Island School 2017 - Day 5

We started the day with "floating the Cut," which was basically snorkeling down a natural lazy river. The current carried all of us along with basically no swimming required, and we saw both a Southern stingray and a nurse shark! After breakfast, we biked out to a mangrove creek along the edge of the island. As we were walking to the mouth of the creek, we saw several nurse sharks that were courting (looking for a mate) and were amazingly close to shore. In the creek, we learned to identify different types of mangroves, then splashed our way upstream, looking for juvenile lemon sharks and other young fish. We then floated back out to the beach and saw a variety of fish, including some porcupine fish (pufferfish)! After lunch, we learned about plastics from one of the researchers at CEI, and dissected fish stomachs to see what microplastics (tiny pieces of plastics floating around in the oceans) were inside. For our evening activity, we went on a night wade, searching for octopus and other creatures that are more active at night. While we didn't see any octopus, we found some very active conchs, several brittle stars, and some anemones that glowed under UV light. To end the evening, Claire, one of our instructors, caught a land crab, which was not at all happy about the situation. When I went to touch the crab's back, it suddenly reached backwards and caught my thumb in one of its claws. Lydia(another instructor) fortunately knew that crabs rarely let go, and so the best thing to do was to break the crab's claw off. I was mostly concerned about whether or not the crab was okay, but everyone else seemed more worried about whether or not my thumb was broken (to answer: crabs regrow their claws, so it was fine, and my thumb is okay, though badly bruised).

                                                                                                           - Charlotte