Rutgers CCMI Coral Reef Internship in Little Cayman

We woke up in the storm this morning like yesterday, and hoping the sun will come up sooner. We went to Rock Bottom and Coconut Walk for today’s dives, and both sites were amazing. We even saw an eagle ray jumping out of the water right in front of our ship, which is quite a rare view.

After lunch, we headed to the Little Cayman Museum and learned all about the Rock Iguanas. We learned the effort made to protect them and their nesting patterns along with their importance on Little Cayman. After the tour, we spent some time working on our posters which need to be presented this Thursday.

It has been a long day, but I really enjoyed it.

We started Sunday with snorkeling in Grape Tree Bay this morning. Just like last week, the original destination—Preston Bay is too wavy for us to do any surveys, so our group, focused on staghorn coral outplants, went out into the waves in Grape Tree Bay. We decided to clean the tags of the outplants and take pictures of cleaned tags with corals so that we can compare them to the pictures took before to see the growing conditions of these staghorn corals. Alexandra, Sally and I struggled in the waves tried really hard not to drown while managing to clean and take pictures. Most of the outplants did not look very healthy and were covered by algae, but we also found some new recruits.

 

After lunch, we started to go through the pictures we took, and tried to figure out the best way to analyze our data. This process is always monotonous but is the only way which must be passed. After sitting in the chairs for four and a half hour and tried not to explode, we decided to go for a bike ride—just to escape from the classroom and the bugs.

 

At night, we briefly discussed the schedule tomorrow. We are going to leave early in the morning to dive so we’d better sleep early to build up strength and restore energy.

 

I learned so much in the past two week and gained precious friendship here which I really did not expect at the beginning of this trip. I don’t talk much because English is not my native language and I have to consider every word I use and how am I going to arrange the sentence, so in the end I will just speak as little as possible to avoid the trouble. However, everyone here shows their patience and care which is such a valuable experience for me. I am looking forward the time we are going to spend together and will treasure the memories we made.

This Monday we went to clean our staghorn coral nursery, which was almost destroyed by diseases followed by huge hurricanes in 1970s. Every pieces of coral were so fragile yet contains tremendous vitality inside. We cleaned the algae that grow on the nursery’s structures.

After the cleaning, we practiced placing transects and collecting data underwater, which would be an important part of our projects. After lunch, we worked on our group project for a couple of hours before we heard that we could help to release baby loggerhead turtles that just hatched. This is the first time I got to see baby turtles in such close distance and I was amazed by its beauty.

It is a wonderful day today.