Marine Hide 'n' Seek

Fish survey

Playing hide 'n' seek with fish

Another day of data collection in the books. Fish surveys were completed at each of my study sites. Again, I am looking at species diversity and abundance, so my fish identification has been improving a lot over the last few weeks. There is the core group of fish species that I see during every survey but there are always new ones that I see. Today, the new species that I saw were a juvenile queen angelfish and two honeycomb cowfish. The honeycomb cowfish were an iridescent blue. During part of my fish surveys, I was playing hiding 'n' seek with some blenny species. It's head was always poking out of little holes but not far enough for me to see distinguishing features for identification purposes. I would hover in one spot waiting for it to come out a little further but it never did. Eventually, I will figure which blenny species it is. Aside from collecting data, I saw my first seahorse while swimming between my study sites.

Honeycomb cowfish

Spotted this seahorse while swimming between my study sites

Around dusk, I went on another dive to collect data for my research buddy's project. Again, we were playing hide 'n' seek with Diadema antillarum. This evening we found the most that we ever had along a transect around 10 individuals. One of the ones I was measuring was moving around making it a bit difficult to get a measurement. The current did help with this matter either. While searching for the urchins, I saw a lot of banded shrimp and brittle stars. The difference between night and day marine life is amazing. I am excited to do a few surveys at night for my project. I will get to do those surveys next week.