Day 16

Windy day today, woke up to waves crashing on the shore below us and on the reef crest behind the lagoon. Luckily the wind is coming form the north, so the south side of the island is still calm enough for diving!

Morning clouds

Wind blowing the palm trees

We spent our morning diving at pirate's point reef where the students each took 2 transects with their quadrats. Everyone did really well and took great images! Everyone is becoming really self sufficient which is wonderful to see. We give the directions at the surface and they dive down and get straight to work!

Photo credit: Erin Papke
A student inspecting a coral after finishing their transects

Photo credit: Emma Wennick
Two angelfish swimming along the reef

When we got back to CCMI we were welcomed with a lunch of bacon cheeseburgers (yum!!). After we had a little time to digest we got to work processing the pictures the students had taken earlier. We also had a little classroom time going over previous data collected along the transects.

After dinner we had another class period in which Dr. Adam Marsh intruduced the students to R - an open source stastical modeling machine that works wonders with data sets like ours. He showed them how to made their data into intelligible graphs so they could compare their work with each other and even from the previous study abroad class 2 years ago! Its going to be great to see how everything turns out at the end of the course.

- J

Wind is still blowing but it looks beautiful!