Turtle Ho!
Finally! I saw a turtle.
I'm in St. John for our coral reef fish monitoring program. I'm acting as a habitat guy. We do about 35 or so SCUBA surveys in a week with 3-person teams. One person does a belt transect counting and measuring fish, another does a point count and sits and counts and measures fish, and a third lays down five quadrats along the fish transect and records the percent cover of all benthic biotic and abiotic features in a 1-meter square.
So we've been doing this for about four years now and, believe it or not, I had yet to see a turtle doing a survey. Finally, on Thursday, I saw a turtle. Two actually. I was taking a couple of pictures while waiting to start my survey and spooked a green turtle out from under a coral head. Then when I was done, it turns out another turtle was holed up under a coral head directly under our boat and I spooked it while swimming back to the boat.
I say spooked, because both turtles were very startled and swam away as fast as they could Not really what I expected. I've never encountered turtles as skittish as these appeared to be. I have seen hawkbills around St. John before and they seemed not to care that I was there. Greens in St. Croix just seem to speed up a bit, but don't zip away. Greens in Hawaii are downright tame.
In any case, I had hoped to provide reports during the week, but there just wasn't much time. Also pictures, but no one remembered to bring the cable connecting the digital camera to our laptops. So watch this space. I will follow up with more storied and pictures when the camera gets back to the office in a week or so.