Week 1 of fieldwork is done! We spent 5 days on the beautiful island of Grand Turk diving, exploring and making friends with the “wild” donkeys that roam.
The diving we did in Grand Turk was focused on the cruise ship dock which has been recently re-dredged to deepen the channel for larger cruise ships to fit. The destruction is expansive and as conservationists its really upsetting to see direct human damage that isn’t needed. As a researcher of coral rubble, the site was fantastic! Each side of the dock was dredged at a different time so we have a time scale for colonisation of the rubble and that is really interesting for science. I was surprised at how many fish were around. I had expected the site to be completely desolate, but actually we collected a lot of invertebrates and videoed a LOT of fish.
The island loves cacti and donkeys!
Friday morning was spent at the Grand Turk Museum doing some outreach through the kids camp. There were 16 kids there ranging in age from five to 14. We spent the first hour looking at coral rubble and discussing the benefits of coral reefs and brainstorming some of the critters we might find there. Then we moved on and looked at a selection of organisms that we had collected over the previous few days. The kids looked at the specimens in the containers and tried to guess what they were before we looked at them under the microscope. They did really well and most were able to correctly guess the crab and shrimp, but the brittle star had them confused. Many thought it was an octopus - I guess it does have some similarities when the brittle star is folded up in a 1.5 ml centrifuge tube! 😂
Finally, the kids played a little eDNA jigsaw game. The game is aimed at older ‘scientists in training‘ so this group just used the game as a jigsaw puzzle and then created their own animal for a game of Top Trumps (a game that is apparently very British, cause no one had any clue what I was talking about!). Each of their creations needed a name, size, speed and superpower.
Outreach at the Grand Turk Museum. From left: Hunter showing his very impressive jellyfish creature which has the superpower that it can make tornadoes; kids looking at the marine organisms under the microscope; the dog is having the best day ever!
The view from the road outside our hotel. I would 100% go back to Grand Turk tomorrow!