pictures part 2

our dining commons area...that white board was filled with fond memories.
the living room area of our dorm. lots of cheesy mystery and romance books on those shelves for people who have nothing to do with their lives. the staircase leads to the girls living quarters. on the right is Irma. we have a special relationship: she calls me "jackie chan". jackie chan=jonathan, kinda sounds the same right? i think the majority of my mosquito bites, including the infamous ones occured here.


here's a nice panorama of the north part of the island. the two bays can be seen on the right side of the photo.

PICTURES PICTURES PICTURES (part one)

Alright where to start? here we go , this here is our beloved Gump Research Station... Buildings from the left to the right: we have the dorm area, the cabanna, the blue tanks (of death), the wet lab, and the research labs. the shot is actually a 360 view and so the right part of the picture actually part of the left. Now, im going to take you directly through the center of the photograph:
As you can see, the wet lab is actually divided into two buildings: the touch tank area and that other building with the green roof, touch tanks are places where experiments with organisms are carried out. lots of fish tanks along here. you can also see the blue tanks (of death) out on the right to give you a sense of direction. Continuing on...
If you walked through the wet lab, you would have gotten here: the dock area, this is where we load up our boats, park them, and lay stuff out to dry.

Now we are going out of this area and going towards the right of the first photograph, the brown building...The building itself is made up of two floors.

this here is our computer lab located on the second floor of the research lab building. If you wanted to know where i am sitting, i usually sit in the far chair of the left side. (i believe my backpack is there) . this is the dwelling place of janky internet.this is one of the lower level labs. this one in particular was known as the dirt lab; but UCLA did all of our in lab experiments here. as we were leaving, a smithsonian team took over. apparently they wanted to make a complete genome project of every single organism found in Moorea (quite a feat)

Wrapping up the last days

wow...where to even start? starting from last weekend things have been very exciting. on saturday night, we went out to a tahitian concert on the island. what was really exciting was that the band featured was the same one to which we had our dance numbers to! the concert wasnt just a concert in itself but it also featured dancers, and for the first time, we got to see how the dances really were supposed to act (we really butchered it). sunday was a day to finally wrap up our projects. we went out to various parts of the bay to collect our cages. luckily this time we had a boat, so we didnt have to swim all over the place.

however, we were far from finished. we had to work on synthesizing and interpreting our data for our presentations today. but...it's all over.

tonight there's supposed to be a toga dance party/undie run....yay.... (note the sarcasm).

this will probably be one of the last entries for this blog site. thanks for joining in on the ride...i will be updating this site with pictures.

see ya.

crunch time...

well hello everyone...im super tired right now, but im writting anyways because the slurring of my type and mental state will be able to help everyone understand what i've been going through. so have fun!

if there was ever a crunch day, this was it:

i guess it started monday when we had to set up two experiments simultaneously, the first experiment which was supposed to start that day, and the other for the next day. by dinner time we were able to complete our first, and complimented that the layout resembled that to a sushi bar (we had different species of algae growing together). the second required that we create cages for an "in-situ", that is, an in-field experiment. by the time we finished creating all 10 cages it was already 2:30 AM in the morning.

by 6:30 AM we were up and running, placing algae into the cages, and by 9, set out to do our experiments. funny thing, halfway completing the 1st part of the experiment, we began to question our methods and everything fell apart into rubble. by the time lunch arrived, we had nothing accomplished except being wet, tired and confused.

by the Grace of God, we were able to pull our act together over some coffee and by 1 set out to do our experiment, which required us to bring 10 pound weighted transects up and down all over the bay. i nearly died the first time i did this but somehow was given the strength to not only do the same distance but swim further up the bay.
we were able to finish what was required of us by the time the sun set.

im sooooo happy its over. although im happy also that i got darker throughout the day. i hope i dont get melanoma. :D

last night...

was pretty interesting. to say the least.

we had our second tahitian feast this quarter, but we weren't the main guests of honor this time. Instead, we had a couple of UC Regents as well as the Review Board of Berkeley (the Gump Station is owned by Berkeley). Along with the great food (poisson crue, breadfruit, stone oven cooked pork, etc), we also enjoyed great entertainment, including karaoke as well as tahitian dancers.

except that the tahitian dancers weren't tahitian. they were bruins.

among the guys (6 of us), only 3 actually participated in the cultural dances. including me. i have absolutely NO idea how i got dragged into that.

all to say, in the near future, you're probably going to get facebook photo updates involving me almost completely nude, with a loin cloth and leaves and over my neck, arms and legs.
i'd like to apologize in advance...

on a brighter side, the natives were particularly enthusiastic. as one of them put it, almost all the time, it has always been the tahitians dancing for the outsiders. now that the outsiders were dancing for the tahitians, it gives her a warm fuzzy happy feeling.

and i still dont know how i even got into that....

phew....

im sorry i've been incommunicado, as the days are getting busier and busier.
i've been pretty much immersed with work for the past few weeks, to the point where i wonder if i should change "daily escapades" to "bimonthly escapades" although the latter lacks umph to it.

so since last week, we started up with our independent projects. prior to these, we've pretty much were drone for various projects proposed by our professors and TA's. although they required lots of time and effort, they eventually provided us the foundation needed to work on our own projects, which have no intervention from the professors.

i wont really bore you with the topic of my research, as i doubt most of you will be fascinated by algae, but to say the least, the work has been anything but being a breeze. To start off, our allotted outdoor tank's (more like a big blue round tub) water was supplied by a faulty system which gave us undistributed flow. One tank (not ours) filled up faster than the other (ours). In an effort to fix this, we tried hooking up other hoses and ended up with very wet and drenching consequences.
To make the situtation even more devastating/humorous (depending on your flavor), another group had set up their experiment in one of the tanks (the one that wasnt ours). Initially, everything had worked out fine, as both tanks were beginning to flow out evenly. We then proceeded to work on other things, but taking one more look at our setup, we saw the other groups experiments being sloshed around in their tank.
Sorry to go on a tangent but i guess i have to explain the set up first. The pipe that distributes the seawater hangs overhead, and a tube is attached to it. The tube itself is attached to a valve, which attaches to another tube, which attaches to a t-valve, which supplies both tanks with water. Got that? hahaha.....
So what happened, was the the hose going to our tank became disconnected from the t-valve, and produced extra current in the other tank, effectively destroying the other group's experiment. In an effort to make wrong things right, we devoted the remainder of the day to resetting and redoing their experiment. Not wanting to repeat the same mistake, we decided to fiddle around with the water system before placing the experiments back into the tank. Fiddling around with it, we somehow disconnected the tube that was attached to the pipe, allowing full flow/unvalved seawater splashing all over the place (remember, the tube connects the pipe to the valve), including the tank we previously wrecked. Good thing we didn't place in the experiments yet! We decided to fix the pipe/tube problem with duct tape. And for the remainder of the day, we fixed and placed the other team's project into the tank and things went well.

the next morning, we were setting up and getting ready for our experiments when we spied The Maltese Falcon [link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(yacht)] coming in the bay. It's an amazing ship that is completely motorized by computer that an 12 year old can manage it. In admiring this magnificent ship in the bay, we looked over to the water tank area, and lo and behold, what should we see, but a cascading waterfall pouring into the other tank, and most certainly destroyed the other group's experiment. Upon inspection, we realized that the tube connecting the pipe and valve required some sort of clamping in order to stay. So again, we spent the entire day trying to fix the jankey (my new favorite word) water system.

the next day, things went pretty smoothly for us and we were back on schedule. too bad the weather decided to disagree! as our experiment was weather dependent, our results for it were pretty sub-optimal and nothing like we've predicted. hopefully, the weather will clear up and things will look better as we begin our second trial.

one thing i've been reminded through this is the sovereignty of God, and how we may plan our ways but He is the one that determines our steps. it's been keeping my attitude and perspective in check. oh and a funny thing! good news: i went to church! bad news: it was a catholic one....
good news: it was in french! bad news: it was in french. hahaha....

God Bless, and sorry for such a long delay and failing to keep you updated as much as i wanted to.

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE MY MOTHER!

Or if you are squeamish…

This is mainly for my parents and family, but for my friends, this can be pure entertainment!

So I went to the doctor today as a strong strong STRONG suggestion by my professor about my mosquito bites. Apparently, due to my inability to resist scratching them at 3am in the morning, the small bites (pardon the perversion) blossomed into puss flowers.

From my mass e-mail, you could have guessed these bites came from back when.

The reason for the title for those out of the look comes from the fact that my mom was dreading me going to Mo’orea in fears that I would get hurt and being the (how do I put it?) absent minded kid that I am, would make problems for myself. Sadly I think I just proved her right. (mothers…..)

I was apprehensive about going to the doctor, since I argued the wounds were slowly healing, after the lime treatment and antibiotic ointment, But apparently my professor disagreed. After a trip to the doctor and pharmacy, I managed to rack up a $200 medical bill (yay!)

*Note if you are my mom or dad, don’t worry, I have receipts and documentation so Kaiser will be reimbursing the fee, which I will have to pay to my professor who provided the money for now.

You know how in TV shows how the dad or husband freaks out after their wife or daughter buys an expensive article of clothing and justifies it since it was on sale? Well mom and dad, if I had to purchase these antibiotics in the states, I would have racked up a $800 dollar bill instead!

Yay! Go me!

a hiking we will go....

Hey everyone,

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day. Instead of doing our traditional marine bio projects, all the students got to tag along with one of our resident terrestrial biologists (terrestrial biologists living at a marine biology lab!?) who was studying obligate mutual relationships between a certain species of plant with a moth. However, instead of helping him (like we were supposed to) we decided to be touristy and just hike.

Our site was the famous Mt. Tetiaroa from which the atoll Tetiaroa could be seen. Mt. Tetiaroa, along with a few other mountains were all part of a volcanic crater that helped form Moorea, but with years of erosion and such, parts of it collapsed, creating a series of mountains and valleys.

Some really cool stuff during the hike were these lizards called skinks which had bright red heads and blue tails. We also saw a couple of wild chickens but apart from that not many other animals were seen. Of the plants, we saw the invasive weed called Miconium, which happens to also plague other tropical islands such as Hawaii and is noted for loosening topsoil and created large area landslides shortly after it rains. We also saw some huge Tahitian chestnut trees, and some plant that resembles a strangler fig (a pretty cool plant).

The hike was a rather strenuous and long. We started heading off around 7:10 am and we didn’t end until 1:30 pm. The path although, well planned out (other hike trails in Moorea are not as defined), was steep and was not without it’s perils including steep ledges, mangled vines (which can trip you if you’re not careful), low hanging tree branches, and smooth slippery rocks. We thought the way up was tough, but we were far from correct. We took an alternate route down the mountain, which faced the southern slope. This is important because here, in the S. Hemisphere, the sun is always part of the northern sky, this means that the southern slope has less exposure and is therefore, wet and slippery. You combine wet and slippery with steep and you know you’re in for a lot of trouble :P.

We had a jolly time, slipping, shrieking, and getting a few injuries (I got a rug burn from hugging a tree) as well as a few others.

One more thing to mention about the hike is the amazing view you get when you reach the ridge of the volcano. Looking on either side will reveal an ocean. I would have taken a panorama of this for you, but unfortunately my batteries died.

To make the situation sadder, I think I broke my charger. I tried recharging the batteries in it, but the charging light doesn’t come on. Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this?

phew!

it's been a while since i last updated this; the reason being because i've been pretty busy! i've been swamped up with class and group projects these past two weeks and am currently working on an additional 3!

since all that stuff's pretty banal, since im betting you want to know more about the more exciting areas of marine biology, i'll tell you about night snorkeling.

night snorkeling is something that everybody should do. just because it's pretty freaky, especially near the drop off. i think part of it is because your vision is so limited, and in the back of your mind, you're going OCD because you're scared that your dive light might turn off. how funny because that's exactly what happened to me! good thing i had friends!

the night scene (underwater of course) looks drastically different than during the day. most of the fish you see during the day, are securely tucked inside the corals, and act rather stupidly (you could touch or even catch them if you wanted to) but the more ominous scene occurs near the frindge, where from the depths, you can see hundreds of Diadema sea urchings (the really really long spikey ones) emerge, and larger fish swimming out at night. can you imagine a shark swimming out at you from no where? (enter jaws theme)

on a cooler note, there are thousands of tiny phosflorescent light producing plankton, in which when you turn off the light, and swish the water, you see tiny explosions of light. and i also learned that it takes a lot for a pufferfish to inflate, mainly, stepping on it and pinning it to the ocean floor. i would have used my hands to spin it around like a ball, but i wasn't wearing any gloves :P

feelings about the deep blue sea....

april 18 2008

there's something about being surrounded by life, as you swim by coral after coral, admiring the fish, snails, crabs, shrimp and all of the sudden the waves start pounding as you reach the reef front. frothy waves envelope your sight of vision. then all of the sudden the water calms down, as you are underneath it and all you can see in front of you is deep blue sea. looking forward blue water with sun rays flickering and then looking below is deep dark blue. no life in sight. you cant help feeling like you're really small in such a setting. the sounds of the waves crashing earlier have been muted down and all seems quiet and tranquil, while all the same time seeming dangerous and unpredictable. your body and mind fight whether you would dare stay longer in this area or fight back to go into the safety of the reef. all the same time reminding yourself that He holds the oceans within his hand....

on updates:
some crazy flu has been going around, and is causing people to throw up. however, they seem to be back 100% by the next day.
we explored what was called a motu: islands formed by reefs that had grown above present day sea level. i had no idea how large a crown of thorns can grow! they are actually around the size of my torso (i know that's not saying much but....) also we found a huge HUGE moray eel! his head was the size of my backpack, and i almost ran into him by mistake!
we also visited a remote island called tetiaroa but it was occupied more with birds. pretty cool.

be prepared for a mass email coming up soon. a lot more things will be described in detail.

first weekend....

april 13 2008
was pretty cool overall. Lunch was cut short on saturday in favor of an amazing tahitian feast including pork cooked on rocks, coconut sauce made from well, coconuts and seawater and best of all, raw fish soaked in fermented fish juice (remember that survivor episode?) the raw fish wasnt too bad, it was the aftertaste that killed me. basically, it reminded me of a dead fish in my fish tank. the food was pretty much amazing. i wish i took pictures that day.... :(

sunday:
NOTE TO SELF: YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN A FULL BODY SKIN SUIT!
dang those jellyfish were annoying. what did i ever do to them? our plan was to swim from the beginning of the lagoon, and head towards the outer part of the bay. little did we know that jellyfish no wider than the width of a fingernail clipping would come and embrace us with their stings. Although i had a rash guard, these jellies knew where to sting, including my lip (which went numb for awhile), my legs, neck, and hands. it was kind of hilarious, because those swimming in front would be yelping and screaming, and the person behind would appear to be confused until he or she got stung afterwards.

i've never swam so much in my entire life. i believe the entire swim that morning was a length of 5 km. most of the swim was by myself and the majority of it lacked "life", just peering into the deep blue sea, i could barely see 8 ft below me. i couldnt help but freak out a little. But again, i had a good prayer time by myself, which was very uplifting, recalling various passages in the Bible reminding me of how great God is. some interesting creatures seen that afternoon included another moray eel, an octopus, 2 white antenna lionfish, and touching a picasso triggerfish (silly fish thought it would be smart to hide in a rock sideways)

I have a couple of projects that i have to start on, the first deals with sea urchins, and the other deals with crabs. should be fun.

a three hour tour...

4/11/2008
okay, so it wasnt a three hour tour of the island. it was more like 12 hour tour going around the island of Moorea, stopping by some various sites such as a pineapple farm, to the highlands (did you know moorea has pine trees?), to mangrove swamps (which weren't supposed to be there), and later to the famous beach of Moorea, Sofitel la Ora, aka THE DEATH SNORKEL.

Funny, i couldnt make up my mind on being excited or terrified. Besides the high wave surges which would bring one dangerously into coral heads, there were sea urchin Diadema, equipped with hypodermic spines 9 inches long, and they were scattered all over the reef. One wrong push with the hand, or swipe of the foot.....

I cant say i left DEATH SNORKEL unscathed but the wounds look a lot worse than they really are. On the otherhand, if you happen to brush your leg against a coral head, you should try putting lime juice over it. The acidity will kill the coral tissue inside your wound and also provides invigorating stimulation. I'll create a photoblog of all my injuries during the trip for your amusement or pity (sorry mom!).

Getting Here....

April 10 2008

Im sorry I couldn’t give anyone an immediate update. I just got my internet password and info but unfortunately cant get a signal here in the dorms. The flight was quite interesting to say the least. I think Tahiti Air gets first place in in-flight dinners and breakfasts. I slept like a baby too; I never sleep well on flights. We managed to arrive there around 5:30 am in the morning (8:30 am for you folks) and the weather was rather cool. It rained earlier so the air was nice and sticky. From the airport we went to the ferry (bad typo, thanks Ben!) docks. Already we were excited. From the edge of the docks we could see hundreds of tropical fish just swimming along the wall.

We took a ferry to go to our true destination Moorea, about a forty-five minute sail from Tahiti. One thing I’ve learned, never go indoors in a rocking boat. Bad news.

Getting on the island though was a blast. I got to sit in the back of one of those cool trucks and managed to get a couple of shots of the beautiful island but for bandwidth reasons I might not be able to show them online.

Anywho, after eating lunch and checking into our dorms (co-ed bathrooms, oh dear :P), we went snorkeling and all that jazz. Some highlights included being eviscerated upon by a 22 inch long sea cucumber and almost swimming into a moray eel head first. Some other cool fish were cleaner wrasses, puffers, and Picasso triggerfish. No clownfish though, I was sad. They were replaced by two-spot damsels, who act the same way as clownfish do with anemones, (but not as cool).

More updates to come….