Day 10- You can't live your whole life behind books about the sea, you must go
out and see the sea in all its beauty....
Another day on
the ocean! Today we went to the Forest and Marine Headquarters on a mangrove
island. Mrs. McRae, a biologist heading
the restoration project, came along for the ride. She was awesome! She was down
to earth real and passionate-exactly what the environmental movement needs more
of. She showed us around the island and how they go about replanting the
mangroves. She used a term called the encasement method. Basically, they were
just taking a mangrove seed and placing it in part of a PCV pipe for protection
and planting it where it was needed. I had no idea that it took over ten years
for one of these mangroves to
mature. Well that really puts into
perspective how important this is…one big storm could come through and wipe
them all out in a matter of seconds. And to start over planting and waiting
another decade hoping another storm doesn’t come in that time is just
horrible!! She was a cool lady that I learned a lot from.
After that is was
on to sea grass. We did a transect in waist deep water and had to count each
bulb of the two different kinds of sea grass. The two types are turtle and
manatee grass. We only did a small portion of counting but I can only imagine
how frustrating it would be to have the job of how much sea grass is on the
ocean floor, the percentage it covers and if its been snacked on or not!! As
you can imagine, things don’t really hold still under water.
For the rest of
the afternoon, the group set out in hopes of catching lobsters on our transects
for measuring and determining he sex of them. Though the lobster count was
really successful, free diving and snorkeling is never a bad time. And on the
way back we got to see a huge group of tarpon that fishermen in FL go nuts
over!
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