Mission Journal 9 — Deron Burkepile: Mission Day 5: Friday, November 12th, 2004
Finally a full dive day after no diving on Wednesday and half a day on Thursday. Forgot how exhausting it is to get up and 5AM to dive for five hours then turn around again four hours after that and dive again. Its fun, don’t get me wrong, but it is a little taxing on the body. I can feel the body heat slipping away. The first couple of days down here I managed in shorts and a sweatshirt. Now I have on a sweatshirt, a thermal shirt, fleece pants, and a stocking cap to boot.
Like every other day, today’s diving went far too fast. Hours just fly by while we are working. Today we finished working on the cages themselves and have started identifying the corals within the cages that we will monitor over the next 10 months. We will take pictures and keep records on their health and survivorship to see how the different fishes in our cages affect how well the corals survive.
While I should have been working, I got to watch a stingray hunt for food today. Like many rays, stingrays eat mollusks and crustaceans that they crush with bony plates in their mouths and usually spend a lot of their time searching for food in the sand around coral reefs. The one I watched was rooting around in the sand like a pig and must have found a tasty morsel because it kept digging and digging in one spot before it finally stopped to eat whatever it had found. Meanwhile all the little fish around the stingray were having a buffet catching all the small things the stingray dug up while it was looking for its meal. I also got to watch a hawksbill turtle cruise through our field site today. All the while the voice of Crush, the surfing turtle from Finding Nemo, was playing in my head, and I was, like, Whoa.
Lastly I would like to give props to Melissa Hicks, our Surface Support Goddess, who has been fantastic so far at coordinating all our Aquanaut needs. But where are the pizzas and DVD’s? Must have gotten lost in the mail.