Today we had a lecture from Vero on marine reserves in the Baja area. We read two interesting papers from one guy (Richard Cudney-Bueno) who studied a marine reserve for rock scallops and black murex in the Gulf of Mexico. The first looked at how to select the location of a reserve to best benefit fisheries. For example, both of theses species have free-floating larvae stages that become attached to a substrate at a certain age. You need to have the reserve located so that the larvae will drift to the area of your fishery. The second paper followed the community response to the marine reserve. I thought this was super cool because the fishing cooperative was really good at regulating itself via social punishment (disapproval, guilt etc). But when bandits began fishing in the reserve, the co-op essentially dissolved because there was no government enforcement to back them up.
We also had an interesting spanish class where we pulled subjunctive words out of spanish songs. It made me miss Sra Warda (high school spanish teacher for 3 years) because we listened to her favorite person ever, Juanes! It made me a little reminiscent, I should go back and find some way to contact her, she'd probably be really excited to know I'm studying abroad in Mexico and speaking lots of spanish.
After lunch we went into town again to conduct more interviews. We didn't get as many as last time, partly because we didn't have Brady to drive around and talk to people she knows. I'm thinking that she knows half the town. We went to the doctor's office to try to talk to a nurse, but she was out for the day, so we walked to La Roca and talked to Armida, the owner (and Poncho's sister). We asked Antonio if he would do some interviews with men, because Jenna and I thought they weren't being totally honest with us, because we're women. We were asking questions about how they feel about professional women, and we weren't getting any negative answers, but almost all of the women we talked to said that men, especially their husbands, were the largest obstacle they faced. One man told us that he thought professional women were great, and after he left his wife told us "He's a total liar! He's the reason I had to quit!" We still didn't get any real negative reactions, so that in itself is an interesting result, compared to the women's experiences.
We had to hand in our DR choices to Brady this afternoon. I ended up putting AJ first, then Vero, then Eduardo. It would be cool to do whales, but I feel like AJ's and Vero's projects have a greater effect on the people of Puerto San Carlos, and since I already know about hard science, I'd like to focus on the human aspect of conservation while I'm here. I didn't really realize that until recently, I had thought that I wanted to experience hard science in a different ecosystem with an interesting cultural component. What I've since realized is that I can do hard science in any type of area, but that SFS provides a really good opportunity to look into community involvement and motivation. I wrote in my request that no matter how many papers you publish, nothing will happen if you can't get the community involved. I'm also thinking that my "home" may be in forest ecosystems, I really miss trees here! It's great to explore something different, and that's part of why I came, to figure out where I want to go, or at least to get ideas.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Banderitas Camping Trip
So the camping trip to Banderitas went well. We piled all our things into the pangas and I got stuffed in a panga with a cooler up against my knees, which led to a very uncomfortable boat ride. The camp site is maybe 30-50 minutes away by boat in an estuary. There´s a beach and then a small cliff (maybe 6 ft high) where we actually pitched our camp. There were a ton of burrs the size of my thumbnail. If you´ve never experienced burrs, I highly suggest you NOT. They got stuck on everything and hurt like hell when you tried to pull them out. Every now and then the point would lodge in my finger, so I´ve got about 5 sore spots on my fingers from them. The campsite itself is classified as desert, with lots of dry grasses and cacti and Dr. Seuss-like trees.
At one point yesterday we went on a hike through it with Gustavo stopping every now and then to point out interesting species. Some were these cacti that are endemic (native) to Baja, which looks like they´re a dead piece just laying on the ground, but are still alive. We also saw a huge cactus that looks kind of like a saguaro but isn´t, Gustavo said it takes 100 years for it to start branching, and this probably had 7 branches to it. There was also a caracara that was building a nest on it-some kind of black and white hawk or eagle, I´m not sure what it´s English name is. At one point Gustavo stopped and told us all to back up quickly because there was a massive rattlesnake across the path. We stopped a good distance away and looked at it for a while before it started moving towards us and we had to leave. Some people were saying they wanted to hear it rattle and were wondering why it hadn´t, but we´d stopped far enough away that it didn´t feel threatened. Eventually we got to a salt flat that fills with seawater at really high tides. It was really cool, part of the water was reddish from a combination of algae and excess minerals.
We also did turtle monitoring at night, where each cabin has a shift where they have to go out in the pangas and go through the nets we put out to look for turtles. My cabin had the shit shift of 12-4, where you can´t really fall asleep early, and only have like 2 hours of sleep before you have to get up again. On top of that, it was freezing and we didn´t find any turtles. But the other groups did, 1 Monday night and 5 last night. In the morning we all got up early to measure them, mostly measurements of their shell length and width. If they had never been caught before, we also named them, tagged them, and took a skin sample. Sea turtles are really cool, their flippers are a lot less armored than I expected. Their skin really just felt like a lizard. And they´re pretty large-probably the size of my torso. And although no one got bitten, apparently they can, and do, bite really hard.
The last cool thing we did was snorkel through a rhodolith bed. Rhodoliths look like this http://vis-pc.plantbio.ohiou.edu/algaeimage/jpegs/ball.jpg and are coraline algae. They´re fairly round and depending on the area are either scattered along a sand bed or densely packed together. We saw a bunch of sealife including a couple of pufferfish, sea bass and a stingray.
As for camping in general, I think my life would be a lot happier if I could sleep better. My one roommate kind of spreads out in her sleep and she kept rolling onto my sleeping pad, which isn´t very large to begin with. It´s also not horribly comfortable. And I was too nervous about oversleeping for both turtle monitoring and measuring to put in earplugs. The burrs also really really sucked, they were everywhere and there was a constant chorus of "effing burrs!" around the campsite. We had to check our gear carefully before returning so we didn´t bring any back to the school. Overall, it felt really natural to just hang around outside a lot and not shower, and go to the bathroom behind cacti. Actually, I could do without the sharp object part, but whatever. But it was a pretty nice way to spend three days, and Gustavo said it´s the worst campsite of the semester, so things only get better.
At one point yesterday we went on a hike through it with Gustavo stopping every now and then to point out interesting species. Some were these cacti that are endemic (native) to Baja, which looks like they´re a dead piece just laying on the ground, but are still alive. We also saw a huge cactus that looks kind of like a saguaro but isn´t, Gustavo said it takes 100 years for it to start branching, and this probably had 7 branches to it. There was also a caracara that was building a nest on it-some kind of black and white hawk or eagle, I´m not sure what it´s English name is. At one point Gustavo stopped and told us all to back up quickly because there was a massive rattlesnake across the path. We stopped a good distance away and looked at it for a while before it started moving towards us and we had to leave. Some people were saying they wanted to hear it rattle and were wondering why it hadn´t, but we´d stopped far enough away that it didn´t feel threatened. Eventually we got to a salt flat that fills with seawater at really high tides. It was really cool, part of the water was reddish from a combination of algae and excess minerals.
We also did turtle monitoring at night, where each cabin has a shift where they have to go out in the pangas and go through the nets we put out to look for turtles. My cabin had the shit shift of 12-4, where you can´t really fall asleep early, and only have like 2 hours of sleep before you have to get up again. On top of that, it was freezing and we didn´t find any turtles. But the other groups did, 1 Monday night and 5 last night. In the morning we all got up early to measure them, mostly measurements of their shell length and width. If they had never been caught before, we also named them, tagged them, and took a skin sample. Sea turtles are really cool, their flippers are a lot less armored than I expected. Their skin really just felt like a lizard. And they´re pretty large-probably the size of my torso. And although no one got bitten, apparently they can, and do, bite really hard.
The last cool thing we did was snorkel through a rhodolith bed. Rhodoliths look like this http://vis-pc.plantbio.ohiou.edu/algaeimage/jpegs/ball.jpg and are coraline algae. They´re fairly round and depending on the area are either scattered along a sand bed or densely packed together. We saw a bunch of sealife including a couple of pufferfish, sea bass and a stingray.
As for camping in general, I think my life would be a lot happier if I could sleep better. My one roommate kind of spreads out in her sleep and she kept rolling onto my sleeping pad, which isn´t very large to begin with. It´s also not horribly comfortable. And I was too nervous about oversleeping for both turtle monitoring and measuring to put in earplugs. The burrs also really really sucked, they were everywhere and there was a constant chorus of "effing burrs!" around the campsite. We had to check our gear carefully before returning so we didn´t bring any back to the school. Overall, it felt really natural to just hang around outside a lot and not shower, and go to the bathroom behind cacti. Actually, I could do without the sharp object part, but whatever. But it was a pretty nice way to spend three days, and Gustavo said it´s the worst campsite of the semester, so things only get better.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Two pretty slow days for this weekend. Yesterday we had spanish class where we did more work in the dreaded subjunctive and finished watching a Spanish chick flick that was pretty predictable and fairly bad lol. Then we had a talk about Leave No Trace camping since we´re going on a three day camping trip starting tomorrow. The main points of the talk were how to reduce your impact, and how you do that differently based on whether the environment is heavily used or pristine. Another main point was how to go to the bathroom while camping, which should be...interesting. I´ve never been camping before, so it´s all new to me. Luckily I have Jenna in my cabin, who´s super outdoorsy and leads trips for her school, so I should be fine. After the talk we had to get all the gear and food together. Since my only job is to help with Monday dinner I helped José carry things from the equipment shed. After that I spent a good amount of the night finishing an essay for Martín about corruption in Mexico (bottom line: it´s pretty bad) and went out onto the beach to hang out with people after that.
Today we hired a boat to take us to the Dunas, which is kind of a island in the bay that´s just made up of dunes and beaches. We were out there for five hours just laying out, going in the ocean and playing on the big sand dunes. Jenna, Laura and I figured out that it´s pretty fun to jump down onto the dunes because it doesn´t hurt and you just kind of slide for awhile. We really loaded the boat down with too many people, so the rides to and from were painfully slow. I took a shower, but I still have sand in my ears and hair, and now we´re just waiting for mac and cheese for dinner. The cooks don´t work on Sundays, so a group of students is in charge of Sunday dinner and so far we´ve been trying to do something American each time. Last week was grilled cheese and tomato soup.
Today we hired a boat to take us to the Dunas, which is kind of a island in the bay that´s just made up of dunes and beaches. We were out there for five hours just laying out, going in the ocean and playing on the big sand dunes. Jenna, Laura and I figured out that it´s pretty fun to jump down onto the dunes because it doesn´t hurt and you just kind of slide for awhile. We really loaded the boat down with too many people, so the rides to and from were painfully slow. I took a shower, but I still have sand in my ears and hair, and now we´re just waiting for mac and cheese for dinner. The cooks don´t work on Sundays, so a group of students is in charge of Sunday dinner and so far we´ve been trying to do something American each time. Last week was grilled cheese and tomato soup.
Friday, February 19, 2010
This past week has been fairly academic-heavy, so I haven't really had a lot of time to blog. We had a paper due on Monday for Vero, then a lesson plan to do for an English class, then a project on climate change for Eduardo, and a Spanish essay due tomorrow. And among all this we had to be planning a project for AJ.
The project for AJ is kind of a mini-project to get us used to qualitative research methods, and an opportunity for us to find out more about town. Jenna and I decided to look at professional women (nurses, business owners, teachers, etc) and how they're viewed. We wrote out and translated our questions on Wednesday and today went into town with Brady to conduct interviews. I think we ended up getting 6 total, including 2 business owners, 1 seamstress, 1 pharmacy-worker and 2 men (husbands of two of the women). We have questions planned for professional women, housewives, young girls, and men. Most of the women said that they didn't really face a lot of obstacles becoming a professional, but some of them had experienced some kind of pressure from family members. And all of the women were fairly adamant that they would not feel happy or fulfilled if they were only a housewife. I think it's especially interesting because I think that's how I would feel, and I know people from home on both sides of the issue. I think we're running into problems with the men, in that for the two we interviewed their (professional) wives were in the room and I think at least one of them wasn't completely honest with us. It's also a problem that Jenna and I are both women obviously in college to have a profession, so they may just tell us what they think we want to hear. On the upshot, I understood a lot more in the interviews than I expected to. We recorded everything but also took notes afterward in case something went wrong, and between Jenna and I we could summarize pretty much what everyone said.
This past week we went whale watching twice-both times I went in Eduardo's boat and we cruised around for awhile looking for mammals other than whales as well. We saw a bunch of dolphins-bottlenose and white-sided, and sea lions. Yesterday was funny, we were in the boats for maybe 10 minutes when Will's sunglasses blew off his head. Usually the pangueros can find hats and stuff, but we all assumed that sunglasses would sink and be lost. But Chilaco turned the boat around anyway and we all looked around on the sea floor, which is fairly shallow in that area. Sure enough, Chilaco spotted them and then came the question of how to get them. They fell off in really polluted water, so you wouldn't want to jump in after them for risk of coming out of the water glowing green. Will was hoping for a stick, but those were in short supply on a small speedboat. Chilaco ended up pulling out a fishing line and hook, and amazingly pulled them up on the second try! The rest of the pangas were waiting for us further up the shore, and when we caught up we saw that there was a whale in between the two boats and super close to them. So that was neat, that if Will hadn't lost his sunglasses everyone would have missed that.
On Tuesday or Wednesday we went into town to Brady's friend who's a dressmaker. We got to pick out fabric and tell her what we wanted for custom made clothes. I ended up ordering brown yoga pants with a green rollover top and a strapless sundress in a big blue foral print. I'm super excited I've never had anything custom made, besides Halloween costumes.
The project for AJ is kind of a mini-project to get us used to qualitative research methods, and an opportunity for us to find out more about town. Jenna and I decided to look at professional women (nurses, business owners, teachers, etc) and how they're viewed. We wrote out and translated our questions on Wednesday and today went into town with Brady to conduct interviews. I think we ended up getting 6 total, including 2 business owners, 1 seamstress, 1 pharmacy-worker and 2 men (husbands of two of the women). We have questions planned for professional women, housewives, young girls, and men. Most of the women said that they didn't really face a lot of obstacles becoming a professional, but some of them had experienced some kind of pressure from family members. And all of the women were fairly adamant that they would not feel happy or fulfilled if they were only a housewife. I think it's especially interesting because I think that's how I would feel, and I know people from home on both sides of the issue. I think we're running into problems with the men, in that for the two we interviewed their (professional) wives were in the room and I think at least one of them wasn't completely honest with us. It's also a problem that Jenna and I are both women obviously in college to have a profession, so they may just tell us what they think we want to hear. On the upshot, I understood a lot more in the interviews than I expected to. We recorded everything but also took notes afterward in case something went wrong, and between Jenna and I we could summarize pretty much what everyone said.
This past week we went whale watching twice-both times I went in Eduardo's boat and we cruised around for awhile looking for mammals other than whales as well. We saw a bunch of dolphins-bottlenose and white-sided, and sea lions. Yesterday was funny, we were in the boats for maybe 10 minutes when Will's sunglasses blew off his head. Usually the pangueros can find hats and stuff, but we all assumed that sunglasses would sink and be lost. But Chilaco turned the boat around anyway and we all looked around on the sea floor, which is fairly shallow in that area. Sure enough, Chilaco spotted them and then came the question of how to get them. They fell off in really polluted water, so you wouldn't want to jump in after them for risk of coming out of the water glowing green. Will was hoping for a stick, but those were in short supply on a small speedboat. Chilaco ended up pulling out a fishing line and hook, and amazingly pulled them up on the second try! The rest of the pangas were waiting for us further up the shore, and when we caught up we saw that there was a whale in between the two boats and super close to them. So that was neat, that if Will hadn't lost his sunglasses everyone would have missed that.
On Tuesday or Wednesday we went into town to Brady's friend who's a dressmaker. We got to pick out fabric and tell her what we wanted for custom made clothes. I ended up ordering brown yoga pants with a green rollover top and a strapless sundress in a big blue foral print. I'm super excited I've never had anything custom made, besides Halloween costumes.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
I seem to have a time lag on posting which doesn't totally surprise me. I was never very good at diaries or any of that. Anyway, new pictures are up! Both from whale watching and our death-defying (ok not really) hike through Isla Magdalena. Just so you don't have to go digging through my posts again, here's the album.
Yesterday was fairly slow, even though it wasn't supposed to be that way. We were supposed to split up into two groups and have kayak lessons and some free time (sound like summer camp yet?). But the first group took twice as long kayaking as expected, so my group basically had the entre morning off. They got back at lunch, so we grabbed lunch to go (this awesome kind of Mexican shepherd's pie with potatoes, ground beef, cheese and guac) and drove out to the beach where Brady was waiting with our kayaks.
Kayaking was interesting, I think I like it. You're much closer to the water than I expected, and you're fairly locked in once you have the spray skirt up. I feel like claustrophobic people (Mom) would probably have a problem with it. And the stroke is different from canoeing. If you do it right, your paddling force should be coming from your core rotating, not your arms rowing or something. I was just starting to get it right before it was time to leave. We also had to do a wet exit, which is fairly miserable in a cold lagoon. Since you're so locked in, it's important you know how to get out. So we had to flip ourselves over then pull up the spray skirt and kick out of the kayak. Then there's a process to get the water out of your kayak before you get back on (at which point you pull a sea lion move). I didn't plug my nose when I flipped, so I was dripping seawater for the rest of the day, and of course you're soaked and cold. I managed to do it, but I don't plan on flipping very often after that.
We got back and had Spanish where we went though conditional tense. We had a couple of minutes left, so we finished with Scattergories in Spanish. We had some time off again, where most people worked on their lab reports due for Vero on Monday. Then we went to dinner...and there was none! On Saturdays the cooks make something in the afternoon and staff of the day reheats it before dinner, only Martin forgot it was his turn. So dinner was a little late, but it was great anyway.
After dinner we all went out to Alcatraz, which is the only really nice restaurant in town. There was a soccer game that Jose really wanted to catch, and Alacatraz was the only place likely to have it. It's a nice hotel with a big open patio and good food and a complete gringo magnet. For reference, in Mexico "gringo" just means American, with none of the stupid American connotation we think it has. Not sure if it has that connotation in other countries, but according to Jose it's not some insult or anything. Anyway, I think just about everyone in there was gringos or other sorts of tourists. After the game we went to Los Arcos for drinks (much cheaper!), then the local "club". It's really just a bar with a dance floor with all the tables pushed to the sides. It was packed last night though, apparently for Valentine's Day.
Today was a lazy Sunday. I finished my section of the lab report, then essentially spent the rest of the day reading in the sun. The weather today is ridiculously awesome, bright and sunny and warm with enough of a breeze to not get too hot. This is the first time I've been inside since like 10 this morning. Apparently there's some plans in the making for Valentine's festivities, we'll see how it goes.
Yesterday was fairly slow, even though it wasn't supposed to be that way. We were supposed to split up into two groups and have kayak lessons and some free time (sound like summer camp yet?). But the first group took twice as long kayaking as expected, so my group basically had the entre morning off. They got back at lunch, so we grabbed lunch to go (this awesome kind of Mexican shepherd's pie with potatoes, ground beef, cheese and guac) and drove out to the beach where Brady was waiting with our kayaks.
Kayaking was interesting, I think I like it. You're much closer to the water than I expected, and you're fairly locked in once you have the spray skirt up. I feel like claustrophobic people (Mom) would probably have a problem with it. And the stroke is different from canoeing. If you do it right, your paddling force should be coming from your core rotating, not your arms rowing or something. I was just starting to get it right before it was time to leave. We also had to do a wet exit, which is fairly miserable in a cold lagoon. Since you're so locked in, it's important you know how to get out. So we had to flip ourselves over then pull up the spray skirt and kick out of the kayak. Then there's a process to get the water out of your kayak before you get back on (at which point you pull a sea lion move). I didn't plug my nose when I flipped, so I was dripping seawater for the rest of the day, and of course you're soaked and cold. I managed to do it, but I don't plan on flipping very often after that.
We got back and had Spanish where we went though conditional tense. We had a couple of minutes left, so we finished with Scattergories in Spanish. We had some time off again, where most people worked on their lab reports due for Vero on Monday. Then we went to dinner...and there was none! On Saturdays the cooks make something in the afternoon and staff of the day reheats it before dinner, only Martin forgot it was his turn. So dinner was a little late, but it was great anyway.
After dinner we all went out to Alcatraz, which is the only really nice restaurant in town. There was a soccer game that Jose really wanted to catch, and Alacatraz was the only place likely to have it. It's a nice hotel with a big open patio and good food and a complete gringo magnet. For reference, in Mexico "gringo" just means American, with none of the stupid American connotation we think it has. Not sure if it has that connotation in other countries, but according to Jose it's not some insult or anything. Anyway, I think just about everyone in there was gringos or other sorts of tourists. After the game we went to Los Arcos for drinks (much cheaper!), then the local "club". It's really just a bar with a dance floor with all the tables pushed to the sides. It was packed last night though, apparently for Valentine's Day.
Today was a lazy Sunday. I finished my section of the lab report, then essentially spent the rest of the day reading in the sun. The weather today is ridiculously awesome, bright and sunny and warm with enough of a breeze to not get too hot. This is the first time I've been inside since like 10 this morning. Apparently there's some plans in the making for Valentine's festivities, we'll see how it goes.
Friday, February 12, 2010
So yesterday and today were, in short, awesome and ridiculous.
Yesterday we had our first whale watching trip, where we had to do boat transects. We collected Vero's crab traps and then headed out into the bay to record the number and behavior of whales we saw on our line. Inside the bay I don't think we saw any, but in the mouth I think we counted 17. We also saw a couple breaching, which gray whales don't do very often. We tried to do three transects, one in the bay, one in the mouth and one outside of the bay. We had to end the outside transect because the waves were too high to see any whales over them. Then we turned around and slowed down in the mouth to do photo ID. That was outrageously cool, we had two different whales swim directly under the boat. They surfaced maybe 15-20 feet away and if we had jumped out of the boat we would have landed on them. I was taking pictures, but my camera's batteries died after four pictures, since I'd been taking some all along the boat ride. We stayed out on the water and just watched whales and took pictures for while until it we realized we were already late for a Spanish class.
Then today we went out to Isla Magdalena, one of the islands forming the bay, to look at rocky intertidal zones. But to get there we had to take a 30 min boat ride and an hour hike through the mountains. There's a small fishing co-op village on Isla Magdalena that we went through. The hike started out fairly gently uphill with clearly defined paths but up by the tops of the moutains we were going on narrow, very steep footpaths. At a few points you'd have a drop off and a path only wide enough for one foot at a time. I'm pretty scared of heights and this was just about the worst kind of situation, surrounded by rocky dropoffs hiking on gravelly paths. There were a couple of times I started trembling and I almost cried twice. Going down was awful, I was terrified I was going to fall and start sliding down rock. I took a bunch of pictures from the more stable areas, hopefully you'll be able to get a sense of how steep it was. We finally got to the end and the Pacific Ocean opened up before us, it was a beautiful view.
We got onto the beach and changed shoes to look in the tidepools. My group (Kay and Lindsey) went off to a different set of pools from everyone else, and of course I fell off the first rock I stepped on to. Go figure my only injury was in the tidepools. We had to do quadrats (PVC pipe squares) and record the types of animals and plants in each square. We didn't find much, just a bunch of snails and seagrass. The goal was to see lobsters for Vero, but I don't think anyone saw anything. We stuck around for another 20 minutes and headed back.
The trip back wasn't quite as bad as the trip out, because I knew what I was getting into and it's always easier to control your weight going up. Plus by that time I had told just about everyone that I was super scared of heights and Jenna walked in front of me and kept talking to me. It really helped to be able to follow someone closely and watch their footsteps, plus Jenna's done a good amount of hiking and it made me feel better to see someone who's more confident at it. I felt soo good once I knew we were out of the steep parts.
Once we got back we had dinner and then there was a showing of a documentary this women made in one of the local towns about ecotourism in the area. It's called Ballenas de Oro (Golden Whales), I don't know if it's available anywhere, but it gave a really good view of the issues surrounding fishing and tourism in Bahia Magdalena. The permits and requirements for whale watching are getting too pricy for most locals to afford, so a lot of tourism is foreign run so it doesn't bring as much money to the towns. And creating a marine protected area would mean that a lot of fishermen would either lose their jobs or a part of their income.
Yesterday we had our first whale watching trip, where we had to do boat transects. We collected Vero's crab traps and then headed out into the bay to record the number and behavior of whales we saw on our line. Inside the bay I don't think we saw any, but in the mouth I think we counted 17. We also saw a couple breaching, which gray whales don't do very often. We tried to do three transects, one in the bay, one in the mouth and one outside of the bay. We had to end the outside transect because the waves were too high to see any whales over them. Then we turned around and slowed down in the mouth to do photo ID. That was outrageously cool, we had two different whales swim directly under the boat. They surfaced maybe 15-20 feet away and if we had jumped out of the boat we would have landed on them. I was taking pictures, but my camera's batteries died after four pictures, since I'd been taking some all along the boat ride. We stayed out on the water and just watched whales and took pictures for while until it we realized we were already late for a Spanish class.
Then today we went out to Isla Magdalena, one of the islands forming the bay, to look at rocky intertidal zones. But to get there we had to take a 30 min boat ride and an hour hike through the mountains. There's a small fishing co-op village on Isla Magdalena that we went through. The hike started out fairly gently uphill with clearly defined paths but up by the tops of the moutains we were going on narrow, very steep footpaths. At a few points you'd have a drop off and a path only wide enough for one foot at a time. I'm pretty scared of heights and this was just about the worst kind of situation, surrounded by rocky dropoffs hiking on gravelly paths. There were a couple of times I started trembling and I almost cried twice. Going down was awful, I was terrified I was going to fall and start sliding down rock. I took a bunch of pictures from the more stable areas, hopefully you'll be able to get a sense of how steep it was. We finally got to the end and the Pacific Ocean opened up before us, it was a beautiful view.
We got onto the beach and changed shoes to look in the tidepools. My group (Kay and Lindsey) went off to a different set of pools from everyone else, and of course I fell off the first rock I stepped on to. Go figure my only injury was in the tidepools. We had to do quadrats (PVC pipe squares) and record the types of animals and plants in each square. We didn't find much, just a bunch of snails and seagrass. The goal was to see lobsters for Vero, but I don't think anyone saw anything. We stuck around for another 20 minutes and headed back.
The trip back wasn't quite as bad as the trip out, because I knew what I was getting into and it's always easier to control your weight going up. Plus by that time I had told just about everyone that I was super scared of heights and Jenna walked in front of me and kept talking to me. It really helped to be able to follow someone closely and watch their footsteps, plus Jenna's done a good amount of hiking and it made me feel better to see someone who's more confident at it. I felt soo good once I knew we were out of the steep parts.
Once we got back we had dinner and then there was a showing of a documentary this women made in one of the local towns about ecotourism in the area. It's called Ballenas de Oro (Golden Whales), I don't know if it's available anywhere, but it gave a really good view of the issues surrounding fishing and tourism in Bahia Magdalena. The permits and requirements for whale watching are getting too pricy for most locals to afford, so a lot of tourism is foreign run so it doesn't bring as much money to the towns. And creating a marine protected area would mean that a lot of fishermen would either lose their jobs or a part of their income.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
No internets...so from yesterday, 2/10
Today there was considerable less excitement than yesterday-no earthquakes, no research conundrums, etc. Just a site cleanup (staff and students, everyone assigned a chore) and a bunch of classes-Sustainable Development, Spanish and Coastal Ecology. With AJ we talked about environmental economics, which is how you put an economic value on the environment and ecosystems. We read a paper (Costanza's Value of the World Ecosystems for those scientifically inclined) that estimated the value of our ecosystem services (i.e. nutrient cycling, gas regulation) in dollars, and the value they found was more than the total global GDP. It may sound like a bunch of BS at first glance, but their methods are sound enough to make it the 2nd most cited paper for a period of 10 years. I think it's cool because they didn't even take into account the fact that we couldn't do some of these ecosystem services if we tried. AJ pointed out that if we changed our economy to reflect the environmental costs, our prices would be completely skewed. A product may be four times as much as it is now because the company built their factory on a wetland and we now have to work on processes the waste that that wetland filtered. I think it was the Iroquois who made decisions based on how it would affect people seven generations away. I found that really sobering.
Something that's been hitting me hard here is just how much trash we put out, especially plastics. Puerto San Carlos has trash everywhere, and the vast majority of it is plastic. Plastics take forever to decompose on their own, and often release really noxious chemicals when they do. In the meantime, they threaten the health of our ecosystems. Even if you recycle, that only buys your plastic bottle maybe one more life before the next person throws it out. I think that's something that's going to stick with me-finding things that are reusable instead of disposable and conserving water and energy. In suburbia we take it for granted that water is readily available. What we don't realize is that it takes vast resources to then treat that water after you use it, and to pump it back to someone's house. Another interesting "green" fact-the easiest way to greatly decrease your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat, or at least cows. The resources that go into feeding, raising, killing and transporting cows is one of the greatest contributors to carbon footprint.
Tomorrow we're going out for our first whale watching, weather permitting. We're going to collect data on how many whales we see, where we see them and behavior (spy-hopping, breaching, diving, etc). We had to make up our slates beforehand because there's so much information we have to collect that there's no way we'd be able to do it on the fly without anything in front of us. I'm still a little concerned that we're going to skip something. We're also picking up some crab pots for one of Vero's studies, and I'm really glad we don't have to snorkel for it. I liked snorkeling, but I would not want to go snorkeling then spend the next 3 hours on the boat.
Tonight seven of us went into town for a salsa lesson that Brady set up. We convinced some of the guys to come, even though we didn't end up dancing in pairs. The dance instructor was really amusing, definitely stereotypical male dance teacher. Vero came with us, and she's good! She takes his regular dance class (you know, for mexicanas who already know how to dance) so he kept using her for demonstrating. We did basic steps of salsa, meringue, "country" and samba. The Mexican version of country is much more intense. It's technically still square dancing but probably twice as fast with lots more moving. And the samba was tough-white girl got no hip movement. I was beat by the end. Another good thing about Mexico-the lesson cost 20 pesos, the equivalent of $1.50. I've spent more on one beer than I did for an hour's worth of dance lesson.
Something that's been hitting me hard here is just how much trash we put out, especially plastics. Puerto San Carlos has trash everywhere, and the vast majority of it is plastic. Plastics take forever to decompose on their own, and often release really noxious chemicals when they do. In the meantime, they threaten the health of our ecosystems. Even if you recycle, that only buys your plastic bottle maybe one more life before the next person throws it out. I think that's something that's going to stick with me-finding things that are reusable instead of disposable and conserving water and energy. In suburbia we take it for granted that water is readily available. What we don't realize is that it takes vast resources to then treat that water after you use it, and to pump it back to someone's house. Another interesting "green" fact-the easiest way to greatly decrease your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat, or at least cows. The resources that go into feeding, raising, killing and transporting cows is one of the greatest contributors to carbon footprint.
Tomorrow we're going out for our first whale watching, weather permitting. We're going to collect data on how many whales we see, where we see them and behavior (spy-hopping, breaching, diving, etc). We had to make up our slates beforehand because there's so much information we have to collect that there's no way we'd be able to do it on the fly without anything in front of us. I'm still a little concerned that we're going to skip something. We're also picking up some crab pots for one of Vero's studies, and I'm really glad we don't have to snorkel for it. I liked snorkeling, but I would not want to go snorkeling then spend the next 3 hours on the boat.
Tonight seven of us went into town for a salsa lesson that Brady set up. We convinced some of the guys to come, even though we didn't end up dancing in pairs. The dance instructor was really amusing, definitely stereotypical male dance teacher. Vero came with us, and she's good! She takes his regular dance class (you know, for mexicanas who already know how to dance) so he kept using her for demonstrating. We did basic steps of salsa, meringue, "country" and samba. The Mexican version of country is much more intense. It's technically still square dancing but probably twice as fast with lots more moving. And the samba was tough-white girl got no hip movement. I was beat by the end. Another good thing about Mexico-the lesson cost 20 pesos, the equivalent of $1.50. I've spent more on one beer than I did for an hour's worth of dance lesson.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)