July 18 - 30 2011 / Guam: A Snorkeling Trip
Seeing Fishes, Corals, and a Far-Distant Island
Part 2 - Spawning and Other Wonderful Things
I lay awake from 3 a. m. this morning, anxious over the whole thing. We went back to the marine lab yesterday evening, all set for spawning, but it turned out that Lee had gotten the date wrong and tonight would be the night. Meantime of course we have not done any practice night snorkels and so if it is tonight, in dark waters, we will have had no previous experiences.
I so much wanted to see this—the coral spawning--in its natural state, but in order to do that I can now see there is a lot more to it than was described in the writeup for this trip. Just getting out to the spot, contending with wave and surge action, hanging in the nighttime water above the coral for probably an hour or more (and the other person on this trip gets cold easily, much quicker than I). So I'm feeling uncertain. I liked being at the lab, I liked talking science with the guys there, and I would love to “help” at the time of spawning—but it sure isn't what I had envisioned when I sent in my large amount of money for this trip.
In discussions with Dave and Lee I have repeatedly interjected how much the things they describe about the marine creatures are the same in the plant world. I so love this. If you know one natural science you sure can know a lot about another. When all goes down to dust the dust will be as that which we know now.
...when I came back to the room just now there was my house skink just outside my closet. He allowed me to take his picture before going into the closet. I wonder if he was after the water that sometimes gathers on the tile floor near the air conditioning thermostat.
So my family is back home and I talked to them this morning. Last night I looked carefully at all the family pictures John put in my phone, and it was helpful.
Seen while snorkeling: A small river of fish passes through the sandy canyon. The farmer fish peer at me before continuing their business in the coral. The ornate butterflyfish or is it a surgeonfish defends his nest vigorously. The moorish idols hang stately. The numerous sea cucumbers lie apparently inert on the bottom, sand over their black, except for the big knobby black ones. Almost invisible neon blue ones dart among their coral castles. I glide above the coral cities and suburbs, watching the inhabitants as they pass along the coral streets. The blennies whisk then immediately vanish in stillness against the sand. Waves push me here and there. Huge gardens, extravagances of corals. This amazing and active world, just that one molecule below.
So again this morning we tried the snorkel site where the corals are to spawn this evening. No dice—too difficult. My co-traveler wants to go to the lab, where at least we will be certain of seeing something. The wave action is strong, and it will be night, and we might have problems in seeing, out there. So it's decided: I will not, after all, get to see what I thought I would.
This afternoon we went for a short walk on a little trail in a nature reserve. Lush jungly growth, earthy fragrances, two lizards, four spiders, a red wasp, two kinds of the large black butterflies, one with white, one with yellow bands on their hindwings.
So we go to the lab tonight, and hope for the best. Tomorrow we are to spend the day on a zodiac—in the blazing sun—and snork from it. I am not fabulously happy about this—no shelter, no shade. But supposedly in the evening we will do a night snorkel, and about that I am happy.
In Cambridge, it was 101 degrees today. It is not that hot here!
All right, I bought a little bottle of wine and I will go have it on my balcony.
Later, this evening. So we had a quick dinner at the bar in the hotel here, and drove to the lab. I was fully suited up for night mosquitoes, in my ratty, comfy hiking stuff. Had the corals begun to set? No. We wandered around, looking at great stuff. I have fallen in love with the sea cucumbers and there were lots of them to look at and to hold. The feral lab cats were there, too, skinny, alert ones.
Then the corals, in their concrete tubs, began to set their egg and sperm packets. Immediately the guys put different batches of coral into different big glass tubs. I couldn't really see, actually, the setting. They just looked kind of dotted, I guess you might say. We hung around, in the dark. I passed out bug spray. We watched the corals with shaded lights, so as not to disturb them.
Then, at just about 9:00, right on the dot, a few tiny pinkish gametes began to rise to the surface of the water first in one tub, then in another until all were going. A crowd gathered, armed with glasses and pipets, to gently suck the gametes out. And finally (this being something I have done so often when ponding, and I have a good touch), I got to help one of the guys gather up the miniscule, pinkish living things. Sweat poured down my face in the heat and humidity, but I have to say I was in heaven. Just in heaven. The dark, the heat and humidity, the task, the proximity of others—wonderful, magical.
After about 45 minutes our coral was done, and all its gametes collected. The crew of guys did some other stuff with them, lots of joking going on about our babies, and it was agreed we'd come back in a couple of days to see how the little ones were getting along.
On the way home, joking and laughing, satisfaction.
This Dave person, the part-time guide, who I think is about 34 or so, has just gotten engaged to the Japanese woman with whom he has been for about 6 years; her family are wildly opposed; it will be hard. I find him very attractive, and this morning, waiting to go out, we sat together and watched Fox “news”, bemoaning the current mess in Congress, and I found him extremely, and surprisingly, intelligent and articulate, and compassionate. A lovely combination. I hope it goes well for him with his woman.
We went out on a ratty zodiac with a friend of the guys, to snork from it in deeper water. Fabulous, fabulous. At last I could just hang there and watch as much as I wanted. Cleaner wrasse patrolling. The deep and precipitous dropoff at the edge of the reef, and I'm not afraid of it. Squadrons of monocled bream, hanging motionless, accompanied by impossibly long and thin trumpetfish. An octopus! courting by rushing about and turning pink. I said, ooh, sexy. Dave said, a guy who's wearing pink is confident in his sexuality. Liked it, I did. [Turns out that possibly the behavior I saw was a female protecting her eggs--not clear.]
A nasty, poisonous scorpionfish that only I saw, looking like the bottom but moved at just the wrong time so I saw him, him and his orange and yellow wings. A huge rain squall as we finished and were coming in, rain in sheets and fierceness, soaking us totally as we rocketed across the bay. Loved it. I am so happy that I can have fun with these men.
Dave told me a terrible story about how in high school he wrote a paper and his teacher said it was illiterate and would not allow him to take advanced classes. He whose spoken vocabulary is without question the most apt and sophisticated I have ever heard. On behalf of teachers everywhere, I apologized to this very intelligent man. Oh, it’s nothing, it doesn’t matter, he said. I said, Well, it obviously does since you told me this painful act of ignorance.
This morning, Liberation Day for my room skink. I took a bandana, carefully lifted the plastic bag in my closet where I’d seen him last. He's not there, but just at the hem of a dress hangs a telltale tail. I see you, sweetie, I told him. Scooped him gently up in the bandana and carried him down the elevator and out into the moist morning garden. Found a lush place, put the bandana down on the walkway and gently opened it. There he was, his tail all scricked up. He looked at the greenery. He raised his head, raised it higher, then higher, and then YES! off he darted, and I went in to breakfast with a smile.
At a ravishing coral thicket, seething with life, I offered thanks, to you, precious Florida friend, for showing me the door to this place so many years ago.
So tonight, a night snorkel.
The night snorkel! I had extremely annoying equipment problems at first, but fortunately we could stand up—and we were right in the front of the hotel (garish thing that it is, much less here than meets the eye).
I found my very own octopus!! My first thought was: ???frog??? but no, there he was, on top of a low bit of coral and rubble, and he lurched along a bit, and then I saw his tentacles (after this trip I most definitely do not eat things with tentacles), and then he shot off and disappeared.
It is hard to describe this. The branching coral stands were seething, bursting, writhing, boiling with life. The smallish crimson squirrelfish among the branches were striped wildly and dotted in red, yellow, orange, black, with small erect black-lined dorsal fins. Within the coral thickets you could see glimpses in every opening of neon blue and violet. Black and white banded fish moved in clouds around the coral. Everybody was eating. During the day they all just seem to laze about, standing or gliding slowly in the water column. At night they are fierce with eating activity.
How strange to look above the water briefly and see the glorious sunset. Music of a loud sort began at the hotel and infiltrated one’s ears. We used our flashlights, circles of white light amid the thus-made-visible rain of sand in the water.
A revelation, a bit scary, of the furious life just barely under there!
At the end, almost nose to sand, the water shot with thousands of miniature torpedoes, silvery blue, shooting apparently randomly everywhere, like a tiny fireworks show without chrysanthemums.
This is all going by too fast, and I never get a chance to just lurk and watch, and then study—it's the studying I need now.