On Monday, we went to a dive site called the Dairy Bull. It was given this name because, every time a large wave rushes in, the water goes through a hole and makes a noise that sounds like a bull. Before this, I had never considered how much the weather conditions affect diving conditions. I know that snorkelers are affected by how high the windspeed is and how large the waves are where they are snorkeling. I thought that, because divers are under the surface of the water, we would be completely unaffected by the waves. However, even thirty feet underwater, we could still feel a rocking motion from the waves passing above us. It was challenging to swim along the bottom without hitting anything due to the current, but the whole dive was still very fun. I found it peaceful to watch the sea fans sway in the current. We saw a lot of different fish there, and two students caught lionfish with a polespear!

This is a picture of some of the other students waiting to get back on the boat after our dive.

Yesterday, we created seagrass tethers for an experiment. I was very excited to participate in a research project while in Jamaica. We gathered seagrass shoots from Discovery Bay and cut and measured them before clipping them to ropes to create tethers. The point of this project is to analyze herbivory rates on seagrass shoots with different ratios of nitrogen and phosphorous.

These are our tethers in the wet lab. We attached tiles to them to keep the ropes from floating away in the water.

We were planning on setting our tethers out in the bay yesterday, but the current was too strong for us to swim out and put our tiles down. We left our tethers in the wet lab under flowing water, and we are analyzing data from our other transects project instead. Later today, we are planning to go on an excursion to a nearby cave system. Can’t wait!

Nancy (Nigiri)