It's already been a week!?

So we've been in Moorea for one week now, and it sure has gone quickly! I can't even believe it is already May! Only 4 more weeks here! :( But at the same time, we have been so busy and have already done so much, that it feels like we have actually been here much longer than a week.

We have been continuing class projects for the past couple of days. On Friday we went out to collected sediment from the area between the barrier reef (the one further from the island) and the fringe reef (closer to the island), to see how the sediment sizes change over a distance and to see what the sediment is composed of (i.e. coral pieces, shell fragments, etc). I was one of the diver for my group, so we went down to about 10 feet and filled up giant bags with sand! It was pretty fun actually. Then we took all our sand back to the lab and sieved and sorted it. That was not so much fun, rather much more tedious. Then on Friday night, we decided to stay at the Gump Station instead of going to the local club, since we didn't really have a way to get there and back. But it was really fun just hanging out with everyone at home and being merry. :) We even took a late night swim! (Well, it was more like sitting in 1/2 foot of water along the shore. haha)

Yesterday (Saturday), my group was assigned to a herbivory class project. We started the morning by drying, weighing, bundling and bagging algae in the lab. After lunch, we took those samples out to the next bay over, Opunahu Bay, and tied the samples to various coral heads. This experiment was to test if there is greater herbivory in high or low complexity areas of coral or algae. It was pretty fun to set up an experiment that we might actually be doing ourselves for our group projects. My group mates Theo and Lindsay and I also met with one of our professors, Peggy, to discuss our group project. We will be comparing differing herbivory and nutrient levels in Cook's Bay and Opunahu Bay to see what influences the presence of different algae species. That might sound boring, but it will be pretty fun to conduct since we will be utilizing a lot of scuba diving and many scientific techniques we've learned such as surveys, herbivory assays, nutrient addition, etc.

Today we have a free morning, since our group did not have any work to do for our class project. This is nice since our invertebrates test got moved to Monday. We have some extra time to study for our test! (And post this blog!) This afternoon we will be doing some more sediment stuff with our professor Dave. We will be diving and finding acorn worm sand poop piles (fun, I know) and measuring how long it takes from them to dissipate over a course of 8 hours.

I just wanted to give a quick shoutout to my grandparents and any other family who might be following along with this blog! :) And a big thanks to my Aunt Becky for the rash guard she gave me for Christmas, since I've been using it almost every day! :)

Well, I better get back to studying those invertebrates!!!