Day #6 January 8th, 2019 - Belize Marine TREC, San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize

Greetings! What a beautiful day! This was perhaps our best day of snorkeling yet, and we made significant progress on our research project. At the end of our last dive, we all turned to the reef and literally applauded. It was that good!

Our day began with a particularly good omen. We boarded our speedboat, headed out to our research site at Coral Gardens, and were greeted by a rainbow:

The students were soon in the water collecting their final sets of data. The class was divided into 3 groups, and each group made 2 observations at each of 3 types of coral sites (boulder brain, elkhorn, and staghorn). Today was our third and final day of data collection. As usual, the students were diligent and thorough in their observations:

After our work was complete, we all spent about an hour buddy snorkeling around this beautiful site:

As we prepared to leave Coral Gardens, I was struck, as I often am in Belize, of the unique beauty of the MesoAmerican reef. Like a baseball game, the basic outlines are always the same, but the details come in infinite variations, with familiar patterns and rhythms but also with sights that you've never seen. The vista is always new and exciting, yet simultaneously familiar:

We boarded the boat around 11AM and sped to a new spot:

Our next stop was called Soft Coral Gardens. Here, we saw many tall, colorful algae, gently swaying in the current, providing a home to a wide variety of fish:

Although it lacks the startling biodiversity of the coral reef, the soft coral gardens perform important functions within the ecosystem and offered an opportunity to view a truly unique marine landscape.

From there, it was a short tide to our final snorkel spot for the day: Tuffy Reef (named for a fishing boat that ran aground on the reef many decades ago). Here we were led on a guided snorkel tour through a deep water channel that brings nutrients in from the open water, providing a rich feeding ground for a very wide variety of fish and coral. We were also able to buddy snorkel through the area and witness its stunningly beautiful biodiversity:

We saw so many sights within this reef that it is hard to keep count: a school of four spotted eagle rays, a shipwreck hiding a very large green moray eel, baby sergeant major fish darting within lettuce leaf coral, a southern stingray feeding in the sand. We all found it exhilarating.

We were back on board by 1PM or so and enjoyed a sandwich lunch on the boat:

We returned to the beach around 2:30PM. Everyone had an hour to shower, change, and get ready for some serious schoolwork. First up was the final species ID exam. Throughout the semester, students have been taking species identification exams on the 70 species that they had to memorize by sight. This information is vital for getting the most out of our experience on the reef, and the students were really up to the challenge! In fact, the class maintained a 92% overall average during the semester. That is truly excellent for nonmajors! Their final exam consisted of 60 photos that I had taken on this trip. I posted them to Facebook (you can see them yourselves by navigating to the trip FB page, clicking on Photos, and looking for the "Final Species ID Quiz" folder) and the students had to work collectively to identify them (without using the Internet). The average score on the final was 58/60, so that shows you how effective immersive learning can be!

At the start of the semesters, I challenged students to become members of the 100Club (keeping a 100% average on species ID quizzes). By the end of the final, two students stood out! Their reward: a fancy dinner out on the island (more on that in a bit).

Once that was complete, the students worked to combine their research data into a unified spreadsheet. Expect more details on our final results soon! Every student had to complete the Results section of their lab report by the end of today.

I took the two 100Club members out to dinner at a local fancy restaurant:

Afterward, we all met to go out for ice cream:

Thus fortified, some students returned to TREC, others went souvenir shopping, others headed out to the beach.

Everyone is safe and healthy (minus a few bandaids) and having a wonderful time. The trip is going about as well as could be hoped. Thank you to the New England College Immersion Fund for making this all possible! It is wonderful to be part of such a life-changing program. Each and every student is putting their all into this experience and I am proud of all of them!

Thanks for reading,

Eric J. Simon, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Biology & Health Science, New England College