Journey to Calatagan

Our next site for seagrass abundance and surveying is in Calatagan, part of the main island of Luzon. The drive was a couple of hours, but we made a few stops.

The first stop was at a fruit stand that was selling...MANGOSTEEN

Many of the lovely fruits in the Philippines

Jackfruit! According to Angela this is the largest fruit in the whole world

Inside the jackfruit! Tasty

 Our next stop was at the top of a volcano- Taal volcano, it has a mini volcano INSIDE the lake at the top of the big volcano 

View of the volcano from the restaurant where we ate

The whole group

Lunch! Lapu-lapu

 After a little while longer we arrive in Calatagan just in time to catch the sunset

 After a few days of surveying Angela takes us up to Faro de Cabo Santiago (the local lighthouse) to watch the sunset

 The lighthouse was closed but the sunset was still pretty spectacular

After watching the sunset everyone is pretty tired

But there is always more work to be done

Angela, Leslie, and Jordan (our last team member) hard at work

The hard work effects some more than others

FIELD WORK: In Calatagan we had a LOT of sites, some much harder than others. For example, one of the sites had upside-down jellies, which look really cool, but they sting.

These are the upside-down jellies...annoying. They filter on the sea floor upside-down

The next site that day had long spine urchins, which shoot their spines at you. Some of the sites are lovely. So here is a little taste of a couple of the things we do in the fields (two of the easier tasks...I'll talk about the other jobs in another blog)

Fin Clips

At each site we collect fin clips from local fishermen to run isotopes 

The entire catch! To bring these guys in the fisherman stands of a raft and slaps the water scarring the fish into a net

One day we got to take out the Peace Core's boat...it was sweet!

Break from work: Off the Peace Core boat we got to snorkel in one of the best coral reefs I have seen

This is an egg cowrie I found (photo courtesy of Cori)

Crown of thorns star- these guys eat reefs

Back to the work we do-

Inverts swim: these pictures are from an inverts swim Ian and I did at our last site in Calatagan

Hairy Pincushion Urchin!

Scary Spined Urchin!

Swimming anemone...careful they sting :( but not as much as the upside down jellies

Nudibranch

It looks nice but it has killer spines

Very exciting find- Tiger Cowrie 

I added the life vest for steez...and to float more

After a week of hard work, Angela treated us to a fun dive in CAP Ocean's artificial reef. These photos are courtesy of Cori (my camera can't go below 33 ft). The artificial reef is stacks of hollow concrete blocks used to encourage coral recruitment. It was kind of like diving in Atlantis.

Me and my dive buddy, Leslie

Underwater pyramids