The Cleaners

Life here in Tela Marine has settled into a routine with only some minor changes day by day. We wake up early in the morning, divers get ready for the first dive of the day and I set up the urchins into their little transport boxes to be brought back to the reef to live happily ever after! Sometimes I go with on the boat, just to steal an extra hour of sleep *insert sly smile*... The waves always make me doze off while waiting for the diving crew to surface again, although, one time the weather did pick up during one of these blissful boat naps and I woke up nearly falling off the bench to the bottom of the boat.. However, as much as these naps are both enjoyable and sometimes needed, I do feel a little left out (and truth be told, a good bit jealous) every time the divers go under, having seen only a fraction of the mysteries of the marine world through snorkelling.... So maybe now would be a good time to explain why I am not diving. One word: horses. Approximately 8 years ago I was unloading one of my two horses off the lorry at a horse show, while my other mare was being held beside the truck by someone else. As I was leading her down the ramp, she took a side step behind me and attempted to jump over me. I fell to the ground, and found myself on my knees between the two mares. Unfortunately I wasn’t on the head end of either of them.... While each of them tried to kick the other (at least this is what I keep telling myself, I like to think it was nothing personal!), one of the kicks landed on my forehead, and the other on my side, resulting in a “yea we can see your skull”- kind of gash in my hairline and broken ribs. I remember someone grabbed my head pulling me on my back to the ground, and my trainer, while holding up 2 fingers, was asking me “how many fingers can you see??” (and I answered “two...but you have 3 eyes...”). In the hospital they found I had also punctured my lung which meant they had to put in a chest tube to remove the blood that was leaking into my lungs. THIS is the reason I cannot dive (which I found out this February). The chest tube would have resulted in some scar tissue (how extensive I do not know, but this is quite irrelevant) which is not as flexible as normal lung tissue. During the ascent from a dive the air in the lungs would expand, causing the lung tissues to stretch. If the tissue is not flexible, it can cause the lung to literally pop. While controlled conditions would allow me to dive, the oceans are anything but controlled. A wave lifting me 2 meters in the water column could have serious consequences if I did not expel the compressed air during the lift. And the chances of noticing that when in between the surface and the bottom are pretty small... especially for a rookie. So I came to terms with not diving. J

The cleaner shrimp giving this white grunt a
dental examination. Can you see it? 

At the moment, the first boats are scheduled at 6 am, due to a “cleaning station” project which needs 

to be at the reef early to catch the best action. At this point it would be a good idea to google the car wash scene from the movie Shark Tale. Or think about the shrimp in Finding Nemo (because everyone has seen that one right?). It’s exactly like that. Basically what this project is about is going down to the reef, setting up some cameras to record anemones, mostly corkscrew anemones, which are often homes to the Pederson Cleaner Shrimp. These little critters are extremely cool looking in their transparent bodies with bright blue lines, and they, like the name suggests, are specialized in cleaning! So why are the anemones called cleaning stations, then? Because that is what they are! Fish come along, literally park themselves on top of the anemone and up comes the shrimp to clean the fish. Sometimes big grouper fish even open their mouths and the shrimp will go in and give them a good dental examination! They truly are multitalented daredevils... The cleaning stations are an integral part of coral reefs, as they provide the fish a way for getting rid of parasites, and thus help keep the reefs healthier. There are three researchers with slightly different viewing points for the data gathered from the cameras. One is looking at how diving intensity might affect visitation frequency by comparing a high intensity dive site on Utila (also here in Honduras) and a low intensity dive site here in Tela, the Banco Capiro reef. Another is trying to see if “cheating” – that is, “cleaning” off healthy tissue instead of parasites - occurs more often when there is simultaneous cleaning by the shrimp and a small fish known as the goby. The third is attempting to figure out how turbidity of the water affects visitation frequency on the anemones, based on the ideas that if the water is very turbid, perhaps the fish don’t find the stations that easy, but on the other hand more turbid water might mean more parasites in the water and hence more frequent need for cleaning... I find myself not only immersed in my own study, but also peeking over the shoulders of everyone else to see what they are doing!

Our urchin project is well underway, we are powering through six trials each evening after dinner, because we have to conduct them in the dark to be able to create a similar shadow every day. Keeping things constant in this camp! Each day Max and Andrew (so just to remind, Max is our supervisor and Andrew is the other dissertation student working on urchins) go and collect us some new bits of natural reef rubble, avoiding taking any coral of course, because we figured out that keeping the rubble for more than a day would make the lab stink as if the Skunk Hunger Games took place there... In an attempt to keep our artificial reef material as free of life as possible, I have also washed our breeze blocks, by hand, scrubbing a huge bucket full of broken up blocks and two intact ones with a hard brush and fresh water. Adding to this the daily sweep of the floors in the lab while dripping water after carrying the water canisters and its starting to look a lot like live-action Cinderella here! Just without the evil ;)

Hauling water.

I also managed to destroy my phone (at least until further notice). You know how I mentioned we need to carry a lot of water each day to the lab from the shore? Well, I really wanted to carry some today as I didn’t get to do any of that yesterday as I went to the mangroves – I’ll tell you more once I’ve been to Miami (not THAT Miami...) – so once I saw other people beginning to carry canisters I joined with such enthusiasm that I forgot my phone was in my shorts pocket. I was filling up my second canister, which means I filled up one canister, walked up to the lab, back to the beach and was half way through the second canister, when I finally realised I never emptied my pockets.... True to the cause, though, I finished filling the canister, shuffled it back to the lab area and ran to the restaurant. “Please, do you have a bucket of rice?? Rice, please, yes” – a perfectly sensible sentence coming out of someone who is frantically trying to pull a phone apart. I got a bag of rice, stuffed everything in it, then realised I should probably rinse the seawater off... out again, piece by piece, under the tap, and back to the bag. And there it is still... I tried to plug it in to charge after a few hours and all I got was one sad, blinking blue light. Back to the bag it went and now I am just hoping for a miracle. This all means I am currently without a camera of my own, unless I want to be that tourist that takes photos on their iPad... Like the one below. 

The walk to the Beach Club is long and treacherous. Jokin'! 

Setbacks and Science

The long spined black sea urchin, Diadema antillarum.

It’s finally time to get around to the reason I am here in Honduras; the research. The research I will be doing is the biggest part of the research project I have to do in 4^th year in UCD in order to get my degree in Zoology. My working title is “The effects of extreme temperature on predator avoidance response of Diadema antillarum: possible roles for reef material and complexity”. It is a mouthful I know! The aim is to test if and how the response to a simulated predator changes in the sea urchins of the species Diadema antillarum. I will get back to how we actually are doing this in a minute, but first let me just explain why these urchins are so important. D. antillarum is a key grazer on Caribbean coral reefs as it removes algae from rocks and rubble to make space for coral larvae to settle on. Coral can be pretty picky on where it settles so paving the way for them is one of the most important functions of D. antillarum. This grazing activity also stops the macroalgae from growing too large and causing the suffocation of already growing corals. I like to think of these sea urchins as the Cows of the Caribbean! Sure, there are other species of both urchins and fish that graze on algae, but by far the most biomass of algae is removed by D. antillarum. That is, when they’re there... In the early 1980’s the D. antillarum populations across the Caribbean underwent a mass mortality event, where some populations were reduced up to 99%. It is widely believed that a species specific, waterborne pathogen was the culprit that sent its evil spawn around the Caribbean on ocean currents and ballast water of ships to make sure the overall mortality of the long spined sea urchin reached ca. 98%. There were some potential suspects, but the true identity of the pathogen was never confirmed. And presently, the populations of D. antillarum are struggling to get back to pre-mass mortality numbers. There are many proposed reasons to why the populations are not bouncing back as expected, including hypotheses suggesting the populations crashed to such low numbers that the way these urchins reproduce is no longer effective. We are focusing on another view, whereby the spawning is successful, but for some reason or another, the juveniles have high mortality rates. 

A view from above with a few individuals of D. antillarum

So back to the project then! We began our project by wanting to do a little pilot study to determine whether or not we should acclimatise our urchins in the new higher temperatures for 6h before trials, or keep them in ambient temperature until doing the testing. We are fortunate that we have the new lab I mentioned in my last post, but I was a little hasty in saying that it was truly functional... We got the seawater hose working and in our excitement we went and collected 10 sea urchins for our pilot study with the aim of acclimatising 5 in elevated temperature and keeping 5 in the ambient water temperature. We filled out the tanks and put in heaters and filters in advance so that the tanks would be ready by the time we brought in the urchins. Me and Max were jumping around like excited little girls, high fiving as we put the urchins in their tanks and went off to have lunch, satisfied with our set up. Fast forward a couple of hours and it all started to go downhill... The urchins we set up in the heated tank had gone from creepy crawlies wiggling their spines to lethargic limpets barely reacting to touch. We thought this had to be the heat, so we moved them to a tank of ambient water and were happy to see them perk up a little. However, despite changing the urchins to non-heated tanks their activity seemed to be going down by the hour. We had no way of bringing them back to the reef that late at night, meaning they would just have to wait until the first boat going out in the morning. Unfortunately, when we got to the lab the next day, we were greeted with a smell of death... All 10 of our urchins had kicked the bucket, as well as one of the lionfish that was in one of the other tanks for another project. Even the urchins that were never heated were dead! Even though we were devastated, these urchins thankfully did not die in vain; there is a girl coming to do genetics studies on these urchins and now she doesn’t have to battle her conscience in order to kill them – we accidentally did it for her.

Natural reef material with low complexity.

The fact that we lost so many urchins in the first place puzzled Max most of all as he has never in previous years had a fatality. The urchins are pretty hardy critters, so the only explanation we came to was that there had to be something in the water. Therefore we set out to do another test, this time to see if the water was to blame. We got one urchin for water from the reef (brought with a jerry canister), one for water carried from the beach, and one unfortunate individual for water from the hose. We monitored the urchins pretty much on an hourly basis, and sure enough after a few hours the urchin in the hose water, which at this point was already called Antal’s toxic water, was deteriorating. To try and avoid any more fatalities we decided the urchin was not doing well enough 

Natural reef material with high complexity: LEGO.

and moved it to a tank with “good water”, hoping it would make the night to be brought back to the reef in the morning. This time they made it. All three were brought back to the reef and we had another answer: we could use the water from the beach which was good news, in a way. It just means that we will be really fit by the end of this project as each canister is about 25 litres, and we need a minimum of 17 canisters per day... that means hauling approximately 425 kg of water each day we do trials, which will probably be 6 days a week.......... Just the thought of it makes me tired! At this point we needed to test again for the acclimatisation. We did it with just 3 urchins per temperature this time, and with water collected from the shore. We stopped the acclimatisation half way through as the heated urchins started to deteriorate and decided acclimatising them to the medium and extreme temperatures would not be feasible as they would most likely die as a result. While the Banco Capiro reef system where these urchins were from hosts one of the highest post-mass mortality population densities in deep water, we couldn’t afford killing any more of them!

On a happier note - moving away from the mass mortality event of 2016 - we have now finally got up and running with the actual trials! On top of testing the effects of water temperature on the predator avoidance response (PAR) of the urchins, we have some reef material in the tanks, both artificial in the form of breeze blocks, and natural rubble from the reef itself. We are also trying to determine if the complexity of the reef system has anything to do with the extent of PAR in the urchins, so we will have trials with low complexity and high complexity for both reef materials. This means that for high complexity we will provide the urchins with a hiding hole; easily achieved with a breeze block, more like playing with Lego’s for the natural reef

Trial in progress with high complexity artificial reef.

material. We also managed to combine my design with the one from Andrew, another dissertation student coming in tomorrow. He is testing for differences in PAR between having no complexity (so no reef material in the tanks) and having any kind of complexity, in the different temperatures. This added another 3 “treatments” to the design - that is combinations of the different factors we are testing for - giving us a total of 15 different combinations to test! Fun times ahead hehe.. We measure the PAR as a percentage of long spines “wiggled” in response to a simulated predator presence. Our “predator” is a big flat scary board that casts a shadow on the whole tank when placed on top. These sea urchins have very primitive sensory systems, but have evolved to be something that can only be described as one big spiny eyeball. While their “eyesight” is nothing like ours, their entire body is able to detect changes in light intensity, and as bottom dwellers, anything casting a shadow is a potential predator. Wiggling their long spines (some up to 30cm long with toxins!) is a way of shoo’ing away anything that might want to take a bite! These wiggles are initiated by the shadow, as each spine is moved by muscles which contract when the light intensity decreases. So far we have done 9 trials, and I am to set up the lab and have it ready for some more for Wednesday evening. Max has gone off to welcome new volunteers in the city of San Pedro Sula and will be back late Wednesday evening. However, the plan is to continue the trials, with or without Max here, so Andrew, you’re in for some hard science on arrival!! 

Me and Manny

Helen and Max

But it is not all just hard work! We managed to sneak out for a kayak around the mangrove lagoon behind our house. After double-, triple- and quadruple checking there were no croc's in this particular lagoon (at least no one's ever seen one...) I really enjoyed the physical effort of kayaking. Seeing the crabs scurrying up the mangrove roots was weird and the smell of the anoxic water was atrocious, but the experience was a new one. Again. 

The lagoon behind our house... 

Settling in and snorkeling!

It’s early Friday morning and we have been on site now for nearly two days. Tela is amazing!! I don’t want to brag but this is like a holiday resort! We have two pools; one at the house and one at the beach club. The beach club is like the action base, with a dive shack and the lab and wifi connection, while at the house we just have lectures in the evenings for the first week. I must admit that in the weeks and months preceding this expedition I didn’t dare to imagine a lab as new and shiny and FUNCTIONAL as the one we have here; it is by the sea so our seawater is pumped in and conveniently comes through a hose inside the lab, we have more than enough plugs for electronic devices like heaters and filters and the like, and perhaps most importantly, there is air conditioning! Because believe me, it is hot in here....

Let me introduce you to Trebol, my home for the next few weeks.

The day we arrived to Tela was a very still day, the wind was only but a little breeze and the sun was out. We brought our belongings to the house (which I could seriously live in on a long term basis, it is so nice!) and made our way the 10 minute walk to the beach club for lunch. There, sitting by the pool eating we were introduced to most of the staff we’ll be working with. My field supervisor, Max, is a nice guy with a sarcastic sense of humour, so I think we’ll be getting along juuuust fine ;). After lunch we went back to the house to get a welcome talk and go through some health and safety rules. We then walked back to the beach club (a lot of going back and forth in the 36 degrees!) to go and set up cork mats under our tanks in the lab, so cushion them against the hard table tops (which I might add are amazingly shiny!) and once that was done it was time to head to the beach and play volley ball!!! First I thought I would die in the heat, but it was already nearly 5pm and the sun was on its way down so it wasn’t THAT hot anymore, only about 32 degrees...... I picked the wrong side of the net too and more than once just put out my hands hoping the ball is coming directly from where the sun was, as I couldn’t see a thing. A couple times this actually worked! :D Sweating and laughing, I was ready to hit the sea at 18.15 to cool off before dinner. Running to the water I was expecting a cold rush that I always associated with sea water. And if not cold, then at least a cooling feeling. None of that here! The water was pretty much the same temperature as the air, at that point ca. 30 degrees!! Floating in the water we watched as the sky turned bright red with the sunset, and for a moment everyone was just quietly appreciating the beauty of the scene... What a way to end the first day.

On our second day me and Helen (who is the other dissertation student from UCD on this site in case I haven’t mentioned her before) got to go snorkelling in Punto Sal, the western point of the Tela bay. As neither of is able to dive (medical reasons, let’s just say that for now) we were brought first to this beautiful forest trail that lead through an army of mosquitoes the most beautiful pirates cove.. Hidden away, the soft waves gently hitting the beach and the birds singing in the forest behind made me feel like I’m in a movie, just after discovering a hidden bay where the treasure ship is lying somewhere beneath the sea surface. Because I didn’t particularly want to wash off the bug spray that kept me from being eaten alive on the way to the cove, I stayed walking on the beach while Helen and Max went for a swim to cool off. I was surprisingly fine with the heat, just wondering around listening to the sounds around me. Once the two had had enough of soaking in the hot water, we made our way back to the boat which would take us to our snorkelling site.

A secret pirated cove. I would hide away here no problem!

We began snorkelling from the beach toward shallow reefs approximately 50m from the shore. We began seeing some elkhorn corals which are actually very rare (Acropora palmata). They are a coral that grows its branches as these big plates, under which many fish and other critters can find shelter. We saw many a parrotfish, a couple of wrasses and other fishes (I am still to do a fish ID course, the next description will have much more detailed information :P ), but there were two things we saw that really blew my mind. First, Max pointed us to peek under a ledge of coral and try to see a lobster. I thought “OK, a lobster, so just a big crayfish, got it”. It took me a couple of dives to see it and when I did I involuntarily let out a surprised “oh!”. Not such a good idea underwater with a snorkel in your mouth.... up to the surface I scrambled spitting sea water from my mouth trying to catch my breath, but that didn’t bother me long as I wanted to see it again. The lobster was the size of MATS (that’s my dog for those of you who don’t know)!!! Absolutely huge.... Like some sort of pre-historic remnant... 

Our happy skipper Hernan :) 

But enough with the lobster, what we found next was something I never thought I would be comfortable sharing same water space with: a shark. Granted, it was “just” a nurse shark, but you know how sharks all tend to look really similar? Yeah, it was still a shark. And I voluntarily dove right beside it multiple times, at awe with both the animal itself and the fact that I was so at ease with it! It was hiding under some of the elkhorn coral and we could dive right next to it both behind and near its head. It was just staying there, not minding us really. Unfortunately, as my GoPro was not ready for the trip and so I have no underwater filming device... But I swear, I swam with a shark!

A small fishing village on the coast of Tela Bay with ca. 200 inhabitants

Another funny moment from this snorkel was when we went to move across the little bay to go and see some old submerged cannons, probably from pirate ships. In the deeper water where we could barely see the bottom, we were suddenly surrounded by moon jellyfish! If you’ve ever seen finding Nemo, you’ll know what I mean when I say it was like directly out of that.... Straight! Left! Right! More right! Left! Straight and FAST! Ok, ok, the moon jellyfish very rarely cause a sting because their tentacles are so short but having to swim directly through a swarm of them, not so assuring! Luckily none of us got stung and we made it through to the other side, and got to see these age old cannons covered in sealife. Our boats captain reckons they have been there for over 300 years! After nearly 2 hours of snorkelling we got back to shore (this time a different route to avoid the jellies...) and loaded onto the boat to go back to the beach club. On the say we stayed close to shore and passed by a small fishing village and only 5 minutes later the only 5 star resort in Honduras.

The only 5-star resort in all of Honduras.

This ended up being a lot longer post than I intended, but if you made it this far, thank you for reading! Next post will likely describe the beginning of a small pilot study that will help us determine some of the logistics for my study. The first urchins are in the tanks, and we are nearly ready to roll! 

And so it begins...

It's 3.30 am and I'm sitting on the couch of a hotel room in an airport hotel in Houston, Texas. Unable to sleep, I figured it was a good time to reflect on what had actually brought me here. 

It all started around October 2015, when an organisation known as Operation Wallacea came to visit UCD in the hopes of recruiting some eager environmental biologists and zoologists for their research projects all over the globe. I went to the talk, and boy this woman could talk.... She made me want to book myself onto the next outward flight to any remote location available with just a backpack and no contact to the outside world, armed with a notebook and a pencil. Saving the elephants in South Africa, surveying the effects of tourists on sea turtles in Mexico, looking out for lemurs in Madagascar... The last project I was interested in was the sea urchins in Honduras. A little spiny invertebrate living off algae on coral reefs, big deal, who cares, give me the good stuff, the big mammals and the exciting hikes in the jungle! Over the next couple of months this changed, though.. 

I have acquired an interest in genetics during my years in college, and once I read through the project topics offered I found that they only had one genetics lab throughout all their projects, and it was in Honduras. Well, OK, Honduras, I could do that. The lab was in the jungle though and the project in itself did not look very appealing (insect bar coding, really?), so in the brainfart that followed I found the sea urchin projects. The black, long spined sea urchins in the Caribbean underwent a mass mortality event in the 80's and no one has really figured out why. Unfortunately, these little critters are the cows of the corals reefs, keeping fast growing algae at bay to allow for the slower growing corals to settle and grow. My awesomely ambitious idea was to go there and figure out the reasons for this mass mortality by using genetics! But upon contact with the project's leading researchers, it turned out that genetic research into these urchins is only beginning this summer 2016 and that this would be a way too ambitious undertaking for and undergraduate thesis.... Bummer. But I was in. 

The Case of the Sea Urchin took me by storm, and by February 2016 I found myself writing a research proposal to test for the effects of increasing temperature, different levels of reef complexity and types of reef material on the predator avoidance response of the black long spined sea urchin (phew that was a mouthful!). Basically I will be looking at the movement of the longest spines on the urchins in response to a shadow simulating the presence of a predator, and how this might change in the different scenarios and combinations of the aforementioned factors. The first draft of the proposal was so bad my supervisor basically just sent me an email saying "There's some work to be done yet...." and a word document with his comments, which was - if you've ever seen a track record doc you'll know - bright red. Nothing was good, my statements needed some serious backing up and all in all I wasn't really sure I had anything solid in there after reading the comments. That put me off for a good few days after which I spent one weekend furiously (literally) looking up references and rewriting the entire document. This time, comments were even a little surprised at the advances made and by the end of April we had a solid, final proposal done! While all this was going on I was also doing some fundraising by organising a lip-sync battle with a few other students going away and by starting up a GoFundMe page, which both proved to be very successful and without which I probably wouldn't be where I am now!

The journey to get here, to get excited about sea urchins of all things and to realise that I might actually really like to do marine biology in the future (although I cannot dive, but more on that in later posts ;) ) has been long and at times frustrating, and the one thing I am still truly at awe is all of You out there who helped me get here! Your support, both monetary and mental, has been motivating me through this semesters studying as much as it has pushed me to want to do really well on this project. You have helped me to do something I never thought I'd do, and most importantly you have helped me find a new path, a new adventure, a new view of the future. And for that I salute you.