A dusky damselfish protecting its turf.

We got our first chance to get in the water yesterday and do some exploring of the lagoon and the back reef. We did a quick snorkel before lunch just to get adjusted to the area and get settled. Of course my snorkel broke on day one. The clip that holds my snorkel to my mask cracked and I had to actually hold my snorkel above water with my hand to keep it above water. I’m sure you can imagine how silly that looked. After some quick repairs and the wonders of gorilla tape, I was able to fix it and was anxious to get out for the snorkel after lunch. The afternoon snorkel we headed straight out towards the reef crest and spent most of our time on the back reef and the reef flat leading up to the reef crest that protects the lagoon. On the way out across the lagoon we crossed over several areas where ground water comes up through the bottom and mixes with the salt water causing many areas of shimmering water- kind of like the blur you see above the pavement on a road when driving on a really really hot day. Very cool looking. We passed over some sea grass beds on the way out and started exploring the patches of reef at the far side of the lagoon. Many cool fish here that I haven’t seen before. I’m looking forward to doing some SCUBA so I can get some more photos of fish, but it is hard to get good fish shots when snorkeling sometimes. It is surprisingly hard to take pictures of fish. Sometimes I swear they know and are camera shy- they seem to swim quickly away just at the last second when you snap the shot. The notable exception being the Dusky damselfish (Stegastes adustus) which are very territorial and try to bully you away from their space (see above). The other very cool find of the day for me was a small group of squid that were near a tethered buoy out in the middle of the lagoon. No one else was around for me to point these guys out, so this was my own special find- Caribbean Reef Squid (Sepioteuthis sepioidea) (see below). It was cool to watch them changing color and trying to match the algae growing on the buoy to camouflage themselves from me. Unfortunately, we were already running late and headed back in for our next lecture so I didn’t get much time to observe them. The weather has been nice, though cloudier and a little colder than I expected, but certainly far better than the 14 degree weather we left behind in New York! The food has been great also. Looking forward to the next two weeks to come. Bye for now.

Caribbean reef squid just hanging out in the bay.

-Laura Picairello