marine ecosystems

so for the last 2 weeks, we've been having our marine ecosystems class. our main professor, chuck, is a biological oceanographer who specializes in using acoustic technology to study marine life. we started out last week with some guest lecturers coming to speak about their own personal research relating to bioacoustics. what a life chuck's grad students have coming out here to do a little work and give a lecture or two.. the first woman we worked with is a marine biologist down at honokohau harbor/ kaloko-honokahau historical park where the state is in the process of expanding the harbor. there they're using hydrophones planted in waterproof casings, rigged with batteries and hard drives or palm pilots, to record the sounds of the bay, most importantly the humpback whales. last year, one of the girls from cornell did her internship down there and monitored the spinner dolphins in the bay as well as the boat traffic. my crew of 3 students actually went out and helped retrieve the hard drive so that we could download this data. to make things especially interesting, all this week and last, we've had a film crew from cornell's lab of ornithology following us around to watch us do acoustics research because they're working on a documentary called 'sounds of the sea'. later in the week, we went up on the west kohala coast to watch humpback whales and simultaneously listen in to the hydrophones placed out in the bays. i never thought i'd actually get tired of watching whales fluke... for friday and saturday, we headed down to kawaihae harbor about 10 miles to the west of us to work on building a canoe. these canoes are very unlike our canoes on the mainland.. these are big double hulled 50 ft long canoes like ancient Hawaiians and Polynesians used to travel between islands. they used no instruments to navigate and instead simply used the stars. in the last 30 years, the canoe tradition has been renewed in Hawai'i and a man named papa mao came over from a small island in micronesia to reteach the hawai'ians celestial navigation. that was controversial in his homeland because the skill is supposed to be something only passed within the family. now, hawai'ians are giving back to papa mao by building him a canoe to take back to his home country and reteach his own people the tradition that he helped to renew in hawaii. western culture is becoming very prevalent in micronesia and so he hopes this will help to renew interest in ancient traditions. however, papa mao is very sick so the canoe must be finished fast. we spent the two days working on papa mao's canoe sanding and painting, and also raising money down at a local grocery store in kona. over the night on friday, we got to stay in a house owned by the canoe club up the coast a bit. ben found a few dead cockroaches and centipedes outside that he used to hide in peoples' clothes and freak them out in the morning. conveniently it was all recoreded on videotape. on saturday night, dad and ian arrived in kona :) i got to have a great big breakfast at hawaiian style cafe with them and go to the beach with them on sunday. it seems crazy that i hadnt seen them for 2 months. this week, we worked on a manta ray tracking project. we split into crews of 3 people and worked 12 hour shifts over a 2 day period on a boat owned by NOAA. i was lucky to be on the first crew where we had to find a ray and tag it so that we could later use hydrophones to follow it using the frequency of its acoustic tag. i volunteered myself to scout out the rays, and after a while, found myself face to face with two 15 ft or so rays. pretty amazing. my lips were definitely quivering around the snorkel. i followed them around until tim, the grad student we were working with, was ready to tag it. unfortunately we lost the signal of the ray soon after, and spent most of the day searching hte coast for our ray. fortunately though, we were entertained by whales breaching right off our bow, and several pods of spinner dolphins, and a beautiful sunset. needless to say, i went straight to sleep after we finished off an entire pizza after getting home.