VLOG: Marine Conservation Internship-message from Honduras!

 
And, yes, it's called Operation Wallasea. I essentially fundraised for this project last year.
And Oya has a significant contribution to that, which I cannot thank them enough.
 
 
So I thought I'd tell you a little bit more about work that we're doing out here. In the first two weeks, I was essentially learning. I was learning a scuba dive. I was learning about all the fish species, all the coral species. And so I got my PADI open water diving certification and my Advanced PADI open water qualification.
 
And now in these last two weeks, I've been acting as a research assistant. The first week I was working on Damselfish, which are a type of fish species that act as farmers, and they'll chase away many types of fish from their territories even if they're much bigger than them.
They have quite the character.
 
Essentially, we were collecting research by setting up GoPro's when we go scuba diving,
and then we would collect them, and we would look at the data and see how many fish they're chasing off and seeing the impact of damper fish on coral.
 
 
This week, I've been working on sea urchins. We've been setting up benthic transects along the sea floor at different depths. And what we're doing then is we're counting the number of sea urchins that we see. So there are different species that we're looking for, which actually are just two in particular. There are the common sea urchin and there's the long spine sea urchin.
And by counting these, we're going to compare this data with another coral reef, which is about an hour away from here called Tela.
 
The reason why we're comparing these is because they're very two different coral reef systems in terms of their conditions. Tela has more turbid waters and a lot more diodema,
so a lot more sea urchins. Whereas here, they don't have as many sea urchins.
 
And so, we are comparing the data and datasets between them. These have been ongoing projects for years with Opwall.
 
Without OYA, I wouldn't have been able to contribute to this and I wouldn't be able to be here right now.
 
And it's been the most incredible experience and I cannot thank out you enough.