caribbean reef shark sighting

saw one of these puppies out at the aptly named "shark alley" yesterday!!! i've seen nurse sharks and lemon sharks, but this was my first reef shark sighting. reef sharks are most keen on pretty shallow water - we saw it in about 3 meters of water (about ten feet that is - the majority of our teachers here are from countries that use SI units and have whipped us into shape about using anything but meters as a measure of depth) but apparently they are often found much shallower than that, with their fin poking out of the water in stereotypical thriller-movie fashion.

caribbean reef sharks grow up to be pretty hefty - they can be up to 3 meters (…or 10 feet) long, and the one we saw was quite a hunk of cartilage. we had just completed our estimation-of-fish-sizes-underwater exercise the day before, and so though i'm no expert, i can semi-confidantly say he was around 7 feet long.

nerdy bio time: reef sharks are kinda cool, and are one of the only sharks observed to rest motionless inside underwater caves. they tend to dine on bony fish, but also have a fondness for my favorite creature, spotted eagle rays. i'm a fan of sharks, but i'm not sure how i feel about that. in our research on rays so far, we have sighted two individuals with pretty major scarring, and this guy might be the culprit. elasmobranchs should look out for each other, at least in my opinion. rays are friends, not food.

we're halfway through the semester what?

this tuesday was the first day back at it after spring break, and we celebrated with eight straight hours of class. it was a pretty grueling reintroduction into scholastic life, especially when compared with the past week, when the most grueling activity i engaged in was walking from the beach to the hammock. by the last class of the day, we were all pretty slap-happy from being in class for so long, and the presentations we gave were all distinctly…interesting. one group ended their presentation on the queen conch by saying "we're on the verge of something great!" …the verge being the uh male organ of the conch, and although i'm always a proponent of biological sex jokes, i don't know if our teacher was entirely pleased. 

spring break involved twenty of us staying in a five-bedroom villa, but having grown up in the mills family, i got plenty of practice squishing into small beds or sleeping on the floor, so i did some of both. provodenciales (the most populous island of the TCI) is like, so expensive it's tear-inducing, even in a manly person such as myself. for example: a usual taxi ride, no matter your destination, costs around 20 dollars…per person. a small container of hummus at the grocery store is like a billion dollars (okay eight, but for real?! i just want some chickpea protein with my baby carrots!). not that i went to any of the bars on the island, but i hear tales of a typical drink being around 12 dollars, which sounds pretty pricy, especially for anyone with a high alcohol tolerance. 

provo induced a kind-of culture shock in all of us. south boasts like 3 stores, 2.5 bars, 1 hotel, and no sit-down restaurant to speak of. compared to this, george, WA would look like a metropolis, much less provodenciales. provo is basically a rich tourist's paradise, bursting with crazy-nice hotels, an insane amount of beach-front, a wealth of aquatic activities, and a whole hodgepodge of fine dining. the abrupt change between two islands in the same country is enough to make anyone raise his or her eyebrows at least once, and as for me, i spent the first day in provo just wiggling mine like i had a tick or something. 

the first day, four friends and i decided to walk to our villa, and i'm positive we looked like homeless vagabonds. there we were, marching down what some call "the nicest beach in the freaking world" with our sleeping bags, camping mats, and shoes tied to the outside of our backpacks, while within, a powerful smell emanated, somewhere between stale bonfire and wet dog (to be fair, we had spent the past week camping). the tourist population of provo seems to be about 6% families and 94% rich old people, and 100% were judging us as we made our way down grace bay, but none of us really minded. spring break was mostly spent chilling in the water, chilling on the beach, chilling on the internet, and chilling in bed (i acquired the bad habit of napping for 3 hours each afternoon that's proving hard to break). 

spring break was real fun, but despite all the class and the usual study grind, it's been nice to have a purpose again, other than evening out my tan (just kidding mom, i soak in a sunscreen bath each morning). yesterday, we began our directed research project, in which i lucked out and get to study the most perfect animal that swims the sea….freaking eagle rays!!! there are three of us on this project, and my job is to study the distribution of the rays and discover if the same animals kick it in the same locations. i'll do this by following around any rays we see like a love-struck angelfish (they mate for life) and taking photographs of the ray's posterior fins like a stalker barracuda (creepiest fish that swims the seven seas). anyway, i think it's a fitting job for me, right?

i'm kind of obsessed

today we went out to take photos for the first time. we drove all the way to the tip of the island, but the current was wicked strong and the tide was going straight out to sea. it's my job to assess water visibility at site, on a scale of good to fair to poor, and based on the copious amounts of floating silt and the fact that we couldn't see more than two feet in front of us, i'd say visibility was pretty darn poor. we did see one eagle ray though! and umm i got within like four freaking feet of it, which is the closest i've ever been to one! since the current was so strong, we got out after only fifteen minutes, but we went back for an hour that afternoon. we saw probably fifteen or so rays, spread out over our time in the water, but i'm not sure if i got good footage of any. i definitely need to work on my ray social skills….someone suggested an eagle ray costume? i'm still considering that one.

field trippin

on sunday morning, all 33 of us south caicos vagabonds headed down to the dock and boarded a boat to north caicos, the second largest of the eight main islands. some group members were, uh, not feeling so hot, due to a nice combination of the rocking boat and the activities of the night previous, but at the end of the hour and a half boat ride, the majority of people were at least half alive. we had completed our midterms the week before, and everyone was pretty rowdy to be out and about, able to attempt to forget everything we had crammed in our heads the week before. i'm pleased to say this operation was a success for me at least. i've skillfully forgotten lots of things, like the definition of resource management (i mean, what is a resource even? i used to know that at one point many moons ago), and how long the larval stage of the queen conch lasts, and the scientific name of a number of fish that all look pretty much the same. i've kept a few nuggets of wisdom in my head to whip out at random times though, in case my nerdiness is called into question. like! did you know that the male spiny lobster initiates mating by brushing his antennae against those of his lady's? pretty cute right.

i think this lobster is into kaity (girl in the background) though she doesn't appear to return his sentiments

our field trip consisted of two nights camping on north caicos and one spent in provo in a hotel with what?! a warm shower?! say it's not so. on north, we spent our days going to a number of local historically or economically significant locations, such as wade's green plantation, a couple farms, mudjin harbor, and the conch caves. the abandoned plantation was cool, i think, but i was mainly concerned with catching lizards so i may have missed some of the finer details of the place. i did catch that there were lots of buildings (the slave quarters, the kitchen, the overseer's house, and the armory) that were all labeled wrong by some college students playing at archeology. moral of the story, never trust a college student. the farms were neat too - i learned how to get a papaya down from a tree with a long stick. see! i'm learning all sorts of useful skills here! 

skills.

mudjin harbor….hold the freaking phone. i felt like such a googly-eyed grinning buffoon, but i'm not sure i have ever seen a place so perfect. running into the water there for the first time, my friends and i were all pretty much in a complete delirium of happiness. it's kind of impossible to describe what made mudjin harbor so unreal, but as insufficient as it sounds, the water was a shade of blue you could drown in. when we swam out, the waves were huge, so the color was probably just warning us to stay away. too bad that was impossible. the entrance to the harbor was a huge, open cave, and you could walk over the top and down through a hole to a smaller, more secluded beach. it was pretty breathtaking, and if i could spend every afternoon swallowing salt water and being a googly-eyed buffoon at mudjin, i definitely would.

is this real life?

the conch caves, located on middle caicos, were AWESOME. i've always been kind of a creepy person, so caves are right up my creepy dark alley. we learned the names of some formations (my favorite was "cave-poo" - that's the official name) and that gave me a nice chuckle. we saw quite a few cute lil bats and learned a lot about guano and its uses, but the most useful lesson being to keep one's mouth closed when peering up at the cave ceiling so as to avoid any falling guano. lots of scatological lessons here.  

the aptly named cave-poo

back at the campsite, we all commenced with being eaten alive by bugs. there were a fair share of mosquitos, but the real ghouls were tiny biting flies called no-see-ums. what i want to know is how something tiny enough to be called "no-see-um" can have such a painful bite that, a week later, still itches. damn biology. that little sucker is pretty well evolved. in a moment of boredom, i tried counting how many bites i had….i got up to 102 just on my right leg and i had to stop. the good thing is that since i look like i have smallpox, no one tries to encroach on my space! it's almost worth it. 

the field trip was fun and i accomplished my unrealized life goal of becoming friends with a forty year old donkey who lived at the campsite (her name was eliza), but i was ready for spring break by the time we reached provo. the whole next day was devoted to surveying for our environmental policy class, but the real bed and oh my gosh the shower did a lot to perk me up. words cannot describe the sweetness of that first shower. warm water? shampoo that's not biodegradable goop? uh shaving my legs? the one downside was that i did discover that i'm not actually tan at all - the color i seem to have acquired over the semester was simply a coating of dirt that came off with freshwater and soap. you win some, you lose some. 

surveying the next day was an interesting experience, but overall a good one. i was surveying about plastic bag use in spanish, and that proved a little bit of a challenge. i'm definitely not fluent in spanish on the best of days, and when you take away the casual conversational aspect and replace it with words such as "reutilization" and ideas such as "coral suffocation," it turns out i have to resort to a lot of hand gestures and blushing. but it was probably good for both my spanish skills and whittling my ego down to the size of a pea. it was getting frighteningly close to kumquat size. 

procrastination nation

midterms week in the tropics is kind of like everything in the tropics: intense. the sun is intense, the storms are intense, the water color is intense, and yeah, taking the exams was a little bit like running into a metal pole….i speak only from experience. 

however, this week was good for something i suppose, aside from like actually getting my academic knowledge of resource management, marine ecology, and environmental policy and economics tested, and that is garnering a number of excellent procrastination techniques.

okay, i thought i had the put-stuff-off game on lock, but damn, i'm learning a lot here (mom, i know you're proud). take the night before our marine ecology final for example. i received twerking lessons, did a whole lot of headstands, got a seahorse tattoo (not permanent of course, mom you can stop hyperventilating), decided it was suddenly imperative for me to be clean so i showered, and helped paint the toenails of a friend (he's a dude) who had fallen asleep in the hammock. did i get a lot of studying done? not really. did i regret the next day during the exam? absolutely. did i do many of the same things the next night before my environmental policy class? um duh. 

another lucrative procrastination technique i've picked up here is hopping in the water. with ocean all around (i mean we are on an island), it's sometimes impossible to resist the siren song of the water, plus sometimes i feel semi-academic looking at marine organisms. look! a fish! biology. so the afternoon before my last exam, i was not in the library but instead out paddling around at HDL. and i saw an eagle ray, a barracuda eating, and a sea turtle, so you tell me if i made the wrong decision. i'll let you know when grades come out. 

the $ickest rap eva

with midterms fast approaching (my first one is on wednesday), the ever-present need for procrastination techniques has reached a new zenith. last week, while in a review session for my resource management class, my friend and i began writing raps so we could engage each other in a rap battle and also so we could make life harder for ourselves when we would try and fail to remember what our teacher said in the review. anyway, this here is the fruit of many hours spent in resource management trying to think of words that rhyme with "caicos." thank goodness i took a marine ecology class this semester, because those scientific names come in handy when rhyming, especially when your name is "maria." it's apparent that my resource management class has been supes valuable, because it has allowed me to finally fulfill my dream of starting my rapping career. now i just need to work on my street cred.....i'm accepting suggestions. 

the $ickest rap eva

born in the state of evergreen

not the tallest rapper you've ever seen

but i've been spitting game since i was a preteen 

catching rhymes in my mouth like a i'm baleen 

whale yo 

my old man said it's better to be lucky than good 

and i took that to heart just as soon as i could,

walking down the street in my neighborhood

five foot one is what i stood 

falling asleep before midnight every night

got that sleep on lock like a madreporite*

you're quite a sight trying to kiss me goodnight 

but sit tight, stay upright, international flight 

to the turks and caicos 

who knows where the time goes

i know how to make those

three-pointers like kevin pangos* 

spitting poetry and prose

way too real to pose

heyyy yo

i'm swimming underwater

i'm a spiny lobster

pledging allegiance to my father 

climbing without a spotter

echinodermata*

meet me at the regatta

holla

i got those killer chromosomes

never comatose 

tripneustes ventricosus*

i'm so sharp 

i'm so cold he calls me fria 

so hot i'm a tortilla 

got that sting like cassiopea*

i'm freakin' maria

heyyy

some helpful notes:

*madreporite: part of the tube foot in echinoderms which controls water entering the water vascular system
*kevin pangos: super sick gonzaga basketball player

*echinodermata: phylum of marina invertebrates, including sea stars, sea cucumbers, and sand dollars

*tripneustes ventricosus: scientific name for the west indian sea egg, or a sea urchin found in the turks and caicos

*cassiopea: genus of upside-down jellyfish 

ps. how do people think i'd look with grills?

month one was pretty cool

month one here in the TCI is done and yeah, i'll admit it: the island life is the good life. although in the spirit of full disclosure, as i write this, my back is excessively sunburnt (shh sorry mom) as a result of four hours spent in a bikini in the field yesterday in which ummm i didn't feel the need to put on sunscreen. additionally, i have about twenty-two mosquito bites along my legs and arms, despite my mosquito net and potentially toxic amounts of bug spray. yesterday night i took my third shower (did i mention i've been here a month?) so my hair feels weirdly like it's not glued together with grease and salt-water, and hold up! i actually shaved my legs so all 32 of my classmates should brace themselves for me ordering them to feel my smooth calves for the next two days. 

despite some very minor discomfort, this month has been a living dream. i've been pretty lax in writing, so for the sake of speed (i'm currently supposed to be researching a genus of algae, oops procrastination followed me from the US) i'm compiling a list of the most awesome things that have happened to me in the first month. so here it is.

the 10 most awesome things in 30 days in the TCI:

1. going turtling. dude, there's nothing quite as cool as speeding across the dark water underneath a massive night sky, unless it's diving in that dark water with only a tiny beam of light to illuminate the whole wide ocean around you, or else it's chasing a turtle and almost catching him (the lil dude was too fast for me though, and honestly, my puny lungs can't compare with his freaking respiratory skills - he can hold his breath for up to 7 hours! i don't think i can do anything for 7 hours, except maybe sleep). anyway, it may have been fortuitous that he was the one that got away, because when we got back to the boat and got to hold the turtle someone else caught, it was get swoll or go home. apparently shells are heavy or something? so if i would have caught one, i probably would have drowned trying to bring it back to the boat. i'm pretty good at the dead-man's-float, but those guys are heavy! and there's no freaking way i would have let go of that turtle for anything, so there i go. what a way to die though, plus i probs would have had a sick phrase on my headstone like "she did it for the data" or something equally impressive. as it is, i lucked out and was the one who got to release the turtle we actually caught, and despite him repeatedly slapping me with his flippers (he stopped when i called him pretty, damn i know how to handle the boys), i guess i was kinda attached because i tried to go over the side of the boat with him…aka grace and balance overtook me again. mishaps and all, it was crazy chill and i can't wait to repeat the experience. 
2. seeing sunrises. don't ask me how, and dad don't say "i told you so," but since being here i've started to become a morning person. though this does have downsides, one being that after 8:30 each night i'm a useless yawning machine, seeing the sun rise every morning is a treat and a half. i also really like getting up early and just having some time to sit outside, drink my tea, and study or….okay, go on facebook. despite my bad habits, waking up before most everyone else is peaceful, and who knows, it might even carry over for one or two days after i leave. 
3. getting the water almost every day. i love bio and the courses here are pretty stimulating, but the classroom pales pretty quickly when compared with paddling around in the tropical water. i've nicknamed the water color "just-see-if-you-can-study-when-i'm-waving-at-you-like-this." so far, the answer is "yeahhhh, no." i've always loved swimming in the ocean, but who knows how i'm gonna go back to swimming through ice in the pnw. for now, not getting hypothermia is pretty enjoyable. 
4. going sharking. as a kid, when i went to the aquarium with my mom, the lemon sharks were my favorite, and this trivial attraction must indicate some sort of crazy fate that i have to morph into the shark-whisperer or something. i couldn't even explain why, but touching a shark and getting to look at it that up-close is pretty enthralling, and something else i could probably do for at least 7ish hours.
5. seeing eagle rays for the first time and feeling my heart just crumple. i didn't know it could do that…..is that what love is?! shoot, maybe i should procure a ring. it is rather hard to get down on one knee underwater though, but i'd do it for any one of those beautiful creatures.  
6. getting to know my fellow sfs students. i've very much enjoyed meeting a lot of people in my program that seem very similar to me in their passions and goals (basically that means they're pretty freaking cool), who are from all over the US. since we currently have a modest 1:11 ratio of guys to girls (yes i did the math), it almost feels like a nice lil throwback to all-girls school. though some people may be having trouble adjusting, i would say i'm fairly familiar with having personal conversations at loud volume, peppering people with questions about their man-friends, and of course the requisite being half-dressed at least 21 hours of the day. ah forest ridge, you taught me well.
7. stargazing. i mean, what is there to say about passing time gazing at the infinite galaxies stretched out before us?
8. learning a bunch of phrases that are now firmly rooted in my colloquial speech. i always hoped studying abroad would help me learn a new language, i just also hoped i'd be able to still speak english. unfortunately, this seems not to be the case, as a number of seemingly nonsensical phrases swim their way into almost all of my conversations. for example, the saying: "she gone." this wonderful phrase can be used in virtually every situation - i.e. "where's kaity?" or "that fish swam away" or "all the salad has been eaten!" she gone. no matter the situation, this phrase must be said with a heavy southern accent (i don't make the rules), making it even more difficult to understand. another classic is "you do you." this also can be applied to everything ever, and despite its overuse, is oddly heartening when someone says it while looking deeply into your eyes. you do you. 
9. dancing. almost everyone who knows me at school knows that i love dancing and have no shame when it comes to my spastic excuse for it. unfortunately, there have been scant opportunities for it here until last saturday. we were celebrating two of my friends' birthdays, and what better way to celebrate another year in the life than the re-opening of "baller's," the solitary dance club on the island? i certainly had a lot of fun looking like an electrocuted spider.
10. trying to freaking discern my life goals. alright, this last one has given me a lot of grief over the years. i have a lot of pretty varied interests and when you combine this with my chronic indecisiveness, deciding on what to eat for dinner doesn't really happen, much less what to do with the rest of my life. however (cheesy alert: you should probs stop reading if you are allergic to cliches) being here, in a radically new environment, has inexplicably given me a little larger of a window into what i want. included in this is the presence of new experiences. this one was a lil of a shocker for me, because i'm definitely a routine person, and usually keep myself firmly nested in the safety of schedule. however, going out in the field and seeing new things almost every day has made the more adventurous and excitable side of me accessible. i mean, i may gulp saltwater through my snorkel like a giddy schoolgirl every time we see a particularly attractive megafauna (think octopus, porcupine-fish, or turtle just to name a few), i don't mind not being too cool for school. studying at a field station has also alerted me to the more nitty-gritty details (literally, not a lot of showers in the field) of being a researcher outside of the lab, and the fact that i may be interested in that for at least a few years after i graduate. i think i can deal with the limited showers, and bugs, and sunburns, especially if it means i get to be a giddy fool coughing up seawater. 

chemistry, modern-day resurrections, and lemon sharks

when i finished my final semester of chemistry last year, i was absolutely certain of two things: hell is temporary and i'm never going back. however, much to my surprise, last wednesday found me in a local high school, trying to teach juniors and seniors about the joys of inorganic chemistry, of which there are none. i pretty much couldn't remember a single thing. who's avagadro? aren't moles animals? i was relieved when they started asking me physics questions, and i'm pretty sure they were too.

later that day, we began the first of weekly house visits to families on the island. two other girls from my program and i were assigned for the semester to an elderly woman who raised 6 kids and 5 of her 16 grandkids, and has the trophies and medals all over her house to prove it. i guess she has some sweet genes, because the medals ranged from track to chess to academics and there were a lot of them. i was feeling a little like an underachiever, but then i remembered that my parents have a "participation" ribbon from when i ran cross-country as an eight-year-old. i haven't seen it around lately, but they're probably just getting it framed. 

she had some crazy stories too, all of which had morals, which i deduced were nearly always "don't go to the doctor." take, for example, the first story she told us. about thirty years ago, she had a terrible pain in her side, and she had to be flown to grand turk (the capital of the turks and caicos islands). at the hospital there, the doctors discovered she had appendicitis, and rushed her into surgery, during which she lost a lot of blood and was pronounced dead. as is protocol in these cases, she was wheeled into the morgue and her husband was called to pick up the body. a day later, he flew into grand turk and went to see his dead wife, who he found in the morgue with her lips moving. he called the doctors and was like "uhhh i think she's still alive guys," at which the doctors questioned his emotional stability, but he was like "nah i'm serious," so they visited her in the morgue and found her alive and talking. surprise! don't trust the doctors.

on wednesday night, five of us got to accompany our ecology professor on a research trip to tag sharks. understandably, almost everyone was drooling over the prospect of seeing elasmobranchs in the flesh, but as there were only five spots, the sign-up was posted at a random time and whoever was quickest or most aggressive got to go. since i'm neither quick nor aggressive (jk about aggressive guys, bio or death, but i'm really slow), i didn't get my name on the board. but as my old gaffer likes to say, it's better to be lucky than good, and one girl ended up having to back out at the last minute, so i got to go along after all.

we took a van to a stunning bay on the other side of the island, and set up the shark net (which is the length of a football field) by the light of the almost-full moon. aaron, our professor, told us to "get comfortable and start talking about our feelings" (that's a direct quote), but before i could begin telling the group about my troubled childhood and delinquent outbursts spurred by emotional instability, we caught a shark. and then another. and then four more. we caught six freaking sharks in the first hour!!! aaron says in a usual night of sharking, they catch maybe two sharks. dad, you were right about the lucky thing.

sharking, of course, is not all glamour and gills. it also involves a lot of wading through mud, tripping over worm-mounds, detangling angry lobsters from the net, and sitting and waiting for sharks to hit us up. but oh gosh, when you catch one…....if i was a crier, i would have been in tears for sure. we were catching baby lemon sharks, so they're not terribly big (the biggest was probably only three feet), but they have these cute sharp teeth that they'll use if you give them the chance, and the rumors are true about their skin! it is smooth one way and the other way feels unnervingly like a cat's tongue. i went home that night smelling like a shark, i kid you not. if i start growing gills, stick a tag in me and put me in the shallows.  

on thursday we had our first identification exam (see guys i am going to school here), and to celebrate, a bunch of us went out to town that night. that was real fun, as i got to get to know some of my classmates better, attempted to salsa dance, and practiced my super rusty spanish with a few of the men from haiti. it did make me very tired for class the next morning (i wake up at 6 here, which means my bedtime is approximately 8 pm), but it was well worth it. especially as that day was valentine's day, and i got to celebrate by spending eight hours in class with my boo, bio. it was pretty romantic. we may have made a few people behind us uncomfortable, but it's not true love if someone around you isn't gagging.