It's been awhile since I've updated, but we've been swamped with working on our plankton and manta project. We have finished collecting the data, including looking at the plankton through a microscope and identifying them up to their order. If asked, I can now identify copepods, decapod larvae, amphipods, and mysids. Now all that's left is writing up the report and giving the presentation, which is also pretty much done. Of course, our project did not come without some complications. Ironically, all this happened at the site where we saw the manta rays the other day. It was day two of our project, and we went out to take quadrat pictures for our habitat types, and we threw the one quadrat down and dove to take a picture, but when we went to grab the quadrat, it disappeared under the sand! The swell was so bad, that the waves completely covered the quadrat with sand, and we couldn't find it, because it was so murky. From then, we tied a rope with a buoy onto the new quadrat so we wouldn't lose that one, only to have water leak into the waterproof case and damage the camera! Obviously, Bateman's Bay did not want us to do any habitat analysis, so we gave up and headed to one of our other sites.
However, because we've done all of this work for the last couple of days, we got to go on a wildlife cruise! We got on the cruise at around 8:30 in the morning, and spent all day out on the boat, looking for Ningaloo Reef's iconic wildlife. We saw black-tipped reef sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, manta rays, tiger sharks, and HUMPBACK WHALES!! The dolphins were riding the wake of our boat, so we got a ton of really close pictures of them. The manta rays were barrel rolling to feed, which was great to see again. We saw four humpbacks total: two were juveniles that were just beyond the reef, and the other two were a mother and calf that was less than a week old resting in the bay. Today was, by far, the highlight of the trip.
Well, that's all for now. We have another free day tomorrow before starting our second project. Here are some pictures from our cruise along with one of our manta pictures for our project.
KK
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