Anna's Atoll Adventure

We added some more tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, bok choy, squash and cucumbers.

AIAS Each CAST does 3 days of collecting ants across the entire island (within and without the infestation area) with centrifuge tubes baited with chunks of SPAM. When I say entire island I MEAN entire island. That means putting down a tube every 50m even if the means climbing on top of the "sealed" bunkers. All the grid points, roughly 400 of them, where we place the tubes are divided among the 5 of us and we each have to cover close to 80 points a day, twice because we walk the route of points putting out tubes labeled with their corresponding grid location and within 2hrs we have to re trace our route to collect them in the same order we put them out. Because of the magnitude of this survey and because these routes are only walked twice a year, we have to spend a lot of time clearing our routes and locating the grid points which are often times in the middle of dense vegetation (the easiest ones to locate are on the runway but they almost always have faded l...

The fact the storm Erick completely passed us left us feeling a little bummed because we had done all that prep for nothing! Also we thought it'd be cool to experience just a little exciting weather, maybe just a category 1... Ah well, Steven says there's still time left in hurricane season. Monday and Tuesday were miserable because we had the exact opposite of a hurricane. No wind, no rain, and no clouds just hot, suffocating air. Definition of doldrums. The only good thing was the water was insanely flat and glassy those few days and we had some great snorkeling visibility and the evening sunsets were extremely peaceful. FINALLY some relief on Tuesday night with a light breeze and a sprinkle of rain. We're getting good at our work now and we completed the second Red Tailed Tropic Bird MIC in just 3 days and had pretty easy go of it because those birds have a low nesting population this time of year. Saturday we had another bonfire and we've gotten pretty good at ...

Again we were battling the stupid weather while trying to complete ant surveys and on top of it we had a Tropical Storm warning to deal with. The first day of AIAS was Monday but just as we were all about to put out our last tubes the rain made us scrap the day's work. It's so infuriating. There is so much preparation that goes into even a single day and this survey takes THREE. We had a few days of stress where we were close to needing to chose preparing for a possible Tropical Storm Erick over completing our work without having either course of action be guaranteed (the storm was to far away to be sure of where it was going and if we had one more day of the survey get rained out we'd have to redo the entire survey at a later date). Obviously we were instructed to prioritize the storm preparation but we were also told to complete the survey if possible. This meant around 4 days of preparing our survey tools the night before, starting the survey at first light, coming ba...

We started the week with the Booby MIC on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It rained 2 of those three days and the Booby babies also looked sad and soggy but because there was much less rain it was mostly comical. At this point we had 190mm of rainfall. Steven thinks we had the rainiest summer in CAST history, we'd have to check the archived data to be sure. Our other priority for this week was the All Island Ant Survey (AIAS) prep. 

I've lost the schedule for the second week of July but we celebrated Jake's birthday on the 13th and he turned 23 on the 15th. The third week of July had a lot of ant survey work scheduled. We were supposed to do hand searching, and Treatment Monitoring and well as prepare for the All Island Ant Survey. Unfortunately we received enough rain on Monday night to have to cancel the hand searching for Tuesday. On Wednesday we more than doubled the amount of rain we'd received since we got here IN A SINGLE DAY. 88 millimeters at 8:30 am and still raining. Everything was soaking and we over flowed all of our catchment barrels. None of my clothes were completely dry the whole week, even when I hung them in my tent or the ant cave. Most of us ended up putting the rain flys on our tents, even though it made them almost unbearably stuffy, just because the rain would come in sideways and go through the mesh screen on the tops of the tents. I've never had a job that was so weathe...

Boobies - Red Footed ( Sula sula ), Brown ( Sula leucogaster ), and Masked ( Sula dactylatra ). These cute lil guys are the puppies of the sky. They have funny webbed feet with tiny little claws that are good for paddling in water AND perching on trees. They make nests for their chicks out of twigs between 1-6 feet off the ground and do not seem to have a preference of vegetation to nest in. Booby chicks are my favorite because they are cuter for longer and have more endearing quirks than Red Tails or Frigates. While they aren't the only plunge-divers the live here, I see Boobies hanging out on the water the most  out of all the pleagic seabirds on JA. I haven't been able to research it but I also think they have unique eyes for seeing above and below the surface. If we approach them while they're nesting or roosting they do a funny head bob, or "Booby Bow" while rotating left and right, which I think helps them establish depth or at least better perception, as th...