Lionfish Sampling Day 1

Yesterday we drove from St. Petersburg to Homestead, Florida for our sampling trip. It rained most of the way across Alligator Alley, which is always an impressive sight. You can see the rain coming for miles, but once you are inside, you can't see ANYTHING!

Once we arrived at Biscayne Bay National Park, we stowed our tanks and put the boat in the water, and went grocery shopping. We went over all of our procedures for the next day, and relaxed for a little while.

Today we began our sampling. Back in January, other divers had set up semi-permanent transects. The total length is 100 meters. There are two sets of divers working at each site. First, Kara and I descend to the bottom & cover the entire site which is 100 m long by 10 m wide.

We would criss-cross back and forth across the site. Kara would be searching for lionfish and I would search for all native predators such as groupers, snappers, hogfish, and the like. This procedure took us approximately 45 minutes.

Once we came up, the other two divers would descend and do an extremely detailed count of ALL fish found on a 25 meter long by 4 meter wide section. That procedure takes anywhere from 45-80 minutes depending on the number of gobies, blennies, and other tiny fish that are living in the area.

Today we completed surveys at 3 sites out of 20 that we have to complete total. That was a pretty good day. We left the house at 7 this morning, and got off the water at 7 pm. After a long day on the water, we went to a great taqueria to eat dinner,  getting us back to the house aroud 10 pm. There's a lot more to this project, but I will continue my descriptions another day. I need to go to bed, so that we can get back up and do it all over again tomorrow! Good times!!!