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