After a busy weekend of reef visits, a lab practical, church singing, and a visit to Key West, the blog is back! It’s hard to believe that we’ve already arrived to our last week here in the Keys. Students are now focused on finishing up data collection for their research projects and analyzing/writing up their results. They also have their final exam tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. Such is life in the field during May Term: there’s too little time to not be busy! Here to talk about our day on the reef last Friday is Luke Geiser, a first year molecular biology/biochemistry major and sustainability minor.
Guess what?! Today was reef day! After a busy week of straightening out the kinks in our research projects, we were definitely ready to spend a relaxing day riding 11 miles out to 3 different coral reefs and snorkeling our little hearts out. Our lunches were packed, our life jackets were buckled, and off we went with Josh & Tom (2 marine biologists from the Keys Marine Lab across the street). After a 35 minute wavy ride through the open ocean we arrived at our first reef site, called Coffins Patch.
We started excitingly suiting up in our flippers, goggles, and snorkel to dive in. Once in the water, there were squeals of delight as people realized just how amazing the reef was. The water was about 12 feet deep or so and visibility was great. There were sergeant majors, angel fish, parrot fish, barracuda, sharks, trumpet fish, sea turtles, and lots of coral of course! We tried to become comfortable diving down to the sea bed but the pressure usually caused us to surface soon after. Then we took a short 2 minute boat ride to our next stop on reef road.
This reef contained huge pillar corals similar to Roman pillars. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were these corals because they average about 1 meter of growth per 1000 years! Unfortunately, we tired out quickly from all the swimming and took a break to use the boat as our own personal diving board. Dives, back flips, belly-flops, twists, front flips, cannonballs, and regular ol’ jumps were on the menu today. I became exhausted from this and ended up floating around on provided noodles, which seemed to be smaller than what I remember as a kid. Then it was time for one last stop to our 3rd reef.
The last reef was getting closer to 20 feet deep and the rolling back and forth of the boat had definitely gotten to many in our group. We didn’t quite have our sea legs yet. The ones who wanted one last shot to see the reef geared up and got in. I was enjoying myself and snorkeling around for a while until Nat motioned me to get back on the boat because apparently it was time to go. After clambering into the boat, we headed off back to our facility to recover from our long day out at sea. We were happy to be on dry land again but that also meant it was time to study for the practical exam over about 70 different organisms that would take the following morning. Alas, my favorite memories from the day were being up close with a barracuda and synchronized diving off of the boat. Day by day, the marine bio course continues to amaze us all and I can’t wait to sea what’s in store next!
