Mon Équipe et le Fish Market

SO now that the course is over, the real work begins! This is the team I will be working with this summer. Bridget and Audrey are volunteers as well. All of us are majoring in Bio at McGill, and we did the tropical ecology course. Vanessa and Sylvain are at U of Laval and Trois Rivières respectively, and Katrine is the person we are working with, and her boyfriend Sébastian is also working with us as well. We're looking at longfin damselfish and territoriality, and how changes in density will affect them. It is a very cool project, which entails us either swimming or taking a boat to get to our study sites.

We went to the fish market in Hoistens. It's a crazy open market area with vendors and tons of stalls sering fantastic Bajan food: grilled dolpinfish (mahi mahi), coleslaw, macaroni and cheese pie (YUM), and other goodies. It's normally right on the beach, but they are doing renovations so it's across the street right now. There is also an area where they blare a random mix of reggae and old pop tunes. There was one guy who was really into his dancing. What we couldn't understand is why he danced with these crazy industrial rubber gloves on. He did eventually take them off. He also lip synched African Queen to a little girl in a carriage who was less then amused by his antics. Lots of fun and good food!

THE END (of the course, not my time here!)

So today is the last day of the course. After a late night (we worked until 3.30am!!) and not much sleep, we hammered out our paper and did our presentation. Audrey knows Powerpoint, so she found some cool photos and put together a cool shot with all our stuff and our kickass rarefaction curves. The presentation was great. Everyone did an amazing job on their projects and put together interesting presentations. considering the presentation was close to 2 hours - it never felt like it was droning on and on.

That morning, some construction people dug up a hawks bill turtle nest, and the turtles had hatched and were probably going to dig themselves out that night, so they brought them to Bellairs. We called the turtle people and they came to get them to release them to the ocean that night.

After the presentations, we had a party - fresh grilled fish (Mahi Mahi, tuna, something else I can't remember) thanks to Dr. Kramer. We made a potato salad, and there was lots of beer and rum. Emma, at the start of the course, collected all our beer bottle caps, and we made them into little bottle cap art. DNA for Dr. Bureau (molecular module), fish for Dr. Kramer (fish module), and a spider for the spider specialist Dr. Buddle (bug module).

And lastly, I pulled out my new Gorilla tripod which provided much phallic entertainment for the evening. I did put it to good use to take our last group shot though.

I'll be posting more about my adventures down here. Stay tuned!