After breakfast, we split into our two groups and started our activities. Team 1 went diving in the morning while team 2 stayed at CCMI and learnt about the importance of marine ecosystems. We listened to multiple presentations about mangroves, seagrass and coral. Each presentation taught us about the roles of each and their effects on the reef. Our first presentation was about the mangroves. These are plants which have adapted to live in a salt water habitat. As part of the mangrove presentation, we travelled to Tarpon Lake. This is a salt water lake which contains many tarpon fish as a result of flooding and storms. While at the lake, we were introduced to the three kinds of mangrove - red, white and black. To tell them apart, we were asked to lick the leaves in order to see if it was salty, as to survive in saline water they filter the salt out and store it in salt glands. This caused a lot of shocked faces. While being there we also saw a bird West Indian Whistling duck, Mr Merrick took a photo.
Our second presentation was about seagrass. We took part in a physical activity which gave us a visual representation of how seagrass helps intercept sediment which can damage the coral. Students were blindfolded and had to walk towards a wall of pupils through an area of random chairs, the blindfolded pupils representing sediment, the wall of pupils representing the coral reef, and chairs representing the seagrass. It was very funny as we hit many chairs.
We then repeated the activity but with less chairs (so less seagrass) and a gap in the reef wall so that we could see the effect of removing seagrass and reef to build harbours and hotels; erosion and reef damage as more sediment lands on the reef.
Our third presentation was about coral. We learnt about the different types of coral such as hard, soft, lettuce-like and brain-like. We were shown coral skeletons where we could see the individual polyps that had cloned to form the overall coral.
We had lunch and then the two groups swapped activities.
On the dive and snorkel, we went to Cumber's caves. We spent 1 hour in the water, during which we saw a Caribbean reef shark (a small harmless mammal with no teeth so nothing to worry about -everyone came back to shore in one piece!). We also saw a turtle, a spotted eagle ray, a rainbow parrot fish, a sting ray, a sea cucumber, and many other shoals of small fish.
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