After a fun day at the waterfall and Ocho Rios it was time to start our group projects. For the project we are doing bottom transect surveys to assess the health of coral reefs and to monitor changes in the relative abundance of different organisms. We are measuring the number of urchins and fish in two sites over the distance of 15 meters. This morning my group and I tried to complete our first transect measurement, but the visibility made it very difficult. Hopefully tomorrow the visibility will be better.

At night some of us decided to go night snorkeling. Within 10 minutes we saw an octopus. We all surrounded it with our flashlights watching it move across the sand. We followed it for five minutes and then moved on to see over 20 beaded sea cucumbers creepily moving along. There were so many different organisms out and about at night. Hopefully we get another to go another night.

The octopus we saw that was slightly annoyed with us.

One of the weird beaded sea cucumbers we saw. (Shoutout to Monkey bread Maddie for both of the pics)

– Raspberry Rose