The past few days here have been amazing. We were lucky enough to get in the water and snorkel our second day here and I was amazed by the beauty that I was faced with. I unfortunately don’t have an underwater camera but the things that I am face to face with are unbelievable. Today, a few of us “DITS” (divers in training) went out for our first open water dive. After scuba diving on our own in the Bay and having some entertaining lectures about the local populations, sponges, corals, and other cool organisms, we were all looking forward to going on our first dive. We went down about forty feet, completed some skills, and did a brief underwater tour when we were done. We saw fire coral (not fun to touch), butterfly fish, and tiny jellyfish! The Tripneustes ventricosus (West Indian Sea Egg) are pretty common here but they are my favorite organisms so far. I love how they can sit on your hands and you can see their projection spines move all around. The only thing better than diving in Discovery Bay is probably the food, shoutout to Ms. Precious and the rest of the galley crew for never making a disappointing meal.

[Ed: Daeyla called this cheerio coral in her figure title, but she will not be getting credit for that name on the ID exam — better figure it out!]

[[One of these is an echinoderm, the other is a stony brook student who forgot to provide a caption for her photo so the poor professor had to write this.]

Dragonfruit Daeyla