on the boat from ten in the morning til four thirty in the afternoon, and we were sampling plankton by dragging nets behind the boat for ten minutes.  There were manta rays barrel rolling at one of our sites, which is how mantas gather plankton together in order to eat them.  So after our last run, we grabbed our fins and snorkel, and jumped into the water to swim with them!  The water was more turbid than some of the other sites, but we found the manta ray barrel rolling three feet from us!  It was by far the highlight of this trip thus far.

We also witnessed from the boat a large plague of locusts coming down from the point towards our camp.  There were so many locusts that they covered the whole point and made the white sand dunes brown!  They have been a bit annoying though, especially when you're trying to shower while keeping track of the seven locusts that are hanging out in the bathroom stall, but they don't bite, so there are no worries there.  Hopefully, they'll keep moving at the same speed they were earlier, and pass through Coral Bay quickly.

Tomorrow, we'll be finishing our last transect as well as collecting data on the habitats we are sampling in, and then afterwards start counting the different species of plankton and abundance at each site.  I don't have any pictures up from underwater, but here's a video of manta rays barrel rolling, so you have some idea of what we saw today.

KK