Working, Studying, and Coral Spawning...oh my!

So this was honestly the busiest week I have ever had.  Whenever I managed to finish one assignment, there was always another one to fill its spot.  I will have to break down this week down day by day so that I don't leave anything out.

Sunday
Our Independent Research Project was due at midnight.  So of course, we spent the morning on Saturday at Lac Bay trying to prepare for doing our projects.  On Sunday, all of us were up and working on our proposals, but Maria, our teach for Tropical Marine Conservation Biology and one of our research advisors, decided to take us to hear and meet Ned Deloach.  He is one of the co-authors of THE marine identification book that is used by scientists and anyone else who is interested in the subject.  He also co-founded REEF.  If you guys would like to Google it, it's really hard for me to explain.  This talk went from 6:45-9:30pm.  Luckily, I had done a lot of work and was in a pretty good place at this point in the writing process, but a lot of people were not close to done.  We were all dying to get back to finish our proposals and Maria was taking her sweet time getting us back to the house despite the fact that she knows we have the proposal due, and not just that, but also reading for her class, which of course she quizzed us on in the morning.

Monday
Apart from the quiz, a good thing that happened was Sarah, one of the interns, taught the lecture in the morning.  Without her teaching, I'm not sure that I would have made it through the lecture.  We were all truly exhausted at the start of the week.  We learned more about pollution.  Another assignment that we did in class was getting into groups of four and summarizing an article.  They gave us a series of questions that we had to answer.  The frustrating thing was that they only gave us 20 minutes to read it and then talk about who was going to talk about what in our group.  These weren't short articles either.  They ended up giving us more time, because the assignment was impossible to complete in the time alloted.  In the afternoon, a guest speaker came in to talk about an on-going monitoring program that is currently going on Bonaire.  We then went on a dive to look at the monitoring system that is on the reef. It had been raining a lot that day so the visibility was terrible compared to what is normal for Bonaire.  We also learned how to take water samples.  I discovered that I am terrible at staying in the same place in the water without a good reference point.  We had split into three groups for the dive and I ended up in the group at the highest depth, so I got to play in the bubbles of the ten people below me which I thought was really fun.  After the dive, we went back to the house to dry off, but had to go back the lab to learn how to test water samples.  The night was spent preparing for class the next morning by doing the reading.

Tuesday
For class we went to catch plankton.  We all went on a boat, got into groups of four, and did four different stations.  The four stations were vertical plankton tow, GPS and water testing, point sampling (the device broke so my group didn't get to do this), and Sechhi disk (which tests for visibility).  We did this near shore and further away from shore.  We had time to go snorkel on Klein Bonaire for about ten minutes.  We then went back to shore to dry off and get to the classroom to do a plankton lecture.  After lunch, we went to the lab to look at the plankton we had captured.  This doesn't sound like too crazy day, but let me just tell you all the assignments that were due this week.
1) Service Project Proposal for Thursday (in groups of four)
2) Reflection Paper from out trip to Mangazina de Rei for Friday
3) Plankton Lab write-up for Thursday
4) Reading for Coral Reef Ecology on Thursday
5) Reading "The Story of Papiamentu" p. 1-55
6) Summary of the Papiamentu Reading
7) Be prepared to give a presentation to the class about how one of these cultures: Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, or African influenced Papiamentu, but you don't know which so prepare for all of them
8) Studying for Papiamentu class Thursday night
9) Graphs of Beach clean-up data due Sunday
I even feel as though I'm possibly missing some assignments.  So I was working on all of these assignments in addition to all of the class time that we were putting in.

Wednesday
We went to Lac Bay to start working on the research project.  I spent the vast majority of the day building cages for my experiment.  I fortunately had at least one person working with me to get it done, but I still haven't finished making the cages so I have to work on those over Regatta Break so that I'm ready to set the cages out the next time we go to Lac Bay.  I also have to make a stand so that I take the same picture every time I go for my project and drill holes into tiles for my project as well.  So much for Regatta break being relaxing.  The really awesome thing that we did Wednesday was our night dive in tandem with a coral spawning dive.  My dive buddy was Beth, as usual.  I trust her a lot so it was comfortable.  I got to see two coral spawn, meaning releasing their egg/sperm packets.  It was really cool to see.  We also got to see a lot of bioluminescence and brittle stars.  The eels are also active at night to there were more of them swimming around.  The corals are also more vulnerable at night because they let their polyps come out so I had to be extra careful about not accidentally touching one.  It as fun to see the reef that we have swam in countless time transform into an entirely new place.  This dive marks my completion of the requirements to become an advanced diver.  YAY!  This dive ended up adding another assignment to the list above which was two paragraphs: one scientific about what we saw where and one about what we thought.  This wasn't a bad assignment, but it felt like some of these assignments were there for the purpose of busy work which was frustrating.

Thursday
We were supposed to go to Lac Bay in the morning, but Caren took pity on us and cancelled that trip so we didn't have class until two which gave me time to work on all of the homework we had.  We learned about oceans, currents, climate change, and REEF Fish ID.  It was a fairly relaxed class compared to what we had been doing during the week so far.  Because we saw very few coral spawn, some of us decided to do another night dive to try to see more.  I saw some sperm get released, but no egg packets.  I got to see a lettuce leaf slug, a peacock flounder (which Beth pet), a spotted lobster, and lots of creatures that I already mentioned above.  I had busted my butt working on assignments non-stop all week.  I worked, went to bed, got up, and continued to work.  It was a lot of fun to do.  I'm glad that did it.

Friday
We were supposed to have class at 11, but it was cancelled due to the fact the discussion that was planned regarding how the various cultures influenced Papiamentu, did not correspond with the reading. We did, however, go do a walk in Rincon for the class.  I got chewed up by mosquitoes and have to reflection paper for it.  I was just so exhausted at this point that I didn't particularly enjoy it.  Because of this week, I have developed a head cold.  I have been fighting it since Thursday after the night dive.  I don't like being sick, especially during a time where there is so much going on.  That's what I have for now.  I'll upload pictures later.