Exams are overrrrrr!!!!

Phew. I couldn't have been happier to be finished with my last mid-term exam this morning! It was a long week what with all of us studying and spending lots of time in the water for CONCH ASSESSMENT!!!

Last week, we went out into the banks around South Caicos every afternoon to count how many conch we could find. For 2-3 hours we would get on and off the boats, laying 30 meters of transect lines in anywhere from 1/2 to 4+ meter deep water.

We counted and measured every conch we found along the line, recording on our underwater slates what we found. Each group (8 groups total) took around 15 transect measurements total over the course of the surveying and this week we are going to try to estimate the populations of conch! wooooo!

On the last day of assessment, we didnt find a single conch, and since our measurements went so quickly, we played with starfish instead! They are sooo big and cool here. This is my friend Amanda and I...she goes to University of Sandiego and was in my assessment group for our survey.Since we were done measuring conch, our water activity today was LIONFISH HUNTING! Lionfish are an invasive species here and are really good at killing ALL of the other fish who live in the reef. Sooooo...... we kill them.

(I dont know if you can tell from this pic but this is me holding up a "hand gun" to a lionfish...)

We went out to hunt them with staff today, but later in the semester we will get the chance to do it on our own! I definately need to get better at it before then because I punched a rock underwater while I was looking for one under some coral...kinda scratched up my knuckles on one hand and let me tell you it does NOT feel great when you do that kind of thing in salt water.
And no, I have no idea how I punched it hard enough to hurt myself. Its usually pretty hard to move that fast underwater...I guess I was just in super-intense-hunting-mode.