Monday 11th October Highlights

Hey guys! Well I am here at Lady Elliot Island (LEI) amongst the birds and I feel like I am on school camp! I am sharing a cabin with 3 other girls, Lea Anne, Corrine and Adele. I have the top bunk and I hope I don’t roll out during my sleep! Speaking of sleep, there HUNDREDS of birds that migrate to LEI to nest and they make HEAPS of noise at night. Some of the girls are wearing earplugs at night to sleep, but I figure if I can sleep through the noise you guys make on camp, then I will be alright! I have done 3 dives so far.

My first dive on Saturday was pretty good! When we were circling the island in our (tiny) aeroplane for landing, we saw about 15 mantas from the air floating around the surface. But when we went for a dive, they were nowhere to be seen. A turtle called ‘BUDDY’ came to say good morning and came right toward me. I thought he was cute swimming around and when I put my hand out he swam down to it and wanted me to scratch his tummy! We also saw large turtles and a black tip reef shark.

My second dive was on Sunday and just before we jumped off the boat to enter the water, we saw mantas feeding at the surface. They looked like big black bats swimming just under the surface. Unfortunately when we got in the water they didn’t appear until the end of the dive, but I saw 3 as they swam by me. They were pretty big! I’d say roughly 3-4 metres. Try laying that out with the metre ruler!

My third dive was today (Monday) at 8:00am and although the water was calmer and there was less current blowing me around under water, we didn’t see any mantas. It’s much more pleasant to dive in these conditions though. I was under water for almost 60 minutes and saw clownfish, turtles, cleaner wrasse, Moorish idols, butterfly fish and more.

The rest of the day I spent in the Lab. I have to download photos of the mantas from underwater cameras. Then I have to sort the hundreds of pictures into just one folder for each manta. Then I have to go through the 10 or so photos in that folder of each manta and try and identify who it is. To work out who it is we have a folder (that’s as big as a phone book) that contains sketched diagrams of the dots on each manta. You have to turn the pages in the folder until you find a match. It can take a while! We also have an MS Excel document that lists how many spots each manta has in the ‘interbrachial region’, as well as other data such as male or female, when it was last sighted, if it’s got any scars or bites out of it, etc. The interbrachial region means we only look at the spots in between the gills and not the whole manta to work out who the individual is. I think if I identify a new manta we should call it ‘Benton’, what do you think?

I have two dives tomorrow so I had better go and get some sleep now. I look forward to hearing from you guys tomorrow... and possibly seeing you on Skype Wednesday! (The internet is terrible here; it’s affected by atmospheric conditions. Bad weather= slow internet that drops out!!)

Cheers guys!

Miss Q