Monday, June 17, 2013

Hazardous Marine Life

Last week we talked about hazardous marine life and here is the accompanying chalk board drawing.

I've got a shark, a Portuguese man of war, an eel, urchin, blue ringed octopus, lion fish, fire coral, and a cone snail.  Today we are talking SCUBA cylinders, but no drawing. Long, busy weekend with little sleep equals zero creative energy...

Friday, June 14, 2013

Scientific Diver Qualification Course!

Yesterday, the scientific dive course began. This is the second year that I will be assisting Jason in teaching the course.  It is a three week intensive couse that is 10 hours a day for the students and more like 12-14 for Jason and I.  The course is required for students who will need to use diving for the research while they are at UH.  
The first few days we are in the classroom and this has afforded me the opportunity to use my favorite artistic medium--the chalkboard! More posts to come...


Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Things I shouldn't be doing

Although I should be working diligently on describing octopus mating behavior, I have also been working on making a rubber stamp. Here is the outcome of my labor. 


A fun project for a night on boats... I've got quite a bit more rubber left and more creative juices pumping. I'll post subsequent projects (if there are any).

Monday, June 3, 2013

Jeff Corwin comes to Coconut Island!

Last week,  Jeff Corwin and his team came to Coconut Island to film Dr. Carl Meyer and his shark research. They needed someone to drive a whaler up close to the other boat so that Travis (the guy on camera 2) could get good footage of the sharks.  I also had the producer, Carolina, and the sound guy, Tyler, on the boat. Unfortunately, they didn't fare so well in the open ocean and both got sick.  Usually in those situations I feel like I'll get sick too, but thankfully I didn't.  

It was pretty exciting to meet Jeff Corwin since he basically does what I want to do--travel the world and talk about animals.  Who wouldn't want to do that?!  The day I went out with the film crew, we saw a small tiger shark, but none of the six-gills we went out to catch.  The next day, however, they caught a whole bunch! Of course I missed it :( But, I'm glad they got the footage they wanted of the research happening in the Holland Lab.

Carl Meyer and an associate in Japan are tagging these sharks with devices that have accelerometers (to find out how fast the sharks move), temperature and depth gauges (pretty self explanatory) and video cameras! So, when the sharks go off and do their sharky stuff, we get to see what they are up to. It's pretty neat--I saw some of the video and it's like you are riding on the back of a shark!  It turns out that they often meet up with other shark pals and so there is great footage of them all together, even separate species mingling in the same area.