February 6th -- I love snorkeling!

This morning was my introduction to snorkeling. Most of the other students had done it before, but no problem – it’s much easier than swimming, and we can all swim, so no one had any trouble. It was effortless, and amazing to see all the fish and other little animals living all over the reef. There were lots of bright-colored little fish, electric blue and red, pink, blue, yellow, black, orange… okay, every color. Lots of stripes and dots. I don’t know my fish at all, but I can tell you that I saw several pufferfish, and a couple of really cute blennies. A blenny has eyes that move independently, and the ones I saw were tiny (the size of the last two joints of my pinkie finger), brightly colored, and hiding out in the rocks. My favorite fish was the Moorish Idol. We also saw coral. There isn’t much coral on the pacific side apparently, so it wasn’t like coral reef at all – mostly just rocks covered in green fuzzy plant material and shells. We also saw a SEA TURTLE! I WAS SWIMMING WITH A SEA TURTLE!! Okay, maybe “with” is an exaggeration. It swam away pretty fast. But I spotted it.

Before lunch I got some quiet time on the beach, and then in the afternoon we got an intro to the forest, which has grown up from pasture in the last 40 years. There are lots of palms, including some impressive Royal Palms, and lots of lianas and aerial roots. All in all, the forest is taller, darker, wetter, and more viney than Palo Verde. It feels more like your stereotypical tropical forest, but is still a far cry from what we’ll see at La Selva (wet tropical forest site). This is characterized as “moist” forest.

I got the nap I was looking forward to so much, and then there was a talk on geology and the history of ocean currents. A candlelit dinner was followed by a lecture on bats with some amazing photos of the types that are found around here. In 7 or so years of netting, they have found 38 species so far. There are the vampires, of course, and then fruit-eating bats, insect-eating bats, fish-eating bats, and big scary-looking predatory ones that eat, among other things, bats. We had a mist net set up that we opened after the lecture, but it was a bit late – we’d missed the prime time for bats, and only caught a few insect-eaters. Over the next few nights we’ll hopefully get out a little earlier. Only 6 of the 22 students have had their rabies vaccinations, so they are the only ones allowed to handle bats. (I didn’t do it – too expensive!)

I found out which faculty-led project group I’m in; Craig Guyer’s. We’ll be doing something on predation on anoles, I’ll learn more about it tomorrow night. It looks like an excellent group, I’m looking forward to it.

I saw a few new birds today; plain wren, band-backed wren, and melodious blackbird.