One month anniversary with LSI

It's been an awesome few days around here with, you guessed it, lots more work. Mark and I finished another round of recruit censuses on Monday morning. We also went on a lionfish hunting safari to round up replacements for the fish that had gone missing since last week. It was nice to get to just go out and kick around a little. Plus I was able to find some fish I plan on going back to collect to use in my feeding experiments. There was a gargantuan lionfish (probably 14 inches nose to tail) who will be perfect for my study. Now only remains the challenge of wrangling that size of fish. :)

Yesterday was our one month anniversary with Lee Stocking Island. Brenda, the Island Manager, had us over to her house to sit around a bonfire and enjoy hamburgers and sangria. And the island decided to celebrate the occasion by waking us up with a totally unbelievable thunderstorm. They are pretty common to build up in the afternoon and blow over as we are working. Lots of days we have big thunderheads lumber by out at the transreefs. But this was our first big morning storm and was big enough to keep us at breakfast extra long hanging out. I felt pretty cool rocking my rain jacket for the like 20 yards from the door of my house to the door of the dining lounge. And the day stayed cold enough to tried out my full wetsuit for the first time this summer. All in all, adventure abounds.

The past couple days we have been helping Tim and Flower work on the metapopulation project with little dicolored damselfish. It is SO much fun! We have been catching all of these little fish, some of who have been recorded and caught/released summer after summer for years. Basically you sneak up to a coral head (the older ones know to run when they see you) and count all the fish to make sure you don't lose any in the catching frenzy. You have a bottle of quinaldine, which is a completely nasty neuro-toxin, anesthetic stuff and a little aquarium net and you have to swoop down and collect all of these little fish into their own individual ziplock baggies. The Quinie basically gets the fish drunk so they get all woozy and slow down, which is Super helpful after you have chased them for like 20 miles around and around a chunk of coral. It's quite the spectacle with divers swimming all around with little squirt bottles dodging firecoral and shooing away big predators who seem to have learned that divers with nets means easy pickings on the woozy fish. It's really fun work bobbing around in the current nabbing little fish and I am really glad we got tagged in as the extra hands.

In other news, I made friends with a BIG (5ish foot) barracuda today. He came and watched the ridiculousness of me wedging myself under a coral head chasing a tiny fish. I thought he would lose interest rather quickly when he realized I was not anything delicious he could munch on but he seemed to enjoy my underwater contortion show. He seemed perfectly pleased to just hover over my shoulder about 2-3 feet away watching me work. There are a little club of barracuda that hang out at all the different sites, one at each. Spartacus lives off the end of our dock, Socrates lives at a site called South Normans, and Archimedes lives at the Windsock site. I think if my little friend comes back to visit tomorrow he might need to join the distinguished ranks of our other named cuda friends.

Mark is spending a dry morning working on odds and ends stuff tomorrow while I finish up catching at another site with Flower and Tim. Hopefully, in the afternoon we will be ready to go out and do some grouper and lionfish collections to kick off my feeding experiment this week! That's the news from LSI on this lovely Tuesday evening. Hope you're all smiling wherever this note may find you!