So this is the first time in writing a blog.  First off Jamaica is so awesome, maybe I won’t come back home.  Chris today pointed to me and said “write a blog about your project”, so here it is.  After that hike up the falls and all the running around in Ochio Rios, everyone was pretty tired, so it was almost a blessing that it rained most of the day.

Stephanie (my research partner) and I met up to start really working on our project about 10:30.  We are so excited about this project. There are some hurdles in our way but we are confident that we can pull it off, and Brad and Chris are showing much support that is great.  We are planning on studying Tripneustes ventricosus, a sea urchin.  We are planning on taking the Tripneustes, tagging them, setting them into different locations and then tracking their daily movement, to determine their movement rate and if they are territorial.  We plan on moving them to six different sites: a control site, a barren sand area, on a reef, in a grass bed devoid of Tripneustes, on a different grass bed filled with Tripneustes, on a coral structure, and next to the Diademas.  The Tripneustes seem to show a liking to sea grass beds, but there are some sea grass beds with many and some that are devoid of them.  Thus far, we are having a lot of problems trying to determine how to set the tags onto them, because those tricky Tripneustes seem to have a liking for wiggling themselves free from anything we set on them. We need to find a way to record where each of the 30 Tripneustes were, so we can determine if they are territorial.
We were going to use today to work on the bulk of our project and perhaps get the load out into the water, but we had problems finding the Tripneustes, finding the right material, and dodging the rain, so we plan on working on everything tomorrow.  We met with Chris who seemed to have high hopes for our project, and gave us some really good revision ideas, so by tomorrow maybe we might get some good sunshine and everything in the water. 

The good news is that I have seen a lot of cool stuff in the water, aside from every other day, I saw juvenile squirrelfish, a sting ray that was probably about 3 feet long (maybe 4), an octopus hiding inside a cinder block, and a barracuda that looked more adult than juvenile. 

So this is Maria saying “get the bad ju-ju off this island mon!”