The past day or so, I can feel myself slowly devolving back into a fish. (There is a non-zero chance that by the end of this trip I’ll crawl back into the primordial soup as a single-celled organism.) Last night me, Lillian, Emma, Dante, and Lauren did our almost-nightly beachcomb, where we found some really interesting animals, like gobies, crabs, brittle stars, and my personal favorite, a pistol shrimp.

Rock pistol shrimp (Alpheus angulosus)

The larger claw on a pistol shrimp is used to stun prey. It uses the claw to blow a bubble, then pops it with so much pressure that it can kill or even stun a fish [Ed note: it doesn’t blow a bubble, the claw moves with such speed that it creates a vaccuum so a cavitation bubble forms and then collapses.  The energy from this can stun prey and is one of the major sources of noise in coral reef soundscapes…  Neil should sign up for Prof. Warren’s bioacoustics course next fall semester….]. When the bubble pops, it emits a brief blast of light energy [Ed note: called sonoluminescence, it’s super-interesting], which is so powerful that if it were thermal energy it would be only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. Needless to say we gave it a wide berth.

Today (January 7th) I spent a total of 5 hours in the water. This morning, I went out with Dante, Lillian, and Emma, where we were able to find the spotted eagle ray that Tegan located with her drone. (More on that in Lillian’s blog post!) A few minutes later, we were taking a boat to a site with tons of soft coral, where I finally got an okay photo of a butter hamlet.

Butter hamlet and stegastes.jpg caption: Yellowtail damsel (Microspathodon chrysurus, above) and butter hamlet (Hypoplectrus unicolor, below)

Now let me complain about the butter hamlet for a second. I swear this fish is cursed. I have seen at least 6 or so since we got here and every single time I’ve tried to take a picture of one it’s been either blurry or the hamlet just simply doesn’t show up in the photo. I could, of course, blame my subpar underwater photography skills, but instead I’d like to lay all the blame on this poor fish which doesn’t even know what a camera is.

After we got back and had lunch, I went out again to the reef with Crystal, Liana, and Hannah, where we saw a ton of different wrasses and damselfish. At this point in the day my time in the water was solidly at 4 hours, and I thought I’d maybe spend the rest of the day relaxing, but Dr. Peterson announced that we were going to do some night snorkeling, which I obviously said yes to. I paired up with Dante and we hit the reef, where we saw a stingray that was at least 7 feet from head to tail, an octopus, a beautiful spotted moray eel, and this very chill sharptail snake eel, which politely posed for a picture (butter hamlet, take notes!!!!!!!!!).

An exceptionally chill sharptail snake eel (Myrichthys breviceps)

I think after tonight snorkeling for eels, rays, and octopuses is going to become a nightly occurrence for me, and I can’t wait!

Till next time,

“Nutter Butter” Neil