sometimes when i say i'm studying biology in school, people make snide remarks about how much memorization biology is comprised of, and i, quick to defend the love of my life, insist that it's more theory and concept based really. however, today i am proven utterly wrong as by thursday, we have to know about fifty scientific names, the key characteristics of each phyla, class, and subclass, and be able to identify and describe each of the fifty organisms in the field. you win world, you win. so naturally, i decided to write a blog post instead of get to work on naming.
i have to admit though, it was pretty cool to see the animals and plants out in the field. this is literally a nerdy biologist's heaven….so i'm fitting in just fine. i'm stocking up on super fascinating and utterly useless facts which are the delight of biology students everywhere. for instance, sea urchins have these little suction feet that tickle when you hold one, and you can identify the black mangrove by tasting the bottom of leaves to see if they're salty, and though sponges are basically the most boring creatures ever, there's a type here called the fire sponge that hell no you don't want to brush against.
the fire sponge, a slightly less boring branch of the porifera.
last night, we went out for our first night snorkel. i'll admit, i felt pretty badass sitting in my wetsuit with my flippers on, about to hop in the dark water with only my dinky flashlight and the moon for light. i'm sure i didn't look too epic though; wetsuits and flippers, sexy as they are, aren't really my thing.
we didn't see anything too wild last night (i was holding out for a lemon shark, but no cigar), but all the colors of the coral looked so different in the dark. we also saw several parrotfish, which have the charming habit of coating themselves in mucus at night to protect them while they sleep. yay science! we have a number of decently big barracuda here, and one of the girls in my group got rammed by one last night. it didn't bite her, but just ran into her side and then swam off. barracuda are basically the creepers of the ocean. they have these big glaring eyes and they like to follow snorkelers and divers around, and though they usually just like to creep from a respectful distance, apparently they will bite your fingers because of their fondness for rings and other shiny objects. if i were a fish i'd probably be a barracuda, so watch your fingers.
me in fish form.
today we're going out into the field again for another identification session, so i better study up. although okay, some of the critters have really awesome names….a type of mangrove that grows here is called laguncularia racemosa and doesn't that just sound like a harry potter spell? it'd probably turn someone into a tree or something. also, there's a fish here named halichoeres bivittatus whose common name is "slippery dick." not gonna have a problem remembering that one, thanks science.
halichoeres bivittatus....better known as slippery dick.
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