Lisianski day two

Today I got to dive with the alien species team again (Megan Donahue and Scott Godwin). It was a GORGEOUS day out on the water. It was super calm and beautiful. We went out to some patch reefs and actually got to do some "real" diving all the way down to 55 whole feet! lol Anyone that tells you that diving in shallow water is easier or safer is lying. It was sooooo nice not to have to deal with the wave orbitals or the surge and to have all this space. This team is in charge of looking for alien species in the atolls. There is one type of hydriod on this atoll that is alien, but lucky it is not invasive (picture top left). We only saw maybe a handful of them on the three 45 minute dives that we did today.

Today was probably the nicest field day that I have ever had. I dove with 2 really fun, super smart people, and we literally just swam around looking for inverts and taking pictures. And, we had real surface intervals where we just relaxed instead of rushing to get gear together and jump in again as soon as our computer says we can. It was so nice to know that two amazing scientists can have a really fun time in the field and also get everything done. During our surface interval we decided to motor around and pick up some trash that we found in the water. We pulled up a couple laundry detergent bottles and other various pieces of plastic. Every piece we pulled up though has a little crab living on it. We couldn't just throw them overboard because we knew that they would get eaten almost immediately. Instead, we looked around for some "biodegradable" habitat to set the out to sea with such as a peanut butter sandwich and a slim jim.... It was pretty funny and we at least gave the crabs a few more hours to live (I am pretty sure that the slim jim will never degrade because lets face it no one knows what its made out of so the crab on top of that should be fine forever). We also found a really cool looking nudibranch on one of the bottles. He was only a few millimeters long. We took him back and put him under the microscope. He was clear with purple spots and orange circles around the spots and you could see his heart beating! I made the dolphin people on the ship come look at it so that they knew how cool inverts were :). Don't worry though we are freeing him back to the ocean tomorrow morning. On another interesting note, the shipwreck crew found 2 more new ship wrecks today! They were really excited (that is 5 in only two days!). So, now we are going to stay here for an extra half day. I will be diving with the alien species group again tomorrow morning and then we are off to Pearl and Hermes reef.

Cheers!
Nyssa