First Snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef

June 8,2010
Location: Heron Island
Started out this morning with our first snorkel out on the reef. Finally I fulfilled a life dream of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. It was a little odd because the tide was coming out as we were out there so we were barely scraping over the top of the corals. With blues and greens and yellows and reds. The fish were amazing. They were bright and colorful just like how I imagined. Looking out in the distance under the water you can see the schools of fish swimming around and through the corals. Once you swam to them then they hide out of view, but if you were patient they will reappear and go about swimming around. After we finished up our snorkel (actually when the tide got too low that we couldn’t swim over the corals any more we had brekky and a lecture soon following. The lecture was mainly over the types of fish we just saw and will see at our time on Heron Island. We then went on a reef walk. Since it was low tide we could walk through the coral beds and Glen could point out all the different types of corals. It was cool finally learning the scientific names to the wonderful corals. After a hour trek we headed back for lunch. We got started on projects soon after lunch. My project is on gobies. We want to measure the re-emergence times of gobies after they are frightened by a predator. If you don’t know much about gobies I’ll give you a little background info. Gobies have a mutalistic relationship with shrimp. The shrimp excavate a burrow in which both the shrimp and the goby in return is a watchman for any potential predators.
After we decided on a project and came up with a methodology we gained our first data set. The sun was starting to set and we were informed that a group of sea turtle hatchlings were flown in that afternoon and were scheduled to be released on the beach at sun down. We headed over to watch/help the babies find their way safely to the ocean and enjoyed another beautiful sunset.