Bio FSP Update #6 - Little Cayman Island
Dartmouth Bio FSP Winter 2023
Hello my lovely people,
From Las Cruces, we allegedly took a 5-hour bus ride (read: 10-hour bus ride) to the capital, San José. From there, we flew to Miami to Grand Cayman to Little Cayman. The flight from Grand to Little was on a prop plane! It was TINY -- Dartmouth was almost the entire plane. But it was only about half of our group on that plane -- the others had a connection on the third Cayman Island, Cayman Brac. It's ~5 miles from Little and the flight between the two is a hilariously short 10 min.
The Cayman Islands are part of the UK (we met Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex & 13th in line for the throne) and the Greater Antilles (the group of larger islands in the West Caribbean). Unlike the other islands in the Greater Antilles, the Caymans are not made of continental rock but rather coral skeletons!
We stayed at the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI) for 3 weeks. And we were about 20% of the island population!
Our professor, Celia Chen, had to leave a few days in, but while she was here, she had an open invite to everyone to walk at 6:30am every morning. It was really nice, because generally only my close friends and I went and we could chat about anything! Another Dartmouth bio person Craig Layne stepped in as prof once she left.
The noseeums woke up and chose violence. Especially against me (see bug bite pics). Honestly, I've never had my quality of life decreased this much by bug bites, especially with respect to sleep quality and range of motion. The worst part was we were getting in the water twice a day, so the open wounds didn't have time to heal (tried using waterproof bandaids but I ran out so fast and they wouldn't stay on that long). And the bites would sting for a solid 10 minutes when I entered the saltwater.
Biome: Coral Reef
For projects, we first did an intro to marine bio data collection with queen conchs then two original research projects.
I wanted to do an underwater bioacoustics with marine mammals and octopus color perception study (they're allegedly color blind yet can camouflage!). But due to our hydrophone (metal circle at the end of the red cable in the vid below) not picking up on sounds and the CCMI director not letting us do the octopus experiment (honesly fair since we’re not trained in octopus care), I could not do either. Bummer.
For the first project, I joined the damselfish group and we studied their aggression in different parts of the reef (backreef, which is closer to shore, and forereef, which is farther from shore). There was no significant difference but we did find that dusky damselfish were more aggressive when comparing across species of damselfish.
For the second project, we pivoted from octopus perception to octopus feeding events in different parts of the reef (backreef, forereef, and sandy flats) using octopus middens as a proxy. A midden is a pile of prey remnants like shells and bones. Other marine animals leave middens lying around, but we just assumed middens we found were from octopuses since the FSP students in 2020 found a LOT of octopus middens. We did forty 30 m transects across different sites (see pic of Kiera pulling in the transect). We didn't find anything significant.
Octopus sighting during a night snorkel.
Scuba diving!!! We did 10 dives including a night dive, a wreck dive, and boat dives. The coolest dive was going to the dropoff. Endless blue. We had 3 divemasters with us, so we were in good hands. I’ve gotten better at buoyancy control and started to really enjoy it. So I’m considering getting more diving certs/diving more often. The non-divers did a lot of free diving, even going down to scuba diving depths (like 40 ft!).
The dropoff.
Adult Hawksbill Turtle, Kiera, and Theo
Bird’s eye view of our favorite spot on the island, Point of Sand
MASSIVE brain coral (and Haley and 3 stripe damselfish)! The neuro nerd in me was SO happy
At the end of FSP, we flew out on another prop plane, dropped off some people on Grand (some were vacationing there with their families), flew to Miami, and went out separate ways. Overall, FSP was such an incredible experience—at no other time in my life would I be able to travel to these remote locations and just science. I feel very lucky. I'm now an amateur scuba diver, naturalist, leg wrestler, cinematographer (vlog is coming soon...), and of course, ecologist. Practiced some Spanish. Realized I'm a noseeum magnet. Yeah. Good times.
Thanks for following along! (read in a British accent)
Megan Liu
Originally published via email 04/03/2023 (yes, wayyy after FSP ended)
Added more details to my bug bite experience and edited ending a little
Removed chiton pic, cockpit video, group picture on the beach, pano from CCMI, drone shot from sand to water at Point of Sand, me catching a goby with a net, snorkeling at South Hole, vid of chicken crossing the road, Whitney diving through the wreck, me coming up from a dive, drone view of Cayman Brac from Little Cayman (it’s only 5 miles away!), tidepools, sunset vid where you can see the sun going down, brain coral skeleton, seahorse [it was just too much]