Gap Year Day 122

Alissa Frame
Nov 1 · 3 min read

Today I woke up and had my bowl of cereal outside my dorm building right next to the water. It was beautiful and super peaceful.

Not a bad place to eat some breakfast!

I went into the lab around 8:45am and started sorting the samples again. I did this till a little after noon and then we had lunch together outside on the picnic tables. Afterwards, I was going to go out on the boat with Michael and another student to take more water samples but it started pouring rain so we postponed and I continued my work in the lab for awhile. And I finally finished my first tow sample!! It took two days! Later the rain slowed so just Michael and I went out to do a modified version of what we had originally planned on doing. We took samples from two locations and we got to see a group of Manta Rays and sea turtles!! So cool! The Mantas were feeding and swimming a circular motion, their wings flapping up through the surface of the water (it looked a little like sharks to me!)

The sea turtles were also super cute and big! They would pop their heads out and flap their fins over the surface of the water. So it was an eventful outing!

I went back to the dorm afterward and made Buddha Bowl for dinner. I cooked up some jasmine rice, roasted broccoli & carrots, and sautéed eggplant and zucchini. I added feta cheese and this awesome spicy avocado hummus that was delish! After dinner, a woman in my dorm named Caro asked if I could help her with her research a bit. She’s studying the behavior of hammerhead sharks and she has 5 babies in an indoor pool that she’s doing the research on. She’s trying to train them to associate certain sounds with food, as well as sounds with location. So it’s like shark psychology and animal behavior which is pretty cool. I think the ultimate goal is to better understand their hearing threshold. I went with her to her “lab” around 7pm and we stayed till a little after 9pm doing all sorts of hearing tests, feeding sessions, and counting their tail beats to assess their activity. I enjoyed learning about what she’s doing, but I must say, I got super tired! I kind of hit a wall around 8 or 8:30pm and so I prefer to just eat dinner and relax in the evenings:) Maybe I’m still getting used to the time difference.

Here’s a view of the shark pool from the window of the observation room

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A daily blog/journal of my gap year adventures.

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