For the past two days I have been working on the lionfish team instead of the aquaculture team on field data collection. Yesterday was pretty nasty, windy and rainy to make a windchill of around 65, and I forgot to wear my wetsuit to it turned out to be pretty miserable, but today was sunnier and warmer.

   The dives take place on patch reef ecosystems, little islands of coral in a sea of sand and turtle grass. The bay we were in, Rock Sound, had a max depth of 11 feet, so dives were very shallow, but I was able to stay down longer and use less air because of the lessened water pressure. The area surrounding the patch reefs are prairies of sand and turtle grass browsed upon by herds of foot long sea cucumbers, and the reefs themselves vary in size, but almost all are the size of a large room. After having dove at the Cobia cage, which is near a 1,000 foot wall, I can definitely see a difference in fish and coral cover, the patch reefs having more juvenile fishes while the area around the cage has lots of big fish.

   We spend about 30 min at each site, with the goal of surveying 6 sites a day. Transect lines are set up crisscrossing the reef, and some of the other interns follow these lines and try to count and identify all the fish species they see in an attempt to quantify the effect lionfish are having on fish biodiversity. My job was to find lionfish hiding in the nooks and crannies in the reef and measure their length while trying to not get stung. Over the 6 dives I counted lionfish, I counted 58 lionfish, but there were more than 100 on these reefs when one factors in dives I did not participate in. Considering their veracity and high place in the food change, the reefs are ravaged of small fish populations, especially gobies and juvenile wrasses which were nonexistent at several of the reefs. Overall the reefs are changing dramatically in their fish biodiversity and biomass as we compare fish population data pre lionfish invasion.

Finally, all the Cobia are in their open water cage! I think we have about 1100 right now. Spent the afternoon doing the whole procedure one last time to get this last batch of about 300 cobia into the cage, went way smoother than our main move on saturday. Now all we have to do is dive the cage occasionally to feed them and do some cage maintenance.

Today was pretty awesome - Sunday is our day off so us interns basically fooled around all day. Me and another aquaculture intern, Tyler, headed off to the offshore cobia cage after breakfast to feed the fish. Although I wasn't able to take pictures, this video above from a few years ago should give you an idea of what I saw. Max depth at 92 feet, saw a couple reef sharks and a friendly black grouper which followed us around the cage while we fed the cobia.

Since we had the rest of the day off, we got on our bikes and went to a series of small cliffs on the west side of Cape Eleuthera to swim/snorkel.

High Rock, Eleuthera

Chris

Tyler

Stefan

 Here are some pictures of part of the Cape Eleuthera Institute I took, more on the way.

from left to right, intern dorms, visiting scientist house, Island School campus

inside of dorm

I haven't had time to update since I just got internet yesterday, so I'm going to skip over a lot.

Flight into Rock Sound, Eleuthera was very cool, the sandbanks in the sound making some really cool shapes.

Dorms for the interns here are small and are ovens which absorb heat from the constant sun. Since the research lab I am working at, CEI, is making attempts to be self sufficient from other power sources, there are only poorly working fans to offer any help.

last night all of the interns and the teachers affiliated with CEI's environmental education branch, the Island School, went to a party a couple miles south of the lab. All interns are given bikes, so we rode down to a delicious BBQ grill session and rode back at 11 on the main highway in eleuthera - two cars passed us. Heat lightning was blinking on overhead coupled with the bright night sky to make an awesome 30 minute ride back to campus.

Today we transferred some of our Cobia from our wet lab to our offshore aquaculture net. We have around 1500 individuals to transfer, going from tank to tubs on a truck to more tubs on a boat before we can release them in the water via a long tube. We had to transfer each fish one at a time from the boat to the cage, which took forever and was painful as Cobia have sharp spines on their back which tore up my palms as I transferred them. Hopefully we will finish next week.

Hopefully will get some pictures of the island and the lab up sometime early next week.

FISH OF THE DAY - I will try to post pictures of a species of Caribbean reef fish every day so you can see the kind of fish diversity I will be seeing.

Today will be the Sharknose Goby (Elacatinus evelynae), of which the aquaculture lab at CEI breeds. We breed them, I'm told, to clean parasites off of the small Cobia, but I have never seen or known of this behavior before. I've seen them mostly on brain and plate corals, where a pair will stake out a corner of coral as their own territory. They are really fast, and look like little jewels darting about on the surface of the coral. See more pictures at http://ie7.reefguide.org/carib/sharknosegoby.html


Picture is not mine, all rights to Florent's reef Guide

Ok so this blog is going to be taking a different direction in the next couple of weeks as I prepare for an internship at the Cape Eleuthera Institute in the Bahamas. I will be mostly serving as an Aquaculture intern, but I will also be assisting with fish surveys for the lionfish research aspect of the Institute. The Aquaculture branch of the institute breeds Cobia in a giant open water pen at around 85 feet, as well as, as far as I can tell, sharknose gobies and rotifers. My responsibilities will include cleaning, cleaning, and monitoring water parameters in the giant tanks on land that are used for raising the baby cobias and the other fish, and power-washing the netting of the open water pen. Although I don't know exactly what I will be doing, I update regularly. Hopefully I will be able to make a couple of posts every week for the two months I will be down there ranging from discussion of daily activities, the science of what I am doing, and musings on whatever I am reading/seeing at the time. Please subscribe to be kept up to date!


 I've been doing some reading from different scientific journals about lionfish, and I feel that I should give a brief summary of the lionfish problem in the Caribbean. The populations of the Pterois volitans, or the Volitans Lionfish, in the Caribbean are not native - they are invasive species that originally hail from the indo-pacific. Although we don't know exactly how they got into the Caribbean, we think that Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was responsible, as the Miami Seaquarium was inundated by the surge and it is thought that several individuals on exhibit escaped. Anyways, the problem now is that they are really, really, really successful predators. Part of this is due to the native fish populations' not being used to this new type of predator. While the Caribbean has it's share of other sit-and-wait predators like frogfish, the rapacious hunger of these guys in addition to their increased mobility over frogfish, etc. are making their populations explode (see Arias-Gonzalez, J.E.,et al.,Predicted impact of the invasive lionfish Pterois volitans on the food web of a Caribbean coral reef.Environ.Res.(2011)) Personally, I still wonder why lionfish are so much more successful than the other sit-and-wait native predators, but that is something I hope to find out. So the lionfish are decimating native fish populations, and part of the research CEI is involved in are reef fish surveys, where they survey the biodiversity and biomass of fish populations in lionfish infected zones. While I'm not sure if I will be participating, many SCUBA divers have taken matters into their own hands and have started a spearfishing rampage in an attempt to slow the spread of the lionfish. Apparently they are good eating, and some restaurants are now using them on their menu. Personally, I have started to wonder if the marine aquarium trade will start importing Atlantic, invasive lionfish in lieu of the indo-pacific populations.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you will stay tuned for further updates!

Marianas Trench Exploration Update

So i've come across some more sites relating to the "race" for challenger deep that i found interesting from Marinebio.org (a great site, check them out)

BBC has come up with a great mini-site about the race where you can see the physical obstacles the explorers will meet as well as the vessels they intend to use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17013285 . There wasn't any info on James Cameron's sub, so I did some digging and found this video which was released within the last week: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/environment/habitats-environment/habitats-oceans-env/deepsea-challenge-first-attempt/
I'm excited to hear that they plan to launch in the next few weeks, so I will make sure to keep up to date on that.

Although it appears Cameron will be the first to reach Challenger Deep on over 50 years, I'm kind of bummed that the scientific contestant, Google's DOER, won't be the first. At the same time, such a monumental feat will be better shared by Cameron and his fleet of HD cameras.

My Picture of the Trieste, the first and last sub to reach Challenger Deep.