I haven’t been in the water much during the 15 days that I’ve been here. Pathetic, I know, since it’s a tropical island surrounded by water. Today, though, I did. I went kayaking for a few hours with Will Hobbs (the club naturalist). It was so much fun! To begin, we prepared the kayaks and dragged them into the water. Then, we put the pedals in (Ambergris Cay has the type of kayaks that can can be propelled both by paddle and pedal) and began to go. At first it was nice but not very exciting, and then, things began to get interesting. First, Will saw a rock in the water, which turned out to be a conch. The inside of it was a perfect shade of pink (very pretty). Then, right after I got back in the kayak, Will saw a shape in the water which, when it got closer, was a four-foot-long shark. Oh, wow. That was comforting, right after I’d been swimming around near it. Later I found out that it was a harmless nurse shark (that burst my bubble a bit… I’d been planning to talk about how I was almost eaten alive). Then we found a few more conch (actually pronounced conk) and it was time to turn around and head back. I was excited when Will said that we could take the conch back to the cafeteria to clean, cook, and eat for dinner. I hope they’re good!
I choose salt. That’s because one of the things that I did today was collect real sea salt (not off supermarket shelves). Yesterday, Lindsay Mensen (the administrative assistant at TCSC) kindly offered to take me sea salt collecting. I (of course) said yes, and so the next day off we went at about noon. We drove down to the northeastern tip of the island, where we set about searching for the sea salt. Lots of it was too dry, and lots else too wet, but in the end we found a couple of suitable patches. Sea salt usually occurs naturally in larger granules (about a millimeter), so we had to be careful when we pried parts of it up so that we didn’t accidentally loosen bits of dirt. After about 15 minutes, we had about three or four tablespoons worth of salt. Unfortunately, some of the patches we had to avoid were patches containing crabs and snails that had by mistake gone into the pools and been quickly killed by the crazily high salinity levels in the individual pool. Some of them, in fact, were so full of salt that the little bit of hot, sun-baked water surrounding it was almost syrupy and slimy to the touch. By the time we left, I was already thinking of how much food I could use my collected salt on.
Seriously, he wasn’t. It really is survival of the fittest out there. A couple of days ago I wittnessed that in person. I was in the ELC when Will Hobbs, the naturalist, said that we were going to feed the two rainbow boas. Before that, though, he said that we had to go hunting. “For what?” I asked. He said that we were going to go hunting for Curly-tail lizards, which is what the boas were going to eat. We would not be killing them ourselves, just catching them to put in the feeding tank with the boa. After a few tries and some extra-annoying lizards that refused to be caught, we were on our way back to the ELC. By the way, if you ever make your way down to Turks and Caicos, don’t try to catch Curly-tails with your bare hands, because if you do, they will try to make away with a substantial bit of your finger. So, moving on, we were at the ELC, and as I held open the lid of the feeding tank Will dropped the two animals in. I won’t bother you with the boring seven or so minutes of the boa striking and missing, so I’ll get right to the action. The boa caught the lizard and wrapped him up tightly in its coils. Then it ate him by swallowing him whole. Below you can see the video; I promise that it is not in the least bit bloody or gruesome but in fact relatively clean and tidy.
“Why?” was my question more than anything today as I spent three hours picking up trash off of Ambergris Cay’s beaches and Tarpon Point (see Tarpon Point blog for more details). Early this morning I was handed a bag and told to pick up every even slightly non-natural thing on the beach. I quickly drove to the beach, assuming that it would be a quick and easy job. Oh, how very, incredibly, extremely wrong I was. Under every little piece of seaweed, it seemed, a bottle or some other little plastic thing lay waiting to be picked up. Various thoughts were swirling around my head, with most along the lines of: ” How do that many peoples’ flipflops get into the sea?” Tarpon Point was even worse. There was a full size raft, ripped to pieces, so many bottles there was no point in counting, and a huge green fishing net. Oh, and I forgot to say one thing. Actually, most of the litter on the shore was the result of people dumping things off of ships, not people on the island. (This is the only blog I’ll ever get a little preachy in, I promise; it’s just that picking up 3 hours worth of gross trash can make a person want to try and save themself more work) I will leave you with this plea: next time you see a bottle on the sidewalk, or anything like that, please pick it up, because by doing that you can save someone else from having to pick it up instead (and you’ll just know that you did the right thing).
I thought that just for fun I could share a bit of what I know about the history (including some general background information) of Turks and Caicos. I’ll start with Ambergris Cay. It was named for deposits of ambergris, or a substance that migrating humpback whales secrete, on the shore. It’s also about four miles long and one mile wide. In the late 1700’s/early1800’s, settlers, most likely from another country, came on boats and settled on Ambergris Cay. They raised cows (we know this because bones have been found), made beautiful pottery, and built hoses, stables, and watering holes. Now I’m going to move on to other parts of the Islands. Early on, a group called the Taino Indians inhabited various islands. They made holes in conch shells to extract the foot of the conch. Another hundred-year-old artifact is a coin found on Grand Turk in 1980. It was later discovered that the coin was a Spanish coin minted at least four hundred and fifty years ago (wow!). There’s actually a lot more history than that, but the little I gave should suffice to show that the TCI’s history is a very rich and interesting one.
Some Sources: http://www.tcimall.tc/ambergriscay/index.htm
Keegan, Bill and Betsy Carlson. “When Conch Was Queen” Times of the Islands Spring (2009): 23-26
Kieth, Dr. Donald. “The “Spillar Coin” Returns” Times of the Islands Spring (2009): 82-83
Well, it’s not really called the Dreamland Hotel, but it is a dreamland. In reality, it’s called the West Bay Club, and is one of the nicest and most hospitable hotels I’ve ever been to. This weekend, my family and I decided to spend a night in Providenciales before my mother and sister returned to Charleston. We chose to stay at the West Bay Club on Grace Bay. When we got there, we were shown to our rooms, which were extremely beautiful. Following this, we went to the beach. It was a nice beach, but the coolest things by far were the sea-doos. The sea-doos are smallish motorized contraptions that pulled you around in the water while snorkeling. My sister and I had a blast on the those things for an hour, then spent the next hour or so burying my sister and having her try to get out (with various results). Now for dinner. It was a casual yet elegant affair at the hotel’s Atlantic Bar and Grill. The dinner was great but the best part was dessert, which was banana fosters with ice cream (banana fosters is basically barbequed banana, but better). By the time my mother and little sister left and my dad and I were on our way back to Ambergris, I had had one of the most fun experiences of my entire time here.
He didn’t really. That’s just a mneumonic device I learned in science class to help me remember the different names for the classifications of organisms, which are: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Today I was assigned to write up descriptions of the various organisms living the tank of the ELC. That involved a fair amount of research, because to complete them thoroughly I had to include their: genus, species, order, class, maximum size (and age), environment, climate,importance, resilience, vulnerability, distribution, morphology, biology, and level of threat to humans and other organisms (Whew! That’s a lot of things!). In the process, though, I learned a lot of interesting things such as what ciguatera poisoning is (it’s a type of food poisoning contracted by eating fish contaminated with a toxin called ciguatoxin), and that the little blue-striped grunt fish in the tank can grow to be 18 inches long in the wild. The overall craziest thing I learned, though, was that lionfish, although highly venomous, are popular table fish eaten by lots of people! You won’t ever catch me eating one of those.
Today is a historic day. Hermit Crab, who resides in cage three of the ELC, has just purchased a brand-new luxury home. At precisely 8:25 AM this morning, he saw fit to forego his old, run-down and much too small shell for a large, shiny new one found by me. If you’ve never seen a hermit crab switch shells, it’s a cool thing to see. When they switch, they move very fast, because it’s when they are between shells that they are most vulnerable to attacks. Today when I saw it I managed to catch it on video in time and so you now can see the changeover below. I think you’ll find that hermit crabs look a little like lobsters in their true form.
Yes, it is a cold, cruel world, but especially for Grouper, the young grouper fish caught during a snorkeling excursion just a few days ago. Scared, he’d begun his life in the ELC tank by hiding in and among the coral, safe from potential predators like the blue crab and large shrimp. Lately, he had begun to venture out from his hiding places to frolic with the other fish. I was relatively certain he’d adjust to the new life, but this morning, when I went to open the ELC and feed the fish in the tank, I looked for him but couldn’t find him. Then, I discovered the shrimp in a corner, happily munching on his poor little body. I feel bad for him (the grouper) because if he’d just taken refuge in some other conch (not the one he was found in), then he might still be alive today.
Well, during the last two days I’ve been back at the nursery, doing all sorts of things including performing asexual propagation of plants. If you’re wondering what in fact asexual propagation is, I’ll fill you in on that later. Wait, I forgot. I did some other things besides the asexual propagation, so I’ll talk about them first. To begin the first day, Mr. McFarlane and I repotted chives into four inch pots. Then, we ventured out on his ATV cart in search of pedilanthus bahamensis (a cool-looking leafless plant also known as monkey fiddle) seeds, but no luck there. That took us the majority of the day. The next day was asexual propogation as well as seedling transplant day. Mr. McFarlane and I went out in his ATV to a nice little spot filled with the type of plant (its common name is Lucayan Eupatorium… it was named for the Lucayan Indians living around the bahamas and TCI) we both wished to propagate and transplant. Unfortunately, I had made the relatively naive choice of wearing flip-flops, which I thought were okay until I discovered that Turks-head spines easily penetrate flip-flop bottoms (I was hopping around for five minutes trying to get them out… so annoying). Continuing on, Mr. McFarlane began to transplant the desired seedlings into small four-inch pots while I began the asexual propagation using the type called herbaceous stem cuttings. Asexual propagation is the division or separation of one growing plant to produce two growing plants. It didn’t take very long, and so by noon we were done, and I could look forward to the next day’s mangrove planting.
I haven’t been in the water much during the 15 days that I’ve been here. Pathetic, I know, since it’s a tropical island surrounded by water. Today, though, I did. I went kayaking for a few hours with Will Hobbs (the club naturalist). It was so much fun! To begin, we prepared the kayaks and dragged them into the water. Then, we put the pedals in (Ambergris Cay has the type of kayaks that can can be propelled both by paddle and pedal) and began to go. At first it was nice but not very exciting, and then, things began to get interesting. First, Will saw a rock in the water, which turned out to be a conch. The inside of it was a perfect shade of pink (very pretty). Then, right after I got back in the kayak, Will saw a shape in the water which, when it got closer, was a four-foot-long shark. Oh, wow. That was comforting, right after I’d been swimming around near it. Later I found out that it was a harmless nurse shark (that burst my bubble a bit… I’d been planning to talk about how I was almost eaten alive). Then we found a few more conch (actually pronounced conk) and it was time to turn around and head back. I was excited when Will said that we could take the conch back to the cafeteria to clean, cook, and eat for dinner. I hope they’re good!
I choose salt. That’s because one of the things that I did today was collect real sea salt (not off supermarket shelves). Yesterday, Lindsay Mensen (the administrative assistant at TCSC) kindly offered to take me sea salt collecting. I (of course) said yes, and so the next day off we went at about noon. We drove down to the northeastern tip of the island, where we set about searching for the sea salt. Lots of it was too dry, and lots else too wet, but in the end we found a couple of suitable patches. Sea salt usually occurs naturally in larger granules (about a millimeter), so we had to be careful when we pried parts of it up so that we didn’t accidentally loosen bits of dirt. After about 15 minutes, we had about three or four tablespoons worth of salt. Unfortunately, some of the patches we had to avoid were patches containing crabs and snails that had by mistake gone into the pools and been quickly killed by the crazily high salinity levels in the individual pool. Some of them, in fact, were so full of salt that the little bit of hot, sun-baked water surrounding it was almost syrupy and slimy to the touch. By the time we left, I was already thinking of how much food I could use my collected salt on.
“Why?” was my question more than anything today as I spent three hours picking up trash off of Ambergris Cay’s beaches and Tarpon Point (see 
Well, during the last two days I’ve been back at the nursery, doing all sorts of things including performing asexual propagation of plants. If you’re wondering what in fact asexual propagation is, I’ll fill you in on that later. Wait, I forgot. I did some other things besides the asexual propagation, so I’ll talk about them first. To begin the first day, Mr. McFarlane and I repotted chives into four inch pots. Then, we ventured out on his ATV cart in search of pedilanthus bahamensis (a cool-looking leafless plant also known as monkey fiddle) seeds, but no luck there. That took us the majority of the day. The next day was asexual propogation as well as seedling transplant day. Mr. McFarlane and I went out in his ATV to a nice little spot filled with the type of plant (its common name is Lucayan Eupatorium… it was named for the Lucayan Indians living around the bahamas and TCI) we both wished to propagate and transplant. Unfortunately, I had made the relatively naive choice of wearing flip-flops, which I thought were okay until I discovered that Turks-head spines easily penetrate flip-flop bottoms (I was hopping around for five minutes trying to get them out… so annoying). Continuing on, Mr. McFarlane began to transplant the desired seedlings into small four-inch pots while I began the asexual propagation using the type called herbaceous stem cuttings. Asexual propagation is the division or separation of one growing plant to produce two growing plants. It didn’t take very long, and so by noon we were done, and I could look forward to the next day’s mangrove planting.
