Getting Caught Up (Pt. 2)

Although I know you are all so excited to hear about Spring Break 2012 (which also happens to include St. Patrick's Day), I realized that I forget to mention some fun events that transpired before going on our field trip.

 I feel like I owe you an embarrassing photo after taking so long to update the blog.

Well, wow.  Where to start.  I realized that I forgot to update a whole bunch of random little things that have happened around here, yet haven't made it into a previous blog.  I guess I'll start cute to draw you in.  Some of my fellow students here found a feral, abandoned puppy on the island, and brought it back to the center.  After making sure it did not belong to anybody, we sent it to the Potcake Place, which is an adoption agency for the "breed" of dogs on the TCI, called "potcakes".  I put "breed" in quotes, because I'm not terribly convinced that they're an actual breed, and it's just a blanket term given to any TCI dog.  Anyway, the puppy, named "Nugget", was absolutely adorable, and was adopted by the family of a student down here.  Once she was vaccinated and checked-up in Grand Turk, she was sent to the States and now happily (at least, I presume) resides in New York.

This has been dubbed my "Match.com profile picture." 

While we're on the topic of dogs, I used to have a fairly regular workout routine in the morning until I realized that I can work out just as good in the afternoon and still sleep in in the morning (don't worry, I'm going to tie this into dogs).  As I mentioned before, the island has a bunch of semi-feral dogs, which means that some of them have owners and collars, but they run around free on the island.  Some of these dogs have incorporated us into their pack, because we treat them nicely (dogs don't get the same level of respect here that they do in the States) and occasionally feed them.  This means that whenever we leave the center, we usually encounter some friendly dogs that follow us around and bark at the other dogs when we walk by.  But they occasionally get in the way as well, which leads me to this latest story.  In the morning, I was working out, doing some ab work on the mat outside the center.  I left to do some work on the stairs, but when I came back, my mat my occupied by Trousers, one of the friendly dogs.  He looked so comfortable, that I didn't have the heart to shoo him away, so I adjusted my workout routine. 

 Dog takes your exercise mat - #tciproblems

On the topic of workout routines, I started my own ab class at the center, called "Bodies with Scotty," that people actually attend.  I guess I should explain.  At the beginning of the semester, there was a signup sheet for people that could teach fitness classes to students at the center for a fun thing to do.  Nobody signed up, and our student affairs manager, Kate, seemed disappointed.  I came up with the bright idea that, hey, I've attended "Washboard Abs" at Clemson, and Amy taught me well, so I should be able to teach a low-pressure course.  How difficult could it be?  As it turns out, not that difficult, because "Bodies with Scotty" has turned into the surprise hit of the semester.  From humble beginnings of just a few student participants, it has grown to include not just students, but a few staff members as well!  Basically, I have a sheet of rotating ab and core exercises that I rotate through, put on some 80s and classic rock, dress in ridiculous outfits, and yell "up, down" in succession.  The young ladies at the center love it and always ask me when the next "Bodies with Scotty" is going to be, so it's not a bad gig.

I'm really not sure what we were doing here.

Aside from these random happenings, I also had a few marine-related experiences that I forgot to mention earlier.  First of all was our night dive.  This was the first time I had actually been night diving (although I had been night snorkeling previously at the center).  We went to the "Airplane" site, which was the crash site of a cargo airplane in the 70s (there were no casualties).  In case you're interested, here's the accident report: http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19790912-0

It's amazing the distance that the debris traveled underwater - the nose of the plane is it's own dive site, called the "Warhead."  Anyway, it's a pretty cool wreck and dive site, even though it's pretty degraded (there's nothing left of the cargo hold to penetrate).  Wrecks, even purposefully sunk ones, have an eerie aura surrounding them, and diving at night just adds to this.  We went on a full moon, and even at depth, if we turned off our lights, we could see enough to generally navigate the reef - it was that bright.  I took mostly videos, so those will be added probably after I return to a place with stable internet.  I attempted to take some photos, but the built-in flash tends to just illuminate the suspended particles in the water, rather than your subject.  I did, however, manage to get a few to turn out:

 Fish - I turned the flash off and used illumination from my dive light.

Close-up of coral polyps.  Most hard corals only bring their polyps out at night for protection.  It's amazing how such tiny little creatures can be the basis for one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.

Night diving wasn't the only nocturnal activity I forgot to mention in my last update.  We also went "sharking".  One of the professors here studies sharks and turtles (i.e. all the most charismatic, non-mammal marine species), and for his studies, we can help him with tagging.  For sharks, this involves going out when the tides are right and setting up gill nets to try to catch juvenile lemon sharks.  We then bring them back to the boat, tag them, and take a few pictures before letting them go again.  For my sharking expedition, we had to go out at night, and the currents were incredibly strong.  After setting up the net, we planned to check the net every 20 minutes to see if we caught sharks (but we would go earlier if we heard splashing), and if we found one, Aaron (the professor) would go out with an intern and a student to bring it in.  Aaron made the first sweep after about 20 minutes, and within a minute, called the first student to come out and help him.  Within another minute, he yelled to the boat to send everybody, because we had a ton of sharks in the net.  In 20 minutes, we had caught 6 juvenile lemon sharks, when some previous groups had gone hours without a single caught animal.  Needless to say, it kept us busy, and after bringing these first sharks for tagging, we headed back out to take the net out, as we didn't want to re-catch sharks.  Bringing the sharks in is actually fairly labor intensive, as the sharks need water running over their gills to breath.  This meant that we had to "walk" the sharks around the shallows while we waited for our shark to be tagged.  It was a hectic, yet awesome night, and I'm looking forward to going out "sharking" again when the directed research projects get underway next week.

They're really not that big, but still pretty cool!

Shark in the water

Getting our shark anatomy lesson

 The whole group (except Aaron and Scrappy, the intern)

 Kind of blurry (I don't have a tripod, unfortunately), but the moon was bright that night.

We're almost to Spring Break, so if you're still with me, thanks for staying!  The last event involves a defunct Coast Guard facility at the very northern point of the island. 

See the green dot way up on the northern peninsula area?  That's where the Coast Guard facility is located.  It's one of the favorite places to visit on the island due to the scenery, but it's almost impossible to make a day trip there without vehicular assistance. 

If you read the caption, you could probably guess that we were able to secure a ride to this northern part of the island for a day excursion.  This was my first time up there, and it did not disappoint.  

Gorgeous sand bank

We could only spend a few hours there, so we did not get to explore the whole area.  In fact, most of our time was spent trying to snorkel around the point of the island against a monster current, and we ended up in a sheltered, shallow bank area.  There was a sand bar in the middle of the water, and from this bank, the water level dropped rather quickly.  We ended up running along the bank and jumping into the turquoise water below.  We hung out at this area for a while, with excursions to the mangroves to check them out.  Unfortunately, we did not have too much time to spend here, and we had to make our way back to the van so we could be back in time for dinner.  This is an area of the island that I plan to head back to the next chance I get.

 Fallen tree in the middle of the water

 The coastline

 Sandbank we jumped off - the water is actually around 5 ft deep immediately after the edge of the bank!

Oh, and the picture with the hard hats in the beginning?  All the props were trash found on the beach at Coast Guard.  Even though hardly anyone uses the beaches on South Caicos, the beaches are filthy from stuff washing up from the ocean.  The sea is a lot more polluted than most people ever realize, because the beaches that people frequently travel to take the time to clean the area.

Whew, now that I got all the stuff that I forgot to mention in the last "Getting Caught Up" post, it's time to highlight Spring Break.  I know that I was building it up for a while, but really, not much happened.  As I mentioned before, Provo is a high-end destination, and we did not want to spend an arm and a leg while we were there.  Therefore, we tended to not do much aside from eat, drink, hang out on the beach, and mooch off our classmates' parents who came down to visit.  

Anyway, when I left the story from last post, we had just been cut off from SFS and were on our own.  This happened around 3 on Wednesday, and we had to be at the ferry dock by 2:30 on Monday to catch our ferry back to South Caicos.  Fortunately for us, Jimmy's Dive Bar, the (actually pretty cool) bar nearby had Happy Hour from 4-7, which included $3.50 margaritas and other frozen drinks, as well as $3 beers.  Naturally, my first purchase had to be a drink I had never heard of before, which in this case was a "Mayan Maniac."  Anyway, we all hung out there for a while before exploring the surrounding area.  Those with family that visited naturally went and spent time with them.  For our first night, we ate at Danny Buoy's, the only Irish pub in the TCI.  Service was incredibly slow, as was service everywhere on the island, but we got used to it pretty quickly.  That first night, we just hung out around the Grace Bay area, and went to Danny Buoy's and Jimmy's Dive Bar until they closed.  Afterwards, we walked to the beach and took strolls for a while before heading back to the hotel to crash for the night.

I guess now would be a good time to describe our living arrangements.  We had five people staying in a room, but the hotel charged an extra $25 per person per night for any additional people over 2, which would have amounted to $75 a night.  Being cheap college students, we decided against telling them of our additional room usage, expecting to get two beds and a pullout couch, like everyone else who did the same thing did.  This would allow us to sleep two per bed, with the fifth on the pullout couch.  I'm not sure if the hotel knew about our plans and wanted to stick it to us, or if we just got unlucky, but they gave us a room with a king sized bed and a pullout couch, forcing us to sleep three on the couch and two on the couch.  Not exactly ideal living conditions, although for the first few nights, one of our roommates slept with on his friends' couch (they flew down to visit him for it was their Spring Break, too).  And this also meant we only had two keys, which led to some interesting key partitioning.

Anyway, the second day, we just hung out on the beach during the day, but we decided to try to go to the Blue Hills area to check out the tourist destination, Da Conch Shack.  In terms of location, this restaurant and the one next door, Horse-Eyed Jack's, are unrivaled.  They both sit on the beach, and have a laid back, "island", feel to them.  That's about the extent of the positive feedback I have for these places.  When we got there, da staff at Da Conch Shack was pretty rude and condescending.  After thinking that our name was on the list for about forty-five minutes to have them tell us that they switched hosts and our name, in fact, was not on the list and that they could not seat us that night, we went next door to Horse-Eyed Jack's.  Bad decision.  By far the worst place at which I have eaten in my life.  The food took over an hour and a half to come out, despite us being among a handful of tables occupied at the place.  When it did come out, the portions were really tiny, but they put them on these huge plates (they really need to work on presentation), and despite paying around $15, none of them came with any sides.  All of this would be forgivable if the food was actually above the quality of your typical TV dinner, but at least those tend to be hot as they come out of the microwave.  Some people's food had clearly been prepared in the beginning of our hour-and-a-half wait, but hadn't been kept warm since, and the ribs were so overcooked that they couldn't be pulled apart.  My conch salad was more salad than conch, which is especially a bummer considering that it was the size of a typical side dish.

If you're ever in Provo, don't go to Horse-Eyed Jack's.

On a brighter note, as some of you may know, that Saturday was St. Patrick's Day.  We had been seeing signs for a bar crawl on the island all week, with deals at bars across the island for forty-five minutes at a time, with it finally ending fittingly at Danny Buoy's from 9:30-close.  These bars were too far away to walk to and from, so being the crafty college students that we were, we rented a party bus for $10 a person to take us to each location, wait for us, then take us to the next.  It made for an awesome St. Patty's Day.  To make things better, the event was being sponsored by Coors Light, so they had all sorts of giveaways at each location, including necklaces, t-shirts, glasses, and hats.  None of these items were particularly good quality, but given the situation, winning a foam hat seemed like the greatest thing in the world.  We tried to minimize the amount we spent at each bar (especially because their deals weren't great), so we bought some rum and dyed it green for the bus ride.  It ended up being quite a fun night, and we all had a great time (and all made it back safely!).

 Party bus!  Beginning of the night - notice the absence of St. Patty's swag

End of the night at Jimmy's.  Notice the vast accumulation of St. Patty's swag!

With the highlights of break covered in detail, I'm just going to briefly go over some other fun parts of Provo, as this post is getting quite long.

• We got to check out some of the nice hotels, because some students' parents came down to visit.  They fed us, gave us drinks, and sometimes we even got sunglasses!

The view from the balcony was spectacular.  Check it out if you can manage to divert your eyes away from the sexy sleuth in the foreground (with new sunglasses!).

• There was a great little ice cream shop nearby that sold homemade ice cream at reasonable prices (at least for Provo!).  I'm not sure if it actually was so good, or it just felt that way because I hadn't eaten ice cream in so long.
• There was also a little diner that we ate breakfast at a few times (you would have loved it, Mom!).  Once again, I'm not sure if it was that great, or if we just enjoyed the reasonable pricing.
• I naturally had to do some shopping while I was there, and I came away with some trashy, super-touristy t-shirts.  I did, however, partially make up for this by getting a full-sized TCI flag!

Eventually, it was time to head back to South, and this led to the most memorable part of the trip.  There were two options for getting back to South from Provo - a plane for $87 or a ferry for $55.  The ferry was only supposed to take about two hours, and it was over the Caicos Bank, so it was shallow, and therefore relatively smooth, water.  For the experience (and the savings of $30), I decided to take the ferry.  We arrived at the dock on time and waited a half hour for the ferry to show

up.  After the wait, some people told us the ferry had arrived and began taking our bags into a fishing boat.  As it turned out, the "ferry" was a fishing boat, and we fit fourteen students, our bags, four TCI islanders, a toddler, and South Caicos' frozen chicken shipment for the week onto this boat.

The term "ferry" is used pretty lightly in the Turks and Caicos.  And,m yes, that is me on the right, looking mighty hippie-ish.

So, the trip over wasn't terribly uncomfort25 yable, but it wasn't exactly first class either.  The captain made us switch positions about three times to redistribute weight and to avoid being splashed by the
wind-propelled waves.  The Caicos bank is a huge area of shallow water, and some areas are shallower than others, so we occasionally had to slow down to a crawl to safely navigate the bank.  The trip took us over the amount of time that we thought, but we finally saw South Caicos in the distance...

That's High Point development on the island - an unopened condo resort that's been in development for the past 25 years.

...and the captain apologized to us, for we had just run out of gas.  One of his crew members went up to the bow and dropped an anchor while the captain checked to make sure he had cell phone service.  Thankfully, he did, and he made a call for us to get rescued.  We waited about forty-five minutes in the middle of the Caicos bank, listening to the fisher's stories, and playing games until a rescue boat showed up, gave us gas, took half the passengers, and we headed back to South Caicos.  We were rescued just in time, as it's almost impossible to navigate the bank in darkness, and the sun was just setting as we pulled into the dock.

Although it was a little inconvenient, running out of gas allowed us to watch this spectacular sunset over the water.  And it made for an awesome story.  Pretty much, the ferry ride was everything I had hoped it would be.

So we made it back to South Caicos, and we arrived at the center late for dinner but safe and sound.

Whew.  So now that I took the time to write that post getting caught up through Spring break, there's been a few more weeks of stuff that has happened.  The internet hasn't been cooperating recently, making it difficult to blog when it decides to crash without saving, and now allowing me to upload photos.  Anyway, our three classes are done with, and we are now working on our directed research projects, so look forward to hearing about this next post (which hopefully will be out soon!).

Getting Caught Up (Pt. 1)

Getting Caught Up (Pt. 1)

Just after sunrise at the docks in Provo.

Alright, so it's been a long time since my last post.  A very, very long time.  As in, this is my first post in the month of March!  I am therefore going to try to glaze over everything that has happened since then.  The beginning of the month marked our midterm exams, which consisted of three, three-hour long essay tests.

While studying for our final test, I created this little meme to describe how I feel about essay tests.

Anyway, I think they went pretty well, but only time will tell.  I'm just glad that they are over!  On the Saturday of exams (which was the third of March - it seems so long ago!) they even took away our diving so we could take the test in the morning.  Talk about a tough life! 

The week following exams, I thought would be pretty relaxed, but our professors instead tried to cram as much material in before break as possible.  We had our last field ID exam (this one was on reef fishes) on that Friday, as well as two projects due that Monday.  On top of that, we had another project assigned during the week that's due after break.  Although I like to complain, the projects due before break were a seagrass and a conch assessment, and both involved hours of time in the water, so it's not like they were bad.  The conch assessment involved traveling out to different areas inside and outside a local marine protected area (MPA) to see if there were any differences in the conch populations.  It was really just a brief study to get us used to working transects, but a group of four students will be conducting their directed research project on this, so I'll be sure to pass along the results for all those interested.  The seagrass assessment took place in the East Bay area that I mentioned in an earlier blog.  We broke into groups and took measurements on water depth, seagrass measurements, and invertebrate abundance along transects in the bay.  While doing so, we ran into some cool creatures, including king's helmets, bearded fireworms, and even a rogue sponge!

 We found quite a few basket stars in the seagrass.

 An upclose shot of a bearded fireworm inside a discarded conch shell.  You can see that it flared its venomous bristles.

The inside of a king's helmet, which is another gastropod (i.e. snail/slug-like) kind of like a conch on the outside, but, at least from what I hear, not as tasty.

The data collection of these projects was pretty cool, but the write-ups were what really kept us busy that week.  We also had some field sessions for our project that's not due until after break.  For this project, we are making a poster on a species that's found in the waters around South Caicos and presenting it to the class in a little mock conference.  I chose to do the bearded fireworm, because, well, they're awesome (and, at least as far as worms are concerned, quite a looker!).

 Another picture of the fireworm.  They really do look pretty awesome.

I apologize about talking about straight schoolwork for a while there, but it was really all we have been up to in the weeks leading up to our field trip and spring break.  On last Monday (the 12th), we headed to the airport and flew over to Provodenciales, which is the main tourist island of the TCI, for our two day field trip.  The interns and staff left early in the morning so they could get over there and set things up for our arrival in the afternoon.  Unfortunately, some of the firefighters over on Provo went on strike, so the South Caicos firefighters had to go over to prevent the international airport from being shut down.  This meant that there were no firefighters on South Caicos to work at the airport when the staff showed up, so they had to take a "ferry", which takes around two hours as opposed to twenty minutes.  Only on the islands, eh?  In order to allow us to get over to Provo, the firefighters had to take a ferry back in order to work the South Caicos airport.  They made it over, and we were able to fly over with no problem - in fact we didn't even know there was an issue until we talked to people later.

So we showed up in Provo, had a few guest speakers, and were able to walk around.  The hotels along Grace Bay (pretty much the only place with hotels on the island) are unreal.  We walked through the lobbies and pool areas of a few of these hotels in our free time, and I felt like I was inside Caribbean versions of Disney's Grand Meridian every time.  Beautiful infinity pools, swaying palm trees, and stunning architecture. 

I didn't take too many pictures because I feared getting kicked out, but look up some of the hotels online if you're curious.  They're gorgeous.

This wasn't Kitty Hawk or even Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic - this is a truly high end destination.  This is most apparent in the prices of everything in the area; they can get away with charging a lot of money for just about everything.  I understand that most things have to be imported which would raise the price, but $66 for a 24-case of cheap beer (i.e. Coors / Bud Light)?  Come on!  We also stayed in the Comfort Suites, which was the least expensive hotel on the island - not even beachfront and offered few amenities (but they did have hot, freshwater showers!) for over $200 a night. 

It was strange being back in civilization again, especially when it came to crossing the street and seeing people on the streets rather than semi-feral dogs.  We manged, though!  Anyway, time to get back to the field trip - I've started fringing into spring break territory.  So the next morning (which is Tuesday if you are keeping track), we woke up early and headed to the dock to catch a ferry to Middle and North Caicos.

Crepuscular rays at the dock before heading out in the morning.

These islands have extremely small permanent populations, despite being among the largest and lushest islands in the TCI.  They have small accommodations for tourists, but are mainly based on people making day trips out to the islands.  Once we got to the dock at North Caicos, we loaded up on a school bus and headed out to Middle Caicos to check out the Conch Bar caves.  Along the way there, we crossed over the failed causeway that connects these two islands.  The government's initial plan was to build a series of islands in the middle of the channel and connect these with bridges capable of withstanding category three hurricanes.  Due to reasons that I cannot remember (although probably money), they decided to eventually just build a causeway to connect the two islands.  Within a year of this being constructed, a category one hurricane came through in 2008 and destroyed the causeway.

 Kind of blurry, but you can see the damage and current state of the causeway.  The whole thing used to be paved.

Some more of the causeway washed into the sea.

It's "repaired" now in the sense that you can drive a car over it, but it's not at all what it used to be.  This video (not taken by yours truly, unfortunately) shows a little bit of the damage as well.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_SnR4YOnMI

It's areas like this that make you realize that we have it pretty good in the States.  Here's a country in the Caribbean that doesn't have the infrastructure to build vital connectors, and when they do, they cannot even withstand a category one hurricane.

Anyway, we got to the Conch Bar caves and were given a tour of the area.  It was strange entering a cave without seeing signs informing the public about white-nose syndrome in bats.  The caves weren't really cool.  I mean, they were fascinating, but unlike a lot of caves in the Appalachians, they don't drop down deep into the earth, so it was pretty hot inside.  We got to see some bats roosting on the  ceiling and we got to see some pretty cool cave phenomena as well.

 A picture of a gecko that I took outside the cave.

 Graffiti.  When it's old, it's history rather than vandalism.

 Not as built up as some of the caves in the U.S.  We did actually walk across that (although it wasn't as deep of a drop off as it seems).

 Can you tell which is the actual way out and which is just a reflection in a calm, clear cave pool?

After the cave, we loaded back onto the bus and went to a little shop where we could buy hand-crafted trinkets.  This was meant to be a short, uneventful stop, but our bus driver drove us off the edge of the road on the way out.  We had to get out of the bus and the strongest, manliest men (i.e. me and about ten others) pushed the bus out of the ditch and back onto the road.  You really just have to be ready for anything down here, as people are a lot more laid back and stuff like this tends to happen.

We're basically Hercules.

We eventually made it to a local beach where we ate lunch and hung out.  It was the most spectacular beach and coastline that I have seen in my life, although I really haven't seen too many beaches or coastlines.  To get to the beach, you have to park above and walk down to half-cave before emerging onto the beach.

View from underneath the overhang.

The rocks in the distance had this fascinating effect where large enough waves would build up enough pressure on top to create little cascading waterfalls on the side that faces the beach.  When it had been too long since a large enough wave, the waterfalls would stop.  Not only that, but the rock formation caused the waves to bend around it on both sides and meet along the little sandy walkway to get to it.  This caused the waves to "battle" in the middle, as they both collided going in opposite directions.  The coastline was spectacular as well, as there were little pocket beaches wedged inside of these tall, overhanging cliffs, and waves were breaking away from the shoreline in beautiful patterns.  It was a fantastic place to spend a few hours, and if you ever are in the area, it's worth it to check out Mudjadin beach.

 Looking back at the coastline.  Between each of those outcroppings lies a hidden pocket beach.

 Here you can see the waves breaking over the barrier reef away from the shore.  The white water stretched as far as the eye could see along the coastline.

 The pseudo-waterfall that I mentioned earlier.  This is it running dry...

...and this is it right after a large enough wave came to push water over top.  A really soothing effect to watch.

 You can kind of see the waves reaching around both sides to meet in the middle.

Just a rock getting hammered by a wave.

Despite our best efforts, the staff was able to load us back onto the bus to check out our final destination of the day - a plant nursery on North Caicos.  This involved going back over the causeway and driving almost back to the dock.  The nursery was a nice place to check out, but it wasn't nearly as exciting as the other stops on the field trip, in my opinion.  It was just different to see a nursery, as there is essentially no agriculture on South Caicos.  The island is so arid and the soil just isn't as rich, making it more difficult to grow plants.  Despite being just a few dozen miles away and being a part of the same island bank, North Caicos is much lusher and is able to sustain agriculture.

 Not to mention, there was a pen full of goats at the nursery!

It's a tiny, baby Turks head cactus - one of the three national symbols on the TCI flag.

 

 A cone from the Caicos pine - the TCI is one of the few places this particular plant lives.

We headed out from the plant (and goat!) farm back to the docks to catch our ferry back to Provo.  Upon arrival, we had a buffet style dinner at a local, off-the-beaten-trail place and had a turtle researcher talk to us about his work.  The next morning, we began our work aspect of the field trip, where we took the streets and surveyed people around the island.  Yes, we were those super annoying kids that guilt you into an interview when you just want to relax on your vacation, but if it makes you feel any better, we didn't really want to issue the surveys, either.  At least our group was assigned to the Grace Bay area, and we spent our few hours on the beach (and we even got our surveys done, too!).  For our final activity of the field trip, we took a tour of the Conch Farm, a, you guessed it, conch aquaculture facility (the only of its kind in the world).  While it was interesting to see the facilities, the tour itself was the same that they give to all the tourists, so we knew a lot of the information on conch biology.

 Are you surprised that I have a panoramic shot of the conch farm?  The structure to the left is a dock destroyed in the 2008 hurricanes.  The offshore pens are on the right of the picture.  After the hurricanes, they were unable to rebuild, as they have not been forthcoming with their data to the Department of the Environment and Coastal Resources, so they no longer have an export license.

 Baby conch!  Although conch outside of their shells are pretty strange looking creatures, they have adorable little eyes!

Another baby conch picture.

 

The baby conch room.  They're kept in those pans.

 They had some donated baby sea turtles in one of the onshore ponds, too!  They weren't being grown for food, although sea turtles are caught in the TCI for local consumption.

Not the most charismatic animal.  And that doesn't even show the visceral mass!

The problem with this particular facility is that they have been unable to create a self-sustaining population.  Therefore, while their board tells people that they harvest egg masses from an "egg farm", they really just mean they collect about 200 of them from the wild each year.  Because they raise so many conch in such close quarters, each individual grows to a smaller size than they would in the wild, a phenomenon called "stunting".  Even with these problems, they are still able to create more conch biomass from each egg mass than they estimate would come from each in the wild, which alleviates some of the stress put on the fishery.

The story is that the guy who created the conch farm was an engineer who crashed his boat in this spot of the island, and he settled down and began the conch farm afterwards.  Supposedly, he kept the boat around, and that's it, still keeping watch over the grounds.

A picture of the onshore ponds.  Most of them had conch, but two had sea turtles, and another had Cassiopea spp. (which is the genus of upside down jellyfish).

Sorry for boring you with some of the science involved in the Conch Farm, but I just wanted to highlight that while aquaculture sounds like a great idea to help curb overfishing, by itself, it is not a perfect solution (although it's not all bad, either!).  Anyway, we made our way back to the hotel, had a final briefing, and our field trip ended just in time to get to Happy Hour at the local bar.  What else transpired on our five, unsupervised nights in Provo?  Well, you'll just have to stay tuned to Islands 'n Oceans n'at to read the next post, "Getting Caught Up (Pt. 2)"

As per usual, some random thoughts to end this post:

• I know I said it before, but you need to check out Mudjadin beach if you are ever in North Caicos.  It's unbelievable, but then again, it may just be that I haven't been to many beaches/coastlines.
• I really hate essay tests.  A lot of the questions on these exams were in the vein of "here's this topic, write as much as you know about it", so you can go on for so freakin' long.  Not to mention the shear effort involved in writing five pages front and back three days in a row (I know, first world problems, right?).
• It's amazing the different types of work available in biology.  There may not be too many jobs, but there sure is a variety.  From creating turtle education programs at the Amanyara (look it up - it's nuts), to living on North Caicos to study Caribbean botany, there's really something out there for whatever subdiscipline floats your boat.
• It sounds crazy, but our filtered rain water that's caught on these giant concrete slabs at the center tastes so much cleaner than the tap water on Provo.  Although it's safe to drink, it just doesn't taste...right.