All of our exams are finally over as of last night, so now we can focus all of our attention and energy on our projects for Dr. Warren. Today our group finished collecting all of our data. We swam all the way out to the back reef to do two transects. The fish and urchin counts were relatively easy to do, but measuring bottom cover was quite difficult because the transect we used measured meters on one side and feet on the other. The feet side was the side always facing upward which made collecting data overly annoying. When one of my group partners finished collected data, she lifted her head from the water and said “that sucked” which is an accurate discription of how it felt to collect data on bottom cover.

After lunch the grad students met with Dr. Peterson to discuss our project, which includes measuring fish sizes and coral beaching using transects. The stero camera we wanted to use hasn’t been working, so the data hasn’t been as good as we were hoping for. Because of wind conditions, we’ve also lost two days to go out and collect data, which means we don’t have time analyze the data like we originally planned, which is sad. But Dr. Peterson walked us through what we would’ve done and assured us our data would be analyzed, just not by us.

We had a quick group meeting to discuss the plan for the next few days, then spent the day enetering data into spreadsheets and analyzing data. Most of the analysis was done a litter after dinner, so tomorrow we will be finishing that up and starting our report!

Here’s a photo I took a few days ago of a Flying Gurnard

-Claire