It's A Parade!

Tonight was interesting. For the last two weeks a drum corps has been practicing at the school down the street. Over and over and over again. And they're not all that great, well, were not all that great. Practicing up to six hours in one day helps you get good, apparently.

I walked down into town for supper and got trapped by a parade. It's almost Honduran Independence day, and apparently they start celebrating early. The crowd was loud and excited. All the children and some of the adults had different colored lanterns lit by candles. These clever little contraptions had cellophane tacked on wooden frames to create lamps that look like porch lights, but a myriad of different colors. They were quite beautiful and someone even had one that was made to look like a star.

In the middle of the crowd was the drum corps. When I walked up someone was yelling something that sounded inspriational, but I wasn't listening all that closely. After a few minutes of this, the drum corps started up. They sounded great! Way better than anything I had heard so far and I had had no choice in listening to much of their practicing. They even had a variety of steps to go along with the music. The piece ended and during the applause, someone started lighting off fireworks in the middle of the crowd! They shot up over our heads, above the buildings to explode high in the sky with a double bang. Everyone cheered. And then took a step back as more were set off.

After the last flare had dusted the sky with its sparks, the drum leader started blowing his whistle. The drums started a new tune and the flag bearers started pushing their way through the crowd. The street wasn't wide enough for a full crowd AND the marching group, so half the crowd was pushed in front of the parade and the rest trailed around behind. It was quite the sight!

I stayed where I was standing, off to the side until everyone had passed. Then I went and got myself baldeadas for supper. Yum! My only regret is that I did not have my camera along with me, so I don't have any pictures of the proceedings. You'll just have to take my word for it when I say that it was one of the happiest and liveliest crowds I have ever been a part of.

Hatchlings!

This week was a mixture of crazy busy and boredom. Amy and her sisters left in a flurry of packing and goodbyes on Tuesday morning. That same morning (and nearly simultaneously) we had our first nest emerge! Amy is still sad because she missed it by just a few hours.

When Lindsey got the call that there were hatchlings, she and I headed to the beach. We ended up digging up the nest there and then, because it was infested with ants. Sadly, the ants had already killed several hatchlings that were still buried. However, we did have a mess of cute, wiggling baby turtles!

Having been up all night for the past couple of nights watching the nest, Lindsey and I were both exhausted. It was decided then, that the hatchlings would be held overnight, we would process them, and they would be released the evening of the next day.

Getting everything set up.

Overall, the data taking went smoothly. For Lindsey's project we weighed each hatchling, measured the length and width of its upper carapace, and took a very small blood sample. This sample will allow Lindsey to figure out what gender each hatchling is.

Turtles don't have a gender determining chromosome like you or I. Instead of being XY or XX, their sex is determined by the temperature that the nest is incubated at. The top of the nest will be slightly warmer because of the heat of the sun and so the turtles that hatch out of eggs from the top of the nest will be female. The lower eggs are colder and will then develop into male turtles. Lindsey has placed data loggers in each nest that will allow us to measure these temperatures. When she compares this with the number of males and females from the nest, she can then develop a temperature profile that will allow us to predict the gender ratios for a nest, without needing to do the extra work with blood samples.

Lindsey was slightly afraid that this little guy would bite her. He wouldn't keep his mouth shut!

Five more to go!

It took us about six hours of lab work to process the fifty-one hatchlings, but we enjoyed every minute! Unfortunately, neither Lindsey or I got to go out and release them because we were still processing the blood samples. Next time I will have pictures!

We now have about a week off before our second nest emerges. I'm using it to get caught up on sleep and enjoy a little more of this beautiful island I get to live on!

Garden Eels and Pufferfish.

Today we did two dives. The first was a deep dive (second time to 100 feet!) and the second was to a small wreck/a navigation dive. Amy's sisters started their Advanced Open Water Scuba course today, so they had to do some compass work on the second dive for that. The rest of us got to play around underwater while we waited. I got to practice my bubble rings, which are getting better every dive!

Sarah and Emily practicing navigation.

Emily doing a "James Bond Roll" into the water.

Aaaaand she's upside down...

Look at my awesome bubble ring!!

We saw a ton of fish today on our dives, but three of animals we saw really caught my eye.

1. A baby trunkfish! These two pictures are of an adult trunkfish:

See the funky shape? In a Fish ID book, you'd find him under "Odd-Shaped Fishes." They are nearly triangular shaped and just make you want to laugh as they whiz by. However cool the adults may be, the babies are cooler. We didn't get a picture of the one we saw today (he went and hid), but I found this picture online so you can get an idea of just how awesome these little fish are:

http://livingoncaicos.blogspot.com/2009/08/juvenile-smooth-trunkfish.html 

Isn't just the cutest thing you've ever seen? At this stage, they are roughly the size of a marble and tend to bounce around, rather than swim. You can barely see their little fins!

2. The other day when I Skyped home, my brother asked me if there were any Garden Eels around Utila. I told him I hadn't seen any, so I wasn't sure. I can now answer that question. Yes, yes we do. On today's dive we came across several groups of Brown Garden Eels (perhaps 250 eels total?).Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of my own again because Amy's camera won't take pictures below about 40ft.

3. As we were working our way up on the second dive, Amy suddenly starts pointing underneath a coral ledge. Just hanging out there was the biggest pufferfish I had ever seen! It was easily a foot long. (the picture I managed to take of this beauty does not do its size justice!)

Awesome, giant pufferfish

Black Coral Wall

This last weekend, I went on my longest dive so far (1:25) and Amy’s sisters arrived to visit. Our house is a little more crowded than it used to be!

I'm driving the ATV and Amy is taking pictures from her seat on the
front grill. Sarah and Emily are hanging onto the back.

The dive was at Black Coral Wall, one of my favorite dive site around Utila. For her Dive Master certification, Amy had to map a dive site. To do this, you swim in a u-shaped pattern using the number of fin kicks to measure distance. When the bottom substrate changes (say sand to coral) or when the depth changes, you mark this down on a slate. When you get back on land, you can then use this information to estimate distances and draw a map of the site area.

While she was doing this, I got to do pretty much what I wanted while following her around the reef. Since I had the camera, I spent my time stalking flounders, hanging upside down trying to creep up behind an angelfish, and trying to blow bubble rings. (I’m getting much better, but Amy is the master of bubble rings.)

This is a Flamingo's Tongue, a fairly common and beautiful snail. 

A mixed school of Surgeonfish terrifying all the Damselfish on the reef.

Look! A bubble ring!

The two amazingly beautiful Grey Angelfish that came and hung out with us. (See my fin the lower right corner?!?!)

Scuba Week!

Last week, Amy and I got a bit of a vacation. Our grad student abandoned us to go home and see her husband for a couple of weeks. Since she was off having fun, Amy and I decided that it was time for our vacation too—especially since the Utila Dive Festival was happening!

We had a ton of fun going to different events and specialty dives. My favorite part of the week was getting to go on several dives to the north side of the island. Actually, my favorite part of the week was getting to snorkel with DOLPHINS!

That was pretty much the most exciting day I’ve had here. On our way to do our first dive for the week, we ran across a small pod of Spinner Dolphins. UDC’s policy is that you can snorkel with the dolphins, as long as you tip the boat captain. Amy and I decided that it was definitely worth the cost.

Despite there being quite a few of us in the water, we got some good looks at the dolphins. The best view I had was when one swam directly under me about ten feet down.

Baleadas make the best breakfast foods!

After the dolphin excitement, we got to our dive site. Blackish Point is a unique dive site here on Utila because it is the only spot on Utila where Midnight Parrotfish can be found regularly.

Unfortunately, we were diving too deep for Amy’s camera to work so I don’t have any pictures of the fish we were seeing. The highlights of the dive were two Midnight Parrotfish and eight brittle stars.

Amy working on her Coral Watch project to help determine
how much coral bleaching is occurring around  Utila.

The rest of the week was a lot of fun—we did a pollution clean-up dive, watched a boat parade, and Amy even won a ScubaPro hat! 

One of the boats in the Parade of Lights.

Ninja Turtle Returns

Last night, Amy and I spent the night on the beach with Gene.

Overall the night wasn't too bad. There was no wind--so more bugs than normal, but not nearly has bad as they have been in the past.

Ninja Turtle returning to the ocean.

The exciting news is that Ninja Turtle/Speedy has returned and she actually laid a nest this time!

Amy came back from the midnight beach patrol and told me that we had a turtle. When we got there, it was easy to tell that the turtle was our old friend Speedy. She has a much smoother shell and almost no notch in the back of the shell. Her tracks led straight up from the ocean and she had dug one nest and laid eggs straight away.

This is why they are called Hawksbill Turtles. I've been told they can
give a pretty nasty bite--I'm not planning on testing that out.

She's almost done laying!

She left an egg unburied, so I rescued it and buried it for her.

It was so relaxing--we didn't have to worry about placing data loggers or a sat tag. When the turtle was there we only had to take her measurements, get a rough count of the eggs as she laid them, and make sure we had her pictures for the data base. No sweat for experienced turtle researchers like us!

"We don't have protocol for this."

The last week or so has been quite depressing.

1. The ATV broke down at the beach. We couldn't even fix it with the machete and we didn't have a second vehicle with us to pull it out. So we walked back to town. Did I mention that we did the three mile walk back   along a road that was more lake than road in the pouring rain because a hurricane had just past by? (The phrase of the day was, "It wasn't raining when we left!" and it got more pitiful the longer we were out.)

2. The ATV broke down at the beach (again). We had just gotten it back from getting "fixed." The other vehicle with us was Gene's scooter. We did push the ATV to a better spot to leave it with the scooter, but we still had to walk out. This was the day after the previous walk, so the road was a mud pit.

3. Amy got sick.

4. The night Amy got sick, Lindsey and I still had to go to the beach. It was the hottest night I have spent on the beach so far and there was no wind, so there were quite a few bugs. However, on the drive back into town we had the worst experience of the week....

5. We were attacked by a swarm of bees. Really. It was quite traumatizing. We were now driving a four-wheel drive golf cart (which is probably why we hadn't broken down again) and I was standing on the back, holding on with one hand while wildly swatting bees with the other. Lindsey was driving at full speed down the road while swatting bees. We both got stung a couple of times (I had to pull two stingers out of Lindsey's head before the night was over). In all, not an experience I want to go through again. Luckily, neither of us is badly allergic to bees and the swarm doesn't seem to have stuck around. We think that one of the trees that fell over must have disturbed the nest and we disturbed it further by driving through it.

So, in all, by Sunday morning we were all in pretty bad spirits and none of us were in the mood to spend Sunday night on the beach. However, Sunday night our stretch of bad luck broke and our spirits were completely turned around in a matter of minutes.

At 9:10, Lindsey comes back to the tarp and tells us that she and Chel found a turtle that was almost done digging her nest. We all packed things up and head down the beach all of twenty yards. This was exciting--we might actually be done early and get to go home to sleep! Also, we were hoping to deploy the satellite tag, which meant we had to start the process as soon as the turtle entered her nesting trance.

On closer inspection we discovered two things about this turtle. First, she was a new turtle--only the fourth confirmed female on this beach! Second, we could not sat tag her because there was a barnacle in the way. However, as long as she laid a nest, we decided that we would be happy.

After a couple of minutes, I headed back to our camp to pick up a couple of things we had left behind. As I walked along the bottom of the brush that lines most of the beach, I heard some rustling. My first thought was that it was either a really big crab or... another turtle. Thinking that there was no way that we could have two turtles at one time, I turned on my light. There was a turtle sitting in the bushes, less than a meter from where I was standing. To say I was surprised is putting it mildly--I nearly fell over! Turning around, I went back to where Amy and Lindsey were sitting.

"There's another turtle over there." I stumbled over the words.

They both looked at me in shock. We had had two turtles, within 10 meters of each other in 10 minutes!

Lindsey's first words? "We don't have protocol for this!"

The next four hours were busy ones. Both turtles ended up laying nests that we had to dig up and catalog, we deployed the last set of data loggers in one, and the second turtle (named "Surprise" for obvious reasons) was perfect to deploy the sat tag on.

The end result is that we are done with the beach nights needed for Lindsey's research and we were much, much happier researchers! Now, we just need to finish the beach profiling and the pollution study before the nests start hatching and we have several hundred hatchlings to process.