An update from ‘The Rock’:

It’s raining again. Not a gentle rain either. The kind of rain that soaks you to the bone in a matter of seconds. The rain has been coming and going for the last week or so long with wind storms and other wonders of nature.

My fisheries management education is in full swing with the cayian community. We are working closely with the two different fish buyers (sisters) observing who is catching what, when its being caught, etc. etc. All of this information is being entered into a database that will be used to create a comprehensive management plan for fisheries in the cays. Not only will the database contain up-to-date information, but also historical records of fishing and how it has changed over time. Amazingly, one of the fish buyers has been keeping records of what she has been buying for the last 23 years. Although the tattered notbooks will take some serious translating and an intern willing to spend some quality data entry hours (not it!), having the fishing records for the last 23 years is an incredibly useful piece of information.

The cayian fishermen are a wonderful breed. The descendants of Christopher Columbus’ last voyage, many of them have lived in the cays for 4 or 5 generations without leaving. Fishing from an early age, one man I talked to said that he got his first boat when he was 12 and has fished nearly every day since then.

‘Life here is not like in America. In America you work and retire. Here there is no such thing as retiring. You work until the day you die.’

Below is a picture I took of mutton snapper and yellowtail snapper waiting to be weighed at the fish plant.

Also check out this website for more photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyle_p

Waiting to be weighed

It seems like an odd concept, to be cold in the Caribbean, but thats how the last few days have been. Ahhhhhh, feels like home with the rain coming down all day and the skies a flat grey tone.

Things are going well on ‘the Rock’ (a local name for Utila). Last week the big boss and I went to the cays (pronounced ‘keys’) that cling to the west end of the island. The there are 11 cays in all, about half of which have a house, or houses, on them. Most people in the cays live on Pigeon and Suc Suc, two patches of sand connected by a cement bridge. I believe that any traces of any real vegetation has long since disappeared and the path can be walked from one end to the other in less than ten minutes. There are around 300 inhabitants split between these cays, an interesting mixture of white native cayians, Hondurans from the mainland, and black caribbean islanders. For most of the people in the cays fishing plays an important role in their lives and has for many generations. Whether it is as a source of food or income, cayians rely on fishing nearly everyday to make their livelihood.

The purpose of our trip to the cays was to look for a house to rent so that UCME can start to work with the cayians to help restore their depleted fisheries. Myself and two others will be living on the cays, hopefully setting up a conch aquaculture program to help reseed the local populations as well as working with the fish processing plants to develop an clearer picture of what is being caught and where. This info will hopefully allow the fishermen on the island to manage their marine resources in a more sustainable fashion than what is currently being used.

Well, so I have now been on the island of Utila for three weeks and am finally making my first post on my weblog. Obviously I am not cut out for this whole blogging craze. Combine that with the fact that the Internet is painfully slow on the island and I have been incredibly busy, I am quite pleased with myself that I am finally able to get a post up.

Utila is a funny little island. The population is an interesting mixture of Caribbeans, Hondurans from the mainland, divers, expats, and the descendants of the pirates that used to cally this island their home. Eleven km east to west and 4 km north to south, the only town on the entire island is East Harbour (with the extra ‘u’ because of the British influence). There is a roughly paved road that runs out the the ‘airport’ and a few small streets that cris-cross the town, upon which the citizens bustle about. Primary forms of transportation include rusted bicycles, golf carts, motorcycles and flip-flops.

Being an intern at UCME is like working at a full-time job, albeit an incredibly interesting one at that. My weekday generally goes as follows: Wake up in my bed at the volunteer/ intern house at 6 am and eat a quick breakfast. Start the 15-minute walk to the office at 6:45 in order to be there by 7. From there on it depends on what the director has planned out for the week. Things that I have been doing include, but are not limited to: cetacean surveys (transects around the island via boat looking to spot several species of whales and dolphins), parrotfish surveys (observing and recording the feeding habits of the intermediate-stage red-band parrotfish), urchin and conch surveys (basically exactly what it sounds like on various locations around Utila), and mangrove surveys (measuring density of mangroves, etc.) I take a lunch break at noon and continue working until 4 or 4:30. Then I head back to the house, eat dinner, read, go to bed and repeat.

Besides these surveys and activities, I have been reading research papers on the spawning habits of local grouper and snapper. Within the next few weeks I will begin working with a man who has been hired by the Nature Conservancy to study spawning aggregations of snapper and grouper. This will be my primary project and I am excited to be working with species of larger, carniverous fishes.

I can’t even begin to describe the marine life that I have observed while diving. More species of fish than you could shake a stick at and dolphins and turtles, etc. etc. I haven’t quite figured out how to upload pictures but I will work on it some more after I finish writing this post.

Well, take care and hopefully I will able to post more frequently in the near future and include some pictures or videos.

Cheers,

Kyle

This will be my blog site for when I am in Utila, Honduras. Hopefully I will be able to use this site to keep people updated on what a research assist does at the Utila Center for Marine Ecology (UCME). My plane to the tropics leaves on Feb. 1st so I am packing and preparing to leave the States.

Probably the thing that I am currently anticipating the most is the chance to dive in water that doesn’t require an exposure suit thick enough for reentry into the atmosphere. That and a chance to swim with a fish whose mouth can be up to 5 feet wide and weigh more than 21 tonnes: the whale shark!

Cheers everyone. More to follow.