Where to start, where to start hmmm... What can I say this week has gone by very fast. After Christmas we had meetings discussing different topics relating to the Christmas Bird Count (CBC). I'm not sure if I had mentioned this before but apparently the CBC started out as just a group of guys going out hunting for birds on Christmas and that became a tradition, then one day they decided hey why don't we just count the birds instead of shooting them. So the CBC has been going on for quite some time. Any who back to the past week, the discussions have just been held in my apartment. It's a very different feeling than that of a classroom and I like it. As my uncle and I were talking about, you can't get away with not doing your homework and you can't get away with not participating. Before the discussion another girl on the trip and I went snorkeling at the same beach we had our Christmas BBQ because the conditions were supposed to be calmer. I was trying to take as many videos as I could so later I could come home and identify the fish. While I was doing this I ran into another group and one of the guys was holding a puffer fish! So I took a picture but then he asked if I wanted to and I was like heck yea! So he got my picture picture with it, but sadly after that point my camera stopped working. My camera had actually broken, somehow water got into an area where it was not supposed to be even though I took special precautions. The TA said that the same thing happened to her roommate last year with the same camera. And not too much longer another girl with the same camera had hers break in the same fashion. Sooo I would say I really don't recommend the Coolpix Nikon underwater camera.
Here is some pictures just before the death of my camera.
After our second discussion on Friday we had another gathering at the same beach where we played volleyball and frisbee. This time though there was an actual pick up game going on and I was very stoked to get in there and play. I was tentative at first, wondering if they would let me play or if I was good enough but then I said what the heck might as well. As I know from our frisbee community in swagstaff we are always encouraging who ever to come play so I figured it was the same here. And it turned out to be such a great experience. I was one of the few girls to play with the guys and I got to meet some people I may need to contact for my research project. It's also the first time I've ever played on a beach which was a challenge. They say that pick up games on the beach happen every Friday so I hope to play as much time will allow me. I think it'll help me keep my sanity here ha.
This is another picture of the place where pick-up frisbee was played.
On Saturday we got introduced to collecting data in the water. Our TA is building on her project from last year of studying sea grass. While she was here last year she looked at the diversity of fish in the short and tall sea grass beds. She was able to come back to look at benthic invertebrates in the sea grass beds as well as getting samples of the sea grass to do genetic analysis. We learned her methods and helped her collect data. Each site had a sea grass bed where we had to place out four 50 meters of lines (transects) to survey. The lines were rolled by 25 meters and anchored to the ground by dog leashes holders. Along those 50 meter lines we would count the number of invertebrates that were half a meter from the line on both sides. Also we used a meter square (quadrat) of PVC pipe at every ten meters of the line to see what the percent cover was (substrate, sea grass, or algae) as well as collecting samples of sea grass from that quadrat. So if you can't tell, it took a lot of time to do this. That day we only did one site for collecting and that took us about 2 hours. Total we had eight sites to collect data from. We did get better at it and were able to knock out three sites the next two days. Leaving one on the fourth day of sampling (New Years Eve). Each night we came back to the apartments and we had to process the samples of sea grass taken from the sites. Ten blades of grass were counted from each quadrat...soooo...10 grass samples x 5 quadrats per transect x 4 transects per site x 8 sites = 1,600 blades of grass were examined for the total length and how much algae covered the surface of the blade.
We worked as a team though and got it done in a timely manner. Here are some pictures from the sites that we sampled from.
So this is pretty much why I haven't written in the past week, we were pretty exhausted from these long days. But I did get to see some amazing animals along the way. I saw a lion fish, eagle ray, neat starfish, odd sea cucumbers, cute pipe fish, a dragon wrasse and baby fishies it's just too bad I didn't have a camera :[ . So finally it was New Years Eve and we were cleaned up from the morning's sampling. We went out to a popular sushi restaurant where we had good conversations of favorite memories of 2013. And other good bonding conversation.
I had some pretty simple sushi and shared with another girl, but at the end of the dinner our teacher who is taking the picture above (Dr. Benford) had some left overs he was willing to share...but nobody would take. It was a fermented soy bean sushi. So gross.
Everyone was saying "ew no you eat it" so finally I just picked it up and popped it in my mouth. Lets just say that was a bad choice.
It was absolutely repulsive to me, and I started to gag. I ended up going to the bathroom to spit it out in the trash. But hey it was funny and probably something I won't forget and never order again. After our lovely dinner out we played games at the apartments. We played what now is probably a new favorite game called salad bowl. It's a game where you first have everyone write down two or three things on separate pieces of paper, those papers are then thrown into a bowl. There are two teams and the first round you have a set time to try to get your team mates to guess the words so like taboo or catch phrase. After all of the pieces have been used you tally the points of the two teams and put the pieces of paper back into the bowl. The second round is now charades and the third round is where you only get one word to describe what is on the piece of paper. Keep in mind that on the pieces of paper it can have anything on it. For example "Like a fart in the breeze" and "Corn in your bellybutton" were some that were used. It's a fun game and is always a great source of inside jokes. We played this game for a while then went and hung out by the pool until midnight. Again we talked of life goals and other topics. So I'd say it was a pretty darn good New Years. The first day of the year we had another discussion over the data we collected, which was mainly about different ways to test things and other statistical things. Last night I fell asleep at like 8:30 pm and got pretty much 11 hours of sleep. That leaves today which was pretty casual. We had another discussion over the data we collected for our TA's project. We were also informed that we will be going to Tinian tomorrow through Saturday.
Just like Saipan 101, we are going to have a Tinian 101 to learn about the history of the island. Also in the future we will be traveling to Rota. Since I don't have a camera I'll probably just be taking pictures on my phone. But I will be away again from this blog for the next week because once we come back from Tinian we will be going straight into another bird survey. So hang tight for the next up date :)
