Hello, my name is Matt Benson and I’m a biology major taking the Marine Biology 247 course in Roatan, Honduras. Today a few members of our class and I started the day by taking a short run down the coast of the island to get some exercise in. We ate at the Anthony’s Key Resort restaurant for breakfast, and enjoyed some great local food and fruit, which consisted of baleada, and bananas. Our first activity for the day was planned as a shark dive and involved a thirty minute boat ride to the south side of the island. When we got there the ocean was very calm and had almost no waves or wind. However, when we dove in there was a very strong current flowing to the west and it required us to hold a mooring line all the way down to the bottom on our descent to a sandy area at seventy feet. When a few other classmates and I were settled on the bottom waiting for the others to join us, we observed very murky green water with visibility of only ten to fifteen feet due to lots of sediment flowing through the current. While we were there we had two large black groupers circling us at arms length. We also started to observe shadows beginning to appear and those were the caribbean reef sharks. A few of us observed one that swam close by, but dive master Sergio decided to abort our dive due to the current and reduced visibility.

After surfacing from the called off dive, we replanned and decided to complete a research dive closer to the ironshore and fringing reef on the southside of the island. My group has been observing the invasive species of lionfish around Roatan on the reef. We use a method called the Roving Diver Technique (RDT) which consists of divers swimming over a large area trying to locate the species. When we locate one, one of us swims up to it slowly, and measures it with a bicolored measuring stick that has ten centimeter increments to allow visual measurements without being stung by their poisonous spines. We also recorded the depth, and habitat where it was located. During the dive we also spotted a caribbean reef squid, a couple channel clinging crabs, a spiny lobster, a spotted moray eel, and lots of comb jellies, and jellyfish. The dive was also exciting because there was a large patch of sargassum algae floating above us, blocking a lot of the sunlight from reaching the reef.

Later this afternoon we did a third dive on the northwest side of the island. This dive site had great visibility and allowed us to see much farther than this morning. My group completed another lionfish research dive, but this site had barrier reef topography and a steep wall. We also located a few other organisms like a porcupine fish and schools of blue tang. This evening we finished with a lecture in the marine science classroom.