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...