These first two are of these two houses I like that are run down as you go into downtown Rincon from the houses we rent each year. The houses are just so adorable and look like they would be easy to fix up, a little cleaning, paint the concrete some cool colors and they would be really neat little houses.
Here's an octopus that Mike took a picture of for me during one of their dives. If you don't know about my octopus obsession, I will likely explain in a future post. ;)
Mike and Brian and Eric put together a homemade protein skimmer for the larvae which was quite impressive.
During one of their daytime dives, Mike got tons of pics of a little group of squid. Here's just one pic of a few of them by an Acropora palmata colony (the coral we are trying to help).
Here's another pic that Mike took of some spawning palmata. You can see the bundles rising up off the surface. Pretty amazing!
This is another pic Mike took of one of our collection cups with bundles safely inside. The cups are fitted onto nets which fit over the colonies and float above to collect bundles from an individual colony.
A picture of me actually doing science, thanks Mike. I enjoyed the last two years with the SECORE workshop, but was busy helping run the workshop, so didn't get to do much hands on science. I was very happy this year to be able to focus on our cryopreservation research.
Mike being funny about this little pipe stand they had had in the larvae pool. :)
The last night as we were packing up the lab, just to make things a little more interesting, we were inundated with a termite swarm. We have termite swarms in Hawaii, but I've never seen such a large one. They were all over us as we packed the lab and all over us as Mike and Brian and I were packing their larvae. It was an absolute mess. You can see them on the ceiling of the yellow house and then in a pile as Brian had to sweep them off the ceiling and walls and floor multiple times the last night we were there. Quite disgusting really.
I'm not sure when this picture was taken, but this pretty much sums up the end of the trip. We were all very tired.
It was a short trip really, but we got so much accomplished. We had a good group of SECORE folks and cryo folks and I thank all of them for their hard work. We had a great time, but I think everyone was happy to get home to rest, get their larvae going (in the case of Brian, Mike and Eric) and get ready for the next coral spawn (in the case of myself and Mary). In fact, Mary is still traveling and may get off the plane here Thursday and come straight out to Coconut Island for a Montipora spawn. We just don't stop...
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