Today was definitely the coolest day so far. Since it's Saturday we got to sleep in for another hour before breakfast. There were a lot of pastries and muffins, as well as the usual fruit and chocolate (hot chocolate Mexican style, with cinnamon and some other spices). After that we had RAP and assorted meetings, which were essentially the students getting together and going over any announcements or requests (ie can we organize dirty dishes better and can we please do something about that poor dog that's hanging around). The staff was having a meeting at the same time, and at the end Brady (Student Affairs Manager) and Gustavo (Center Director) listened to our points and brought up any they had for us.

Then we went out on our first field exercise. We loaded up the pangas with all our snorkeling gear and packed lunches and field equipment and had maybe a 15-20 min boat ride out to the bay where we were doing a scallop abundance sampling. We had squares made out of PVC that we had to throw behind us, then snorkel to see if there were any scallops within the quadrant. If there were, we had to collect any. Unfortunately no one saw scallops, although one of my group members Jose almost put his hand on a stingray. Then we got back in the boats and had another boat ride to collect octopi! Vero (Principles of Resource Management) has a study of octopus using artificial shelter (beer cans). So we had to go out and collect the cans and their stakes from three different sea floor types-rhodoliths, sand, and rocky. To do this you had to dive down (nothing over like 4 ft), plug the end of the can, grab the stake and bring the whole thing to the surface and put the can in a Ziploc full of water. The first and last locations we had to snorkel and had difficulty finding all of the cans. In one place I saw a big blue crab, a bunch of scallops and a really weird looking fish. But for the sand, the water was only about 2 feet deep so we just waded and found almost all of them. All of this took 4-5 hours, and we ate lunch on the boat. My snorkeling gear all worked fine-it was my first time, and with all new gear. It was a little harder to get to the bottom with my wetsuit on, but it was too cold to go without. I also stupidly forgot a towel, so I borrowed someone else's once we got in the boat.

Once we got back we had to process everything in the lab, which involved cutting open the cans and recording all the animals that were in the bag. Most of them had a ton of snails and I got to show off my amphipod prowess. My group had a couple of fish and crabs, but no octopi. I think there were maybe a total of 10 octopi caught, some with eggs in the can. We had to kill one of them because it was a new species and we had to keep a sample for identification in the future. Vero got really upset and was having problems because the octopus kept trying to crawl out of the jar of alcohol. I ended up grabbing it and doing it myself. A lot of people were kind of shaken up by it and couldn't watch, but I guess from putting so many frogs down I'm used to having to do the sad part. I also believe that "if you kill something, you have to watch it die," kind of as a token of respect to it, or so you don't forget what you're asking of it. We didn't have to put any others down, and they were very cool. One of the other kids got pictures and will be putting them up on the server. It was really weird to hold one, their suckers were definitely strong, but they didn't hurt. They could move in so many different ways and it was like having 8 legs gave them a different dimension of movement, or at least had many more ways of moving.

Tonight we're going into town to the restaurant Poncho (one of the pangueros)'s sister owns. Some of us are having dinner there, but since they're only doing shellfish tonight some people ate at the center and are only doing drinks once we're there. It's a good thing we're getting a ride though because I'm exhausted from snorkeling all day.