How about a picture of everyone that’s aboard the Nancy Foster. Exciting to see 9 women scientist and 4 men scientist standing all together eager to explore. The Caribbean is known that the water there is crystal clear blue. Where tourist seem to always flock to, getting their tan on these beautiful white sand beaches or take a dip and enjoy the experience of snorkeling. While swimming they will be able to see the beauty of the coral reefs and the diversity of fish. But as scientist, biologist and oceanographers, we are more interested where the coral reef fish spawn and how the processes that transport the larvae to their final destination, coral reefs.
The Virgin Islands are relatively small, where St Croix is isolated from the other islands. Scientist are amazed that its position affects how the waters flow into and around the northern island like St Thomas and St Johns. Therefore, aboard the Nancy Foster they are trying to understand the flow to the shelf break south between St Thomas and St Johns. That is, if there is connectivity between inshore and offshore areas, or if there is a barrier between them. They are very excited to collect the data of this study! After the expedition we will then be able to better understand the specific mechanisms which drive interactions between fisheries and the environment in the USVI, and hopefully be able to measure the effectiveness of current fisheries management strategies, while developing methods for improvement.
Due to weather we have had high seas and it has was difficult for them to get in contact with me. But according to Professor Lindo, he states that they are good, they have been a bit busy, and the weather should be getting better starting today so they will recover forces tomorrow. Also, yesterday and today they were doing basically biological stations. Tomorrow they will start his new stations (drifters north of St Croix as seen above) which should be exciting. They are still continuing to look at the positions of the bio drifters. Giovanni has noticed that they are taking an interesting path, where they have drifted along the shelf from the east to west. He also noticed that one of them stopped transmitting, and the other ones just kept going the same way. The reason why we are deploying pairs of drifters is to compute relative dispersion, a measurement of the separation of two surface particles (e.g. larvae) drifting in the ocean.
