16:45 Turns out I got to bed at 03:30 nearly as guessed after showing 10mins of Lee Evans to Kat, and changing to fresh clothes post-monsoon. This meant I missed my alarm this morning, and my phone dying did not help, so the cooks knocked on my door around 09:00 though I had appreciated the couple of hours extra sleep.
After
snack I walked Em, Je and Dw to a beach near the entrance gate asking if they
had everything ready with them to compare shell size of molluscs inside the
reserve to those outside - the reply being a resounding "yes." This
beach is very beautiful actually though I had never really fully explored it
before, although I dislike that tourists go there as it is just within the
buffer zone of the reserve.
.JPG) |
| Entrance Monkey (D.Philpot) |
As
I went to leave, the students asked my help and what was it… they had in fact
forgotten to bring a square quadrat for sampling - derp! They said "we
should go back," to which I said "nope, we'll build one" and so
we spent 10 minutes gathering straight sticks, some vines/scrap string on the
beach and fashioned ourselves a quadrat using measurements on the transect tape
- we were quite proud of this actually, back to basics!
I
walked back via the beach, then had lunch before going out with the
"beginners" snorkelling again.
This time I taught Adria to swim, without a vest, which was impressive
as she was really scared to lose the vest so I made a witty bet saying "I
want you to aim to swim without it at some point during today's snorkelling
session for just 5 minutes" and she ended up from the start barely using
it at all. I also spent some time to
teach Adrie to duck dive, I do make a great one-on-one teacher I must say, and
now I am going to the lab again.
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| Hermit Crab Shell Selection Research (D.Philpot) |
20:30
I got dinner order for the meal out this coming Friday - which is worth
mentioning as when I went out to ask what the Sea Cucumber Team wanted I
slipped on the rocks flat onto my back, though luckily the rock was a smooth
one and it didn't hurt one bit as I landed with my back flush to the rock so I
was laying there pretending nothing happened expecting everyone to be laughing
at me but no-one noticed! Movie night tonight was cancelled and it was too
stormy to go out with the fish people during (or until) the early hours.