Spending the past week along the Ecuadorian coastline has been a welcoming change from the cooler and rainy Cumbaya.  The first five days were exploring the rambunctious and salsa loving town of Puerto Lopez.  Here I got my 1st dive of the year in at a spot called La Plata, a blue-footed booby's island of paradise.  As I learned from my classmate, this island is lined with white circles of guano, aka poop, that encircle a blue-footed booby's nest.  I also learned that only about 1 in 3 babies live because the oldest/biggest chick will push the other ones out of the nest and off a ledge or something like that when the parents are out searching for food.  But the dive around this island was incredible despite the shallow depth.  Because this place is legally protected, the marine species are massive & fearless of divers compared to their relatives in the Virgin Islands.  But since I didn't expect this, during my 1st dive I set the zoom on my camera when I shouldn't have since I could get so close to all the fishies.  The next couple of days in Puerto Lopez involved intertidal madness, and my 1st observation is that one of my professors is part mountain goat, creaming us in adventuring on the algae-covered, slipper rocks, while the rest of us are falling on our asses & stained with green algae.  So the intertidal field work contained 3 components:  quadrants, whelks, & biomass.  In the .5 x .5 m quadrants students estimated percent coverage of sessile organism and algae types, counted the number of mobile invertebrates, and a couple of other things.  Biomass students scraped off algae & other organisms to save for later investigation.  And saving the best group for last... WHELKALICOUSNESS!  Me and my partner tramped through high, mid, and low tides to collect, measure, & record the length of 3 different types of whelks.  In total, I probably caught circa 300 whelks!  Other creatures I scrounged for were a gazillion types of slugs, polychaete worms, 'hieroglyphic' crabs, urchins, and hermit crabs.  These tasks were pretty simple but done at multiple sites and tidal levels for us to do comparisons when we return.  Some of the things we'll be looking for is if there's any correlation between whelk size and tidal zone & whelk abundance with respect to north/south position of site along the Ecuadorian coastline.  In addition to spatial differences, we also have past years of data to see what changes occur temporally at each site.  We continued to do this intertidal work in Las Esmeraldas, and I also installed sediment plates all over a colossal rock to set up a new experiment.  During this part, the ITCZ winds and rain were pounding me as I tried to work in my bathing suit and handy dandy reef booties.  The sediment plates were either black or white, and the experimenter's objective is to test algal growth.

Panamac Green Moray

Yellowtail Surgeonfish

Trumpetfish

Tiger Snake Eel

ps.  The late response was due to my 1st Ecuadorian parasite, keepin me laying low.  I'll die another die.