I am a HUNTER!!!

That's right. Today is the first of many days to come for LIONFISH HUNTING!!! For the next two weeks I will be going into the reef for hours everyday to count and catch lionfish! Lionfish are invasive to Turks and Caicos, which means that they are not a natural species in this area. They can eat up to 20 fish in half an hour, and can clear out their entire reef-habitat-area in 5 weeks! Since they are not native, they also have no real predators to keep their populations in check. The numbers of lionfish keep growing every year, not only here but in the ENITRE Caribbean and even up the Atlantic coast. It is thought that the outbreak of lionfish started in the early 90's when a hurricane damaged an aquarium in southern Florida...the 7 lionfish that escaped to the ocean have become tens of thousands in a very short time.

For our project, not only will we be catching/killing the lionfish, we will also be recording GPS coordinates for where we find them and dissecting them to find out what fish they are eating on the reef. Soooo pretty much I will be a hunter by day and a dissecting scientist by night. Oh and we also EAT the lionfish! I know what you are thinking, what is Dani (werid-vegan-girl) doing eating lionfish?? Well, I'm probably not going to eat a lot of it but I will be fine testing out some evil, sustainably caught, killed-for-research fish every now and then... I will relay more info on our research as it comes up, but since we are just starting our first day, Im still not positive on what hunting will be like!

Alright, enough of this scienc-y talk. On to some sweet snorkeling pics! Last Saturday we went to one of our regular spots, but instead of snorkeling the whole time, we swam to and climbed up on top of Dove Cay to get an awesome view of the ocean. An Australian catamaran passed us while all 8 of us were up on the peak, they waved at us...probably very confused as to what 8 white kids were doing on a tiny cay in the middle of nowhere.

After looking down at the other side of the Cay (which we usually dont snorkel to) Laura and I decided to try to swim around once we got back into the water. It was amazing! There were huge waves crashing into the cliffs, making the water almost murky with teeny tiny bubbles. We also found a 5-6 foot nurse shark chilling on the bottom about 8 feet below us. Usually you catch a glimpse of a shark swimming by but this one was pretty settled on the bottom and we spent a good 10 minutes just diving down to it and staring. I know it might sound scary but they are such beautiful animals that you cant help but be fascinated instead of scared. The picture below is actually a tiger shark...some students were out on the boat a few days a go and saw it in the water. The boat followed the shark and one guy stuck a camera into the water to snap some pictures of it...this one came out AMAZING!)

On Tuesday night after WE FINISHED EXAMS (!!!!) there was a beach camping trip. We had a nice little campfire cookout with singing and games. Only a few people decided to spend the night so it ended up being me and my friends Keri and Meg with 3 staff members. If I didn't already notice a difference in the South Caicos camping experience, the mooing cow outside our tent at 3AM was proof. I am laughing about it now, but I have never been more afraid of a cow in my life. We fell back asleep with a very real fear of waking up via cow stepping on our face...

Every Wednesday night, a group of students goes to play volleyball against the Indian construction workers who are building one of the new resorts on South. Last night they invited us to come for a cookout! We brought some classic pasta salad and bbq grill items but were treated to some *awesome* Indian food. As always, they beat our team in volleyball, but they promised to teach us how to play cricket next week...as if we would be any better at it haha

Also on Wednesday was snorkeling...this week at our favorite spot near Long Cay. My friend Katie and I followed a group of 5 spotted eagle rays for a long ways until we realized that we had pretty much swam into the open ocean...oops! While we were making our way back to the boat a huge school of barracudas surrounded us. They are sooo scary and mean looking! I would rather run into a shark any day.

Well that is all for now, enjoy a couple more awesome pictures from Laura Stone and my friend Nina Yang...they are getting so food at taking pics underwater!!

These are my favorite types of coral, Elk horn (Acropora palmata) and Boulder brain coral (Colpophylia natans).

One of my favorite fish (and favorite of Lauras pics!!), the Four-eyed butterfly fish (Chaetodon capistratus).