And missing our brilliant CI students, of course!
I must be back in California…
Our New Orleans trips have a “getting home to SoCal” tradition. Once we land at LAX (usually late at night), we hit the In-N-Out on Sepulveda for some burgers (preferably Animal Style) and fries.
Having just returned the good Dr. Lambrinos to LAX for his connecting flight up to Oregon I decided to make the ceremonial stop at the reigning temple of SoCal fast food culture. This happened even though my family had just satiated John and me with drinks and food for the past few hours on a balcony in Manhattan Beach while we passed the hours of his layover.
Tradition are traditions afterall…Although it would have been nice to have one final pow-wow here in SoCal.
Some great photos from the trip….
This is what a hermit crab looks like without its shell. Crabs, like snakes or lizards shed their shell and go into hiding for up to 3 weeks while they create a new one. This Hermit crab was looking for a new home when we found him!
We picked up 8 bags of trash on the outer edge of Aitutaki. This is all the trash that washes up on the island from the Pacific Ocean….
Arrived at LAX!
after a long flight home we made it safe and sound!
Back in the States!
We just landed at LAX. Guy and John still have more airtime ahead, but we are all in Los Angeles now.
Heading Home
We are on our way home after two fantastic weeks of learning, service, all manner of interdisciplinary coastal monitoring and assessment, cultural exchange, and making tons of new friends.
Our internet credits have all expired, so we have been unable to post for the last day and a half, but check in the next few days for our pent up posts.
We had a wonderful final few days. There were many watery eyes among our CI students and new Aitutaki friends alike as we held our final farewell to the Islands ceremony as the sun set on Aitutaki minutes before we boarded our plane to Rarotonga.
We will see everyone soon!
Second to last day…
Everyone is out and about today rushing to get as much done as we can before we head on back to the States tomorrow night.
Our Reef and Robotics Teams are on the boat, our Ciguatera Team is meeting with Dr. Helen at the hospital on their never-ending hunt for public health stats, and I have the Lagoon and Beach Teams with me near the airport.
Later today we have our meeting with the Island Council downtown.
Markets in the Morning
Our ciguatera team has been heading out most mornings (when their alarms go off) to census the offerings in the Aitutaki Market down at the main wharf on Sir Albert Henry Drive. It opens at 6:00am and we usually shoot to get there around 6:20. While have had an array of student make the drive into town with me, our most consistent stalwarts are Shannon (when her alarm works) and Aspen. They have done a great job of both interviewing local folks about the understanding of the ciguatera situation (origins, historical trajectory, their own incidents of getting poisoned, etc.), trying to buy fish for our ciguatoxin assay, and surveying the local produce being offered.
Adventure Day
Our team was bolstered by the addition of Aspen today as Dr. A needed to help the robotics team move around/operate units. The ciguatera team were kind enough to take us to our first lagoon survey location. Today we surveyed lagoon sites arrayed around the innermost “v” of the island where water quality tends to be poor/highly turbid. These sites were all very shallow so they went quickly. We completed our first set of transects in short time, waited for Dr. A for a bit and then ended up getting a ride from the ciguatera team again. Again we finished up our lagoon transects quickly… and waited for Dr. A without seeing him. The ciguatera team again came to our rescue and drove us to our third site. Upon their heading off, we agreed to meet at a pier at 3:00pm (they said that they would wait for us if we weren’t there at that time). This third site had extremely murky water so we opted to not survey it and instead started our walk to the pier.
This is where the day got interesting. We walked for about 30 minutes, missing the turn that we needed to take to the pier. When we looked at our map, we noticed a little road that ran out quite close to the pier. We decided to do our third and final survey for the day right then given the pier seemed so close. Again the water was shallow so it was completed quickly. The pier was actually farther from where we were then we though and so we didn’t get there until nearly 4:00pm. We thought our drivers would miss the turn so we went to the main road where we waited for a total of 3 whole minutes for our ride to get us. However it wasn’t the ciguatera team it was Steve. That was when we heard that our original drivers got to our rally point at 3:00pm and waited there until 3:45pm. In the end it all worked out and we all got back safely.
Over all it was an adventures day. A day where we got a good amount of data and all had a good time.
-Lagoon team
Hayden, Meg, Julie and Aspen
Teaching the next Generation
On Tuesday, August 4 we were blessed with a visit by group of students from the local school here on Aitutaki. These young people (who ranged from middle to high school ages) were in the middle of their two-week Independence Day holiday but still managed to muster up the energy to come by our “Base 1” (aka End of the Runway) site. We (hopefully) regaled them with ecological stories and showed them various aspects of our monitoring efforts to characterize lagoon health. After patiently sitting through our overview, they got down and dirty and helped with everything from our sand coring to looking for micro plastics in beach sand via our ESRM mobile microplastics lab. They and their Araura College Principal Tracy Spiers (who we first met on last year’s preliminary visit to Aitutaki) had a fun time (we hope!).
Our mobile ortable microplastics lab.
Araura College students learning how to search for and quantify microplastic particles in beach sand.
Sifting through core sand to hunt for invertebrates.
Coring at our Base 1 beach site.
Tevin showing students a just-collected worm to our Aitutaki students.
Our CSUCI students had a great day showing the local kids how we do what we do. The kids also taught us a thing or two (what it feels lilt to get ciguatera poisoning, etc.). We hope to get them up and running with some subset of our lagoon monitoring protocols throughout the school year to help integrate more environmental science into their routine classes and simultaneously building a cadre to local Aitutaki folks into the routine monitoring we hope to foster here.