• Day 072: Monday March 12th

22:00 Instead of attending the fish lecture (and video in the afternoon) I did a fair bit of reading on fish behaviour and ML was right… this book is very interesting and hard to put down, could be the fastest I’ve ever read a book before.

Following yesterday, whilst snorkelling I saw a few notable things including 2 or 3 huge Golden Jack Juveniles maybe 60 cm in length (as opposed to a couple of centimetres as I have seen before), and above all my first Round Stingray.   

Engulfing The Seabed (D.Philpot)

At first this guy swam off, he moved so fast (with his body edges rippling) that I distinctly felt his movement as I felt a pulse in the water against me and I wasn’t even that close. Later we then found the same guy again relaxing on the bottom so I of course took the opportunity to get some pretty good photos, oh and yes, this ray was maybe 2 metres or a bit more in length with his tail and wide enough to make it hard to get him in the shot (maybe 1 metre wide). A rather poor video of this Ray can be seen here (I was worn out so could only make a quick video in case he shot of).

The rest of the snorkel session can be summarised using these photos: 

Juvenile Cortez Angelfish (D.Philpot)

Another Unknown Flat Crab (D.Philpot)

My First Starfish Of This Form (D.Philpot)

Tina Taking A Breather (D.Philpot)

You can also watch some Turtle feeding action here with Video #95. 

Another Favourite Animal Of Mine Here, A Decorator Crab (Or "Moving Moss") (D.Philpot)

We then initiated a different version of the self-guided hike where I ran ahead and waited for the students at the end of a clearing. The students did well to spot everything on the list for themselves, and once finished I got to laugh at them ‘climbing’ trees and falling off some of the large vines/lianas/aerial roots.

DL had a live bubble snail which is apparently very rare too, so we set up an aquarium especially to look at it for little while.

I am in belief that right now is the changeover period between the dry and wet seasons as so much seems to be changing and going on. This transition is seen but hard to pin down what is noticeable, one such example is the number of butterflies is clearly increasing – one student got a photo of a really cool individual:

One Off Butterfly (Not My Photo)

Might Of The Pacific (D.Philpot)

In the late evening I went tidepooling alone to try get some photos of the nice Aplysia and other species we had seen the previous night, though no success.  Also managed to cut my toe tonight, with ¼ of my big toe nail gone…