Day 9

Another lovely day in paradise.

Started the day out with a morning lecture on brain coral skeleton morphology (how they are structured and look). We then headed over to salt rock dock to look at the iron shore formations (made of karst - a calcium carbonate substrate formed by cyanobacteria) which contain many coral skeletons (and even conch) from the pleistocene era, about 125,000 years old! This was one of my favorite things we've done thus far. I just think fossils are so cool!

After our morning field trip we had a delicious lunch of loaded nachos (shoutout to Ms. M, our cook who feeds us VERY well).

Fossilized conch shell

Fossilized brain coral skeleton

Fossilized coral skeleton

Dr. Mark Warner teaching the class about coral morphology

Dr. Mark Warner teaching the class about coral morphology

Fossilized brain coral

Salt Rock Dock

Salt Rock Dock

Salt Rock Dock

We quickly switched over to diving after lunch. We broke up into two groups again so we could use the small boats to head over to snap shot reef to take more transect measurements there. Each group identified what was under their transect tape and took images at every meter along a reef spur. They then looked for all the orbicella annularis corals along their transect and imaged them alongside a coral health color index. While each group wasnt diving they were writing up all the data they collected that day. It will be awesome to see the data that gets collected this week!

After dinner we had another short lecture going over the major coral genus and species names that we will encountering over the rest of the trip. Everyone is really starting to commit them to memory! Im excited to see how much everyone knows by the end of the week.

Everyone is really imporiving in their diving skills and it is great to see! And as always, I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store!

- J