Ros in Madagascar

Benthic, Whaffles and Zebu Kebab!

I can't believe a week has gone by since I was last writing an email. Emails are only collected once a week on sundays.
Since last time I wrote we have started diving and going through Benthic (coral and invertebrates) point outs so that we can learn the ones we need to identify. We have our firt Benthic computer test tomorrow. The benthic is definitely easier than the fish (as there is much less to learn) although there are a few exceptiopns (eg: hard coral that whaffles doh!). It is really hard to identify fish in the water!!
We also had our first day off on Friday and the party night the night b4 (on Thur). For the pary night we cross-dressed and it was quite funny to see the guys in women's dresses and lipstick :), we also got some treats (zebu kebabs and cake since it was Yvette's birthday: the medical officer). It is getting hotter every day, the water is 27C!! Yesterday I think it was the worst for heat in the air, I hope it's not going to be like that when we travel around Madagascar because it was really unbereable. We had a storm last night so it was a bit better today. It was great to see the storm arriving with lots of lightining. I was trying to get a photo but it is too hard. Every day is really busy. We have so many things to do on top of the studying. I also saw a couple of interesting big spiders and slim snakes (they are not dangerous in Madagascar). Yesterday we had fish monitoring which consists on shifts throughout the day down at Andavadoaka beach stopping by every pirogue (local boat) that comes in and counting, measuring, identifying and weighting the fish. I did it with Thomas, one of the Malagasy staff and it was good because he knew most if not all of the families and the species so didn't have to look to hard on the book :). The diving so far it's been OK, the viz hasn't been great, apparently it's not good when the breeze is up. I suppose that's why yesterday was the best one with about 18m viz.
Ros.

posted by Simon @ Monday, November 20, 2006