The Ocean Is Calling and I Must Go!

Hello!

After an escapade across the equator, I couldn't resist getting on the island hopper back to this little gem of land in the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve once again lost track of days and the calendar. Time seems to be a conglomeration of diving, writing about diving and the marine projects, looking at pictures from diving and comparing them to corals and fish in books, surfing, fixing surf boards, Green Banana Paper things, reading, sleeping, playing with the dogs, admiring the ocean, orange sunrises, making coconut and banana smoothies, scouring the island for the Kosraean tangerine, and knowing that if it’s sunny then it will pour soon and visa versa. It’s a wonderful conglomeration of things!

Let me backtrack for a moment. In early February, I went to Australia to visit family who live in the rainforest outside of Cairns. Cairns is in the northeast part of the country and a primary access point for the Great Barrier Reef. Upon arriving in Australia, I was comforted by the familiar big green leaves of banana trees around my family’s property. However, unlike Kosrae, they also have an abundance of mango trees and a chest freezer stocked full of mango. Anyways, my days primarily included playing with cousins and taking in the local scenery. They have a small pond and at night the barramundis eyes shined orange. Additionally, I was delighted to meet up with a friend to explore down unda together. Grace if you’re reading this, I think maybe the lizards, frogs, toads, and birds are wondering where their new best friend went!

One day in Australia I went diving in the Great Barrier Reef. I surprised myself by how intrigued I was to observe similarities and differences between the Great Barrier Reef and the reef in Kosrae. On the boat ride I talked with one of the divemasters (person who leads the dives) and he told me a bit about the scientific work he does on the reef in addition to the tourism. Ideas started percolating…

After a record amount of email exchanges with Maria at the dive shop in Kosrae, gathering specific materials from Cairns for marine projects, and switching plane tickets (again!), I parted ways with the kangaroos and set forth for banana land. (I did stay for the entire time I had planned to in Australia, actually I stayed slightly longer because of infrequent flight schedules to the islands).

I am now interning with the folks who introduced me to Scuba diving. We’re working on a couple different reef conservation projects. There’s currently an outbreak of Crown-of-Thorn Starfish in Kosrae. Their predator, the Triton Snail, is wiped out. However, we did find a live Triton Snail a couple days ago. It was the first live Triton Snail that Maria had seen in approximately seven years. It was definitely the first one I’d ever seen! Very exciting! But still, there is an outbreak of COTS. They feed on corals and an outbreak is extremely harmful to the reef. Before October, we’d see maybe one or two per 50-minute dive, but after October we could see 20-30 per 50-minute dive. Australian’s are experiencing similar problems on the Great Barrier Reef. COTS are eating corals with no sign of slowing down. Scientists developed a collateral damage-free method to kill them. A 20-ml injection of vinegar is enough to unbalance their pH and kills them. There is no harm to surrounding corals or other aquatic life. In fact, as we witnessed during our experiment here, fish congregate around the dead COTS and eat them.

I got the appropriate equipment for this eradication project while I was in Australia. Even though this process has already been proven to work, we still wanted to do an experiment for ourselves on the reef in Kosrae before jumping full swing into eradicating the COTS. We started by bringing ten live COTS to two tanks at an aquaculture site here. We put them in two tanks—in one we injected five with 20-ml of vinegar, and the other tank we left to be the control sample. We monitored them over the next 24 hours, which is the time it takes for the vinegar to unbalance their pH and kill them. It worked. The ones we injected were still on the bottom of the tank, while the healthy ones were climbing up the walls to the surface of the water. We then took our experiment to the ocean. We brought a crab cage and put four COTS in the cage and injected them with vinegar. We used the cage so we could monitor them over the 24-hour period and be sure that they wouldn’t swim somewhere else. One hour later they were clearly weaker, and when we came back after 24 hours they were discolored, disintegrating, and being eaten by fish.

While working underwater our distractions were a school of rainbow runners, a sea turtle, and a feisty triggerfish!

The next step for the Crown-of-Thorn project is to apply for a grant from the Australian Embassy to get more materials to increase the scale of this eradication project. The director of the Kosrae Island Resource Management Authority is going to try to provide additional financial support by applying with this project to tap into the Compact funds (Compact relationship with the USA). For now we will inject COTS every time we go diving with the one gun that we have.

collecting Crown-of-Thorn Starfish to bring to tanks on land

four COTS in the cage

fish food!

The next project we will delve into is documenting corals. Maria has data from ten years ago of the corals that were at a couple sites on the reef around the island. We want to document what is here today. The coral reef has undergone significant bleaching and change in the past ten years as a result of climate change.

Exciting things are happening at Green Banana Paper as well! Matt went to Las Vegas for the ASD Market Week trade show. Not only did he/Green Banana exhibit at a big business trade show for the first time ever, Green Banana Paper won best in show! For some perspective, there were probably seven or eight times more people at the trade show than on the island of Kosrae.

Upon returning to Kosrae, it's the same beautiful little island world. The main difference is that I am primarily focusing my energy towards marine projects and doing background work and projects for Green Banana Paper.

That’s a brief update on my adventures. It’s now a pristine sunny blue-sky day and the ocean is quite calm. James and I tried to surf this morning, but the tide was pretty much as low as it can go. Oops. While he tried to surf in knee deep water, I explored the reef flat (area between the beach and where the reef drops off in the ocean) and the little itty-bitty snails and creatures in the shallow water amongst rocks and seagrass.

Thanks for reading! I'll leave you with a video of a sea turtle.

more photos--

bats in Cairns

colorful airport art enroute to Australia

flight was delayed because the runway lights in Chuuk weren't working. Another story I heard is that people go to the airport at night and shine lasers in the pilots eyes. For whatever reason, the flight was delayed until daylight and we got to fly over clouds that looked like snow.