the only new recruit i got this week

was gordon


welcome gordon.

as you can see he´s a cheery fellow and hails from the U.K.

besides diving he´s been way enthusiastic about the world cup and him and catherine have been taking advantage of the many locations that advertise satellite tv

in other news, catherine leaves in one week. and well, i´m not ready to talk about that yet so.....

the end

oh and we´re totally getting skunked

hardly any cabrilla at the filet table and NO recruits from 7 sites.

sandy says come home

i´m seriously thinking about it. of course by the time i pack i would have already missed her party anyway, so maybe not...

oh and the front of the new do

because sandy´s freaking out about the back

hee

a dog named spoon

this is spoon. spoon showed up at the trailer in mid-may. glenn was mildly perturbed because he thinks we´re his but spoon prevailed. spoon was really cute and reminded me of the afghan puppies we used to have when i was a kid (that is until step-dad number two hauled the mother shauna to the pound because she didn´t like him - trust your dogs people!) he had long legs, a long black snout and a whip like tail. of course, this being mexico it´s a long shot if he really was afghan hound.

his name is spoon because when he showed up catherine said "what´s the word for puppy?¨" i said "cachorro" the next day catherine was saying "come here cucharra! come here cucharra!" and i said "you do realize you´re calling him spoon..."

the name stuck

sadly though spoon isn´t around. when we left for the island he ran down the street following our van and quit about 3 block from the trailer. i thought for sure he would just turn around and go back but when we returned he wasn´t there and the liza next door said that when we left he never came back. so i don´t even know if we had made just a day trip that day instead of a week trip he would have made it back.

i feel really bad that he´s gone but i hope maybe he found another place to take him in.

speaking of dogs, i stole this from catherine´s flickr page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37019612@N00/168583550/

she called it half naked dog tossing. we were at the beach one day and this little girl runs by us with this puppy on a leash. the puppy slowed down to check us out and i petted him and started talking to the girl (in spanish...) i asked the dog´s name and she said "superman!" in a kinda "duh of course" tone! then i said he´s very cute and she started telling me (very rapidly) that she's afraid of the water and doesn´t want to get stung and that she doesn´t want anything in the water to sting or bite her puppy. then she took off. i then turned to catherine and said, betcha she throws that dog in the water. i dont´know what it is but here in mexico i can´t tell you how many times i´ve seen people just fling their dogs in the water and watch them swim back.

and sure enough the girl took her shirt off went to the shore and TOSSED it! alot

catherine took pics check em out

and because catherine wants to be cool like me

she started a flickr page too

long time no see

i can´t believe it´s june 15th.

things have been going well with a few bumps. tons of pictures but i have so little time to do anything beyond dive, dive, dive, collect, make dinner and get ready to do it all over again. i finally made some time today to do some pictures.

some cool highlights of the last two weeks is that Adam was able to go out on a humboldt squid dive with dolphin. the owner was taking some friends out to film them so i horned in and got adam on the boat. this is adam before the dive
in front of the shop.

this is adam after the dive


catherine has discovered the utility of the mexican bandaid


one day while diving catherine and i are doing our transects and i hear what i think are dolphins nearby. but it sounds different, more highpitched and longer with an occasional scream like sound. kind of like one call starts and another call lays over it halfway and there is this trilling screaming noise. it was wild. so when we get back to the boat adam is going crazy "DID YOU SEE THEM? DID YOU SEE THEM?"

what?

he said pilot whales had been passing by for the last 40 minutes and he said a big bull went straight for our bubbles and went down and he thought for SURE we had seen it.

DAMMIT!

but they were still passing when we pulled anchor there were so many. i know this picture doesn´t really show how many because they're surfacing is separate and random and hard to photograph

and no we did not follow them and no way did anyone **coughcatherinecough** get in the water.

the main thing is that the recruits have not been coming in. last year i got recruits in my collectors in mid-may. now it´s june 15 and we´ve had recruits one day this week. can you say all eggs, one basket? yikes! so we're just making sure to keep doing the biodiversity transects as well as pulling collectors so i can at least have SOME data. we were trying a bunch of different things, doing plankton tows, diving in the afternoons to deploy light traps


speaking of biodiversity, we've figured out a way to capture as much as possible, put the quadrat ONLY where there is some. BRILLIANT!ª

for example, the other day we were diving over a large flat sandy area between reefs when BLAM! in the middle is this jawfish so like a good little worker catherine puts the quadrat over him

of course, in order to make it look random our smart diver DOESN´T put the jawfish smack in the middle of the quadrat

and then to make it all official records the jawfish on her underwater paper data sheet. now it´s data. now my research will say what I want it to say.


awesome

so as you can see

NOT a leopard grouper recruit in my collector *sigh*

we got a few though the other day which was a bit heartening


we let the collectors soak all weekend before starting an intensive collecting regime so you can see they get big quick


but the subsequent days yielded only blennies. soooo, i´m thinking now this is becomig a leopard grouper spawning and blenny recruitment project and i will somehow spin it as if the two are connected and then graduate and then get a job and get out of debt.

hahahahaaaaaa hahahahhahahhahaha

**wipes tear from eye**

who am i kidding? lol

ok well that was my hour this week at the interent kiddies. hasta luego!



ªok it´s possible that only catherine and i thought this was funny...lol

last island trip evah part II

i don´t have a lot of underwater pics from this trip because i was mostly trying to film the spawning and that´s hard work chasing those grouper all around.

but when i did get to take pictures catherine ALWAYS somehow managed to get herself in the shot.

excuuuuse me i´m trying to take a picture of orange cup coral. gosh.
i can´t even get a picture of a chocolate chip cookie star without her horning in.


the only reason i would let something like that slide is because the previous day i saw exactly how big her knife is and well, dive lightly and carry a big knife is her philosophy.

as you can see, even on our last night on the island we were all business. while catherine and adam were off taking pictures of the silly sunset joe and i took off all our gear, took a nice rinse in the ocean and then slammed down the remaining beers before they got back. as you can see, joe is very shy.


as the night went on joe and i got even funnier while i made dinner.



we had everybody in stitches!! we were so funny!!



the next morning while we were packing up to leave the island obi-Wan kenobi came by our camp to inform us that these were not the droids you are looking for.

and then like magic just disappeared.


in the meantime catherine was experiencing phoebe´s (from friends) version of gravity, where gravity wasn´t so much pulling but more like a pushing


and then we were rescued. and they brought beer. and it was good. that is until i got back and checked my bank account and it all went to hell in a hand basket.

frantic attempts to fix things over the internet didn´t work and neither did the bank to wire money. finally a desperate call home to sam (LOVE YOU MEAN IT SAM!!!!) and then catherine and adam both were very cool about it and both lent me money to get us through the month. of course now the dynamic has changed a bit. before whenever i would ask someone´s opinion about what we should do that day or when something would go slightly wrong catherine would say "whatever, it´s your project." and now whenever i ask them to do something they say "well, you know it is our project..."

bastards!

last island trip evah

so sad

so this was the last island trip for my project and possibly the last island trip evah. next year at this time i will be **fingers crossed** almost finished with my thesis and preparing to graduate so i won´t be here in loreto.

*sniff*

so i´m very glad that this island trip went very very well. this time we had four people: Adam, Catherine (catarine to the neighbor kids) and Joe.

Now not many people know that Lance Armstrong uses the alias "Joe." and he often randomly volunteers to help out poor little grad students with their projects.


"Joe" arrived on the same flight that Adam was returning on from LA. Adam returned for a couple of days to take in a graduation and a wedding that included a madcap drive up and down the state of california. While he was gone, Catherine and I worked very hard.


i don´t have any pictures of the trip out to the island because i was shooting video but once we got there on thursday afternoon and unloaded the gear it was essential to take part in the luxuries this site offers


since adam was recovering from a bad cough joe and catherine dived with me at this site. in the mornings we did transects and in the afternoon we tried to document spawning. the first morning out catherine and i were a bit distressed when we went down to do transects and their was a giant gillnet stretched across the entire reef from 60 feet deep up to 45 feet deep.

whoever put out the nets must have just done so that morning because most of the fish were still alive.

i started to cut one out with my tiny dive knife when catherine shoved me out of the way and busted out her machete and started doing serious damage to the net. all told i think we released about 20 parrotfish and then we had to stop. it was maddening how many there were and we were running out of air. plus catherine was spending half her time cutting me out of the net. i had so much stuff attached to my BC - slate, transect tape, camera that any little thing that touched the net would get caught in it.

on our second dive we went to another part of the reef on the same side of the island to actually do transects and ran into ANOTHER net. we cut a few fish out of that one too. now normally i would not mess with a person´s ability to make a living but the nets were illegal. there were three net sets in a restricted area (near the grouper spawning site) so my only regret is that when we tried to tangle up the nets they wouldn´t tangle up so much and i kept getting caught in it in the process. yes, i know, i´m your hero.

when we dove in the afternoon, they were TOTALLY doing it

it´s very hard to take pictures and video of these guys. first the water is normally very murky and even though the viz this year was amazing you still have to deal with low-light conditions and long distances between you and your subject. another problem is that the action can start at about 40-60 feet and culminate at 20-30 feet or even sometimes break the surface and it´s too dangerous for a diver to follow them that quickly from depth to the surface. so i just do the best i can with what i got.

one afternoon when it was catherine´s turn to dive in the afternoon to see SPAWNING! (when i had mentioned the original dive plan with catherine diving in the morning to do transects and joe in the afternoon to be my buddy during spawning since he was new and i hadn´t trained him to do transects catherine busted out with "SPAWNING! I NEED TO SEE SPAWNING!" so i had to rearrange my entire sampling scheme and train joe just so CATHERINE could see SPAWNING!)

ahem

anyway, this giant school of tuna came up past us and just split in half to go around us and we were in this huge pocket between the two sides of them.



it was awesome.

more pictures

not enough time to blog right now.

things on the island were great but quickly became not so great when we arrived back and there was no money in my bank account. the university decided to keep my paycheck to pay the overaward they gave me of a student loan. so 've been freaking out a bit here and trying to get that taken care of.

so for now check out the pictures on the flickr page