5/21

 Today, we took a boat to the University of Puerto Rico and took all of our gear and headed out on another boat to Media Luna to do benthic surveys with my group. The water was about 3 meters deep and Amelia and I first started carrying a bag of rocks together to hold down the buoy where the transects were attached to. I attached the transect and swam out 30 meters to hold it in place while Amelia and Caitlin took the quadrant, camera, and data form to do the survey. After they finished, I switched out with Caitlin and moved the quadrant in 2 meter increments so Amelia could assess the area. We surveyed an area full of dead coral, but there were also some small live ones. I saw a large purple gorgonian, some squirrel fish, and butterfly fish. I also found an old bottle covered in red crustose algae that we took pictures of. After we finished our survey, we swam back as a group and I took a break to rest on the boat while the others stayed in the water for a free snorkel. We took the boat back to the university at 11:00am and rinsed off our gear on the dock and headed back to the classroom for lunch. We had a guest speaker today, a professor from the university who specialized in ciliates. Dr. Johanna Rotterova gave a presentation that gave an in depth explanation of her research on ciliates. She told us that she had found a new organism by accident after thinking her test ciliate had died. She said that the organism looked like a sun, so it was named after that. We also listened to a presentation from Amanda through ISER Caribe on her work with Diadema and coral restoration through fragmentation. I learned that Diadema are sensitive to light and will move if  you cover them with your hand. JJ and Matthew collected sediment cores today and everyone went through the seagrass cores to record data on seagrass biomass. After that, we returned back to the house to log the data we collected today. I will work on BRUV data later which will improve my skills in identifying fish species. This is good for my career because I learned to be more comfortable in the water as well as maintaining organization skills in logging data.