Carrie Bow Cay Field Station

Green Heron

Jay has been going to Carrie Bow Cay Field Station, run by the Smithsonian, for about 12 years now (13?). He has helped our friend Randi with her PhD research, he works for the Smithsonian on their reef monitoring program (described here with Jay's photo: http://ccre.si.edu/reef_assessment.html), and now he is doing his own PhD research at Carrie Bow. Throughout these years I've always been a bit envious of my tropical biologist husband, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I love temperature marine science and, heck, I even got to dabble in polar marine science while diving under the ice in Antarctica (go here and read blogs around this dates for those stories). But I still really wanted to go with Jay to Carrie Bow and see this island that had become so special to him. So this year, finally, Jay decided he could use some help on the island with his research. We booked our flights and the lab space and we were off. On election day. Noooooo. Flying to Belize to do research on a remote tropical island when your country just let you down by electing a man who is threatened by science and who doesn't understand the scientific method....well....let's just say that this turned out to be a really tough week for both Jay and me. It is hard to motivate to be a scientist when science is going to be undermined by the new administration. We powered through Jay's research thanks to unwavering support and encouragement from our families via email and chats. But there were no other scientists on the island to commiserate with and the station managers (typically older retired couples) didn't want to talk about the election (I have my opinions about why). So my first visit to Carrie Bow wasn't exactly how I imagined it happening.....but I am so glad I was there with Jay so we were together during the disheartening news of the election. And I really did love Carrie Bow - it is a gorgeous research station that is perfectly situated for all kinds of amazing science. Maybe I should study tropical crustaceans? Or snails? Or clams??

Carrie Bow from the dock

Carrie Bow from a wide shallow reef that runs far off the island

We spent our first day setting up a coral torture, I mean thermal tolerance, experiment. Three bins, two experiments, two temperatures, and lots of cute little beakers that held the individual corals in place (not in this photo). I'm not going to get into the real details of what Jay is doing for his research, I'll leave it up to him to chat with folks about that. If you are curious, ask him because it is really interesting work!

Jay does all his work in water so shallow you can stand up, but it helps to have a mask and snorkel. Here he is collecting some coral for the thermal tolerance experiment.

We cut the tips (called nubbins - how cute!) off the coral and used some marine epoxy to fasten the nubbins to these tiny petri dishes. Each coral was assigned a number and experiment and then placed in the appropriate tank.

You can see the one tank with a water heater in it..... looks great right? Well, we ran into problems from the start with this experiment - which luckily wasn't the main reason why we were there. The corals were already stressed in the field before we brought them into these controlled conditions.....but they bleached within a day. Jay wanted to be in control of when they bleached, but they had their own ideas. If your subject is already stressed, it makes it hard to determine what might have created changes in the epigenome of a coral because we were not in control of the stressor that caused the bleaching! Make sense? And we also had issues with other things like problems with controlling water level, wind, etc... So in the end this turned out to be a great pilot experiment that can be better conducted at Shannon Point this summer with anemones instead of coral. The experiment wasn't a waste, however, it was a great learning experiment and Jay still got some data out of it. This is science folks...sometimes experiments work and other times things, like stressed corals, are out of your control and the experiments don't go as planned.

Thankfully Jay had other experiments going on that we were going to finish up during our week-long stay. Last year Jay had taken some coral samples and moved half the colony to the reef right behind Carrie Bow while keeping the other half of the colony at the original collection location (again, all in extremely shallow water). Here is my man driving the boat to one of those sites.

One day when we were feeling especially bad about the election we took a break from science and went out freediving for fun. Found this cool jelly with lots of cute little fishes in the mantle.

Here I am with a Caribbean roughtail stingray

Back to the research.... even though all of Jay's transplanted corals were in super shallow water, the visibility wasn't always great and they could be hard to find after a year of fouling organism growth. Here is an example of the little subsurface buoy tied to a piece of dead coral next to the chunk of coral that was Jay's colony.

  The look of a man who is happy to find his transplanted corals. 

Jay almost always found his corals before I did.... but I found this one (in my hands)

Our trusty boat

Back in the lab each coral had a special photo shoot with the tag (this one is #13) and three rings of color standards. Jay can use photos like these to determine symbiont levels in the coral tissues.

Happy coral collectors in the wet lab

I wasn't kidding when I said you could stand up (which is what I'm doing taking this photo of Jay). This is the reef right behind Carrie Bow where the temperatures are warmer and the transplanted corals may have undergone genetic or epigenetic changes to adjust to the temperature (we don't know yet, that is part of what he is testing right now).

Pretty much the same photo but underwater.... you can see lots of little green blobs, those are actually his corals.

Once you devote some time in your life to a particular creature, you end up loving them wherever you go. That is the case with me and sea cucumbers. I was in love with this turd-shaped sea cucumber immediately. I later learned the common name was.....no shit (pun intended)....the donkey dung sea cucumber. Nuff said. I'm in love.

We spent one night in Dangriga before flying back to America. Through Texas. After the election. This was difficult. But I loved being back in Dangriga....I had traveled around Belize in 2002 by myself and I stopped in Dangriga and Tobacco Cay for a stint. It was fun to be there again, even if we didn't have much time to explore.

Back in Washington we had some much needed time with friends that think like us for Thanksgiving! Ralph and Alana came up to Anacortes and we cooked up a storm! I think our dinner fed all four of us for days.....

Yum! 

And, because we haven't done this for years, we decided to put up a Christmas tree. Who cares that we were gone for most of December? Not me. I've enjoyed having this tree for the two weeks I was around to enjoy it.

Happy holidays everyone!
November photos are here: https://goo.gl/photos/YWL2qoEV5RazPNoc7