Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Chasing turtles

At the university today, a sea lion decided to set up camp outside of the front door.  Presumably to escape the heat by hiding under the balcony on the 2nd floor, he was sprawled out on the tiles, completely unconcerned with us humans milling about.  Being a sea lion, that wasn’t terribly surprising!  As far as I know, he’s still there in all his smelly glory.

 Yesterday for class we went to Playa Corola, a 15 minute walk from the university, to work on group projects.  My group’s project was to study the feeding behavior of sea turtles in the little bay that makes up the playa.  The turtles there munch on algae growing on and between the rocks, but we didn’t know what kind of algae, so we set up the experiment to figure out.  Here there are too many, very similar algae species to easily identify, so for simplicity’s sake, they’re divided into a couple major groups- green, brown filament, red leafy, and brown leafy.  The plan was to bbreak into groups of 3 and swim through the harbor of playa Corola until we found a turtle, then swim with it as it ate, recording how many bites it took of each kind of algae to get some idea of its feeding habits.  Unfortunately, the turtles we found weren’t the most cooperative, and after we finally found one, it decided it would rather pass it’s time swimming than feeding, and we chased it around for the lagoon for a while.  We didn’t get to close- we stayed far enough away that at times we could barely see it through the sediment kicked up by the rough water- but our presence still may have affected its behavior.  Eventually, we gave up on that one, and found a second turtle, but this one behaved the same as the first, idly swimming until he headed out and we lost it in the bubbles generated by the bubbles at the end of the harbor.  The water was rougher than it has been- there were plenty of surfers further out, and inside the bay pretty big waves were coming in, making it hard to have exact control over where I went while I was swimming, even with fins on.  But despite the lack of our desired turtles, I was still able to see a lot of fish, and enjoy and afternoon in the water! 

While we were in the water, we used slates that we used in class.  Being that paper doesn’t tend to do so well underwater, the slates were our way of taking notes while working on our projects.  The slate itself was a quarter of a cylinder of PVC pipe, with the surface roughed up with sandpaper so a pencil would leave a mark.  Thanks to holes drilled in the corners of the slate, I was able to attach elastic bands to hold the apparatus to my arm.  Finally, the pencil stub got tied to the slate so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it in the waves.

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