Sunshine and Seagrass

Today we went to the seagrass beds to do some more studies.

We looked at the seagrass density in two different bays, Well Bay and Long Bay.

Well Bay was really sheltered and Long Bay had a lot more wave action so we thought we'd see more sea grass in Well bay. We would swim out from a particular spot on the beach to a depth of 1.5 m and then put our quadrat on the bottom and count blades of sea grass... There were a few more blades of grass than jellies this time.

There weren't too many animals swimming around in this area. At the end of the day part of our group swam out and found a reef with parrotfish and sea fans but I was already dry so I'm holding out for the real reef on Thursday. I did find several jellies and ctenophores (pronounced tee-no-fours).

As we were leaving I saw something shiny on the ground. I guess it was a piece of oil. Sometimes it gets dumped with the bilge water and as it floats around it hardens up. It's illegal to collect anything in Bermuda but we decided this was trash not treasure.

We've been so fortunate. Today was beautiful. We had rain at about 3am but nothing since then. There were big clouds on the horizon but they skirted the island. I think everyone actually got some sun today. Sweatshirts came off and everyone showed a little skin. It was quite exciting. Tonight we are working on our data from the lab today. Tomorrow we are spending all day writing up a paper on either mangroves, plankton, or sea grass. If we get it done early we may be able to go play in Bermuda a little. We'll see. So now it's time to look at the data a bit and see if what we found today was significant or not. Maybe we can do this in the sun ;-)