Dive dive dive

Okay, I'll come clean right away. The real reason I'm posting is to share the coolest picture ever. It's the zoomed-out version of my facebook picture, so I'm sure it looks familiar to some people. I just think it's awesome, though. If I look intense, it's because I'm really pissed off at my students. I'm swimming back down from the surface where I had to have one of them picked up by the rescue boat. Not a big deal, but frustrating. And see? I really do dive all day. I'm not just making it up. I'm sure you thought I was.

So I finally have a normal day off! It's been like two weeks. I mean I got days off for Sydney, but we were pretty busy. Then I got a day off on Thursday, but I went out on the boat anyway. It was actually pretty fun, I was taking Jon out to work on getting him certified as a diver. Which I did, and he's actually very good at it. Which is a good thing, because last night I took him out for a night dive. The timing for his certification was not an accident; last night was the Tusa coral spawning trip. Without getting too marine bio-y on y'all, this is basically what happens. In short, corals reproduce in a couple of different ways, but one way is sexual reproduction, which they only do once a year. The corals all release their eggs into the water on the same night. This happens for a variety of reasons, including that they want the tides to not wash the eggs too far from the reef, and that if they all spawn at once, there is too much for predators to eat, so a higher percentage survives. Got it? So scientists predicted this weekend for the annual spawn, and this is what it's supposed to look like:


I say supposed, because it didn't happen. We went out and did two night dives, and it was still pretty cool, but there was definitely no spawning going on. Jon did an awesome job, the first dive we went on was very shallow (which is harder than deep, actually), and very crowded, but he was great, especially considering it was his fifth dive ever. The second dive, Matt (who I work with), Jon, and I went off in the opposite direction to look for sharks. We found one, which is apparently an epaulette shark. It was probably three feet long, and it looked like this:


We didn't actually take that picture, although Matt took a lot of really cool pictures, which I will hopefully get, and post along with Maisie's Sydney pictures. Anyway, so we found one shark, some pretty cool other stuff like a baby octopus that inked just a tiny bit when I touched it. Oh and sea turtles who would not leave us alone. That was kind of fun. After the diving, all the staff who had come out just for fun went down to the rooms below and slept. Because we had all worked that day, and then just stayed on the boat for the night dive. Which means we were all on the boat from 6:50 AM Friday to 2:30 AM Saturday. Poor Matt had to work today. Oh well. Good times were had by all, despite the lack of spawning.