Water Ballet

More lionfish hunting. We speared 23 today. Many of the sites had clearly seen divers before and knew what to expect. 

The interesting part of today was that the corals started to spawn! We were hoping to collect the Acropora corals for research because they are hardier, but they aren’t cooperating. As soon as I got into the water, I realized that my light was really dim. Over the course of 30 minutes, it got so dim that I couldn’t see anything and had to stay near Danielle to see the corals. Then, what sounded and felt like a depth-charge went off in my hands and something hard hit me in the face. I realized that my dive light had exploded in my hand. Actually exploded. The batteries hit the floor, the body was attached to my wrist, and the light-bulb top section flew to the surface, hitting me in the face on the way up. We still had a 2-hour dive left and I had no light. The rest of the dive, I had to swim very close to Danielle so that I could still see anything. We did manage to see several sting rays and a bat fish (probably the ugliest and funkiest fish I have ever seen). 

Finally, we saw the star corals (M. annularis) “setting” to spawn. We made it over to a large head of corals just in time to see all of the tiny pink bundles slowly lift off the corals, sway synchronously in the water and then drift away. It was like a beautiful water ballet! We set up the nets and collected a fair number of the bundles before packing everything up and getting back to the boat. After 2.5 hours of diving, most people were pushing the red line on their air tanks. One buddy group had to buddy breathe while another person took his last breath of tank air as he was climbing up the ladder into the boat. Good thing we were only in 6 feet of water!

Back at the island, we performed a cross because we only had 2 sample colonies. We mixed the eggs of one with the sperm of another and vice versa. The bundles had all broken up and now we could see the true size of the eggs - super super tiny! We set them up in flow-through tanks and monitored them a few times before heading to bed. What a crazy day!