This trip was to see the coastal marine environment. We had 2 hour lectures everyday and a day trip where we took field notes. My mom decided last minute to come on this trip with us. She hadn’t been to the coast so it was definitely a good idea. Ecuador is divided into 3 parts: the highlands (where Quito is), the Oriente (the lowland Amazon Rainforest), and the coast. Each of these places is so different and special a trip to Ecuador is not complete if you do not visit them all. Unfortunately she will not be able to get to the Amazon, but 2 out of 3 is pretty good. The first 3 nights we stayed camped on the beach near Puerto Lopez at a hotel called Alandaluz. We took a day trip to the fish market in Puerto Lopez and another to the tide pools of Montanita. The fish market was very interesting. I had never seen an actual tuna before and we saw a huge albacore tuna. I see livestock fairly regularly and it is easy to imagine where the meat comes from but fish is different. Living in Wisconsin you never see these ocean fish. Albacore are predatory fish and much larger than I expected at about 1 meter long and meaty. We also saw a 2 meter Mahi Mahi, loads of snapper, a sail fish measuring over 2 meters, 4 sharks, and tons of other fish I can’t remember or identify. We learned a lot about the fishing industry in this course. It is legal to catch sharks in Ecuador if is only as by-catch and a small percentage of your total catch. Shark finning is the reason to kill sharks and is having a devastating effect. In Ecuador each fin goes for about 15 US dollars and then gets shipped to Japan where they are sold for much more and made into shark fin soup, an expensive delicacy often served at weddings. As for the fishing industry as a whole, it is destroying the oceans and whipping out entire fish populations. Cod is commercial extinct and we are eating down the food chain to fish that used don’t even taste good because we have killed everything else. I won’t bore you with all the specifics but it is way worse than I thought and because of this and the high quantity of fish I have eaten here in Ecuador, when I return home I am going to become a full on vegetarian and stop eating fish. I will definetly miss my fresh water fish though… I may just be very selective on my fish choices. The Alaskan fishery is one of the only sustainable fisheries, so I may make an exception for Alaskan salmon and halibut. Anyways, we also visited tide pools in Montanita.
Tide pools are another thing I have never explored before and they are rather amazing. All these little filter feeders and grazers that are quite wonderful to observe. The coolest thing was definitely seeing an octopus. A local fisherman showed us some that he had caught, soon to be turned into chiviche, and we also found a live one in the rocks. There are also these things called nudibranchs which are like naked snails, and are usually brightly colored. For our last 2 nights on the coast we stayed in Quayaquil. Quayaquil is the largest city in Ecuador and I don’t have much more to say about it since we were strongly encouraged not to go out at night, even in a cab, since it is so dangerous. During the day we visited the nearby national park and saw Mangrove forests. Compared to the Amazon and tide pools no one was very interested or impressed by the forest, but it was good to see. We also visited a shrimp farm, one of the major treats to mangrove and dry forests. ( Another reason for my giving up seafood.) On the 22nd we got on our plane to the Galapagos, we were all obviously super excited.
Galapagos Cruise 3/22 – 3/29
These 7 days were amazing. I went into this Galapagos trip not expecting too much, the Galapagos have such a huge reputation I was assuming I would be disappointed if I expected that much. However, it was so much more than I even imagined. For our group we needed 2 yachts, I was on the Guantanamera with half the students and the other half were on the Eden. The Eden was slightly larger and roomier, but the Guantanamera was very nice as well. On the upper deck we had a nice covered area and some lounge chairs in the sun. I slept on these chairs at night and it was amazing. We were usually cruising at night to another island so we were in the middle of the Pacific with no light and the stars were spectacular. Our boat went to 1 or 2 different islands every day. We visited South Plazas, Floreana, Bartolome, Rabida, Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, Seymore, Espanola, and Genovesa. The first wildlife we saw was the Galapagos Sea Lions.
These are so adorable. They are rather clumsy on land but amazing in the water. On land they are usually just sleeping and snuggling. They usually line up in a row to sleep and the outside one always wants to get in the middle and watching them try to call what we coined “the wedge” to get into the middle spot was always entertaining. The baby pups were another level of adorableness, they waddled looking for their mom and it took all of our willpower not to snatch one up and take it home. We saw some blue footed boobies here and there, which was what I was excepting (not getting my hopes up), but on the third day we saw more blue footed booby than I thought existed. The Galapagos are so protected now that the animals don’t hide they are in our face, on the trail, and you have to move around them as to not step on them or in their nest. There were tourist with huge camera lenses and they literally had to wait to step back for many of the shots. I even heard on say “that is bird is too close for me.” Which brings me to the tourist factor, there were way more than I was expecting. I really despise feeling like a tourist when I travel, but for this cruise it was utterly unavoidable. It was mostly old white rich people with huge cameras and bodies covered in high-tech sun protection clothing, like the hats with the neck covering flap. It was amusing a lot of the time just to people watch, but the animals were luckily the main attraction. Along with our land trips we usually went snorkeling twice a day. There aren’t coral reefs in the Galaps, the water is too cold, but it is still great for marine fish. One day I saw 5 white tip sharks, I never thought I would snorkel with sharks, it was tremendous. The highlight of snorkeling was definitely when some young playful sea lions found you. The first time this happened I could not contain myself it was so awesome, and the next couple times I was able to actually interact and play with them because I was over the initial shock and astonishment. When you dive down they fallow you, they blow bubbles, and play chicken I with you. They are literally just playing, we must look and act ridiculous to them and they just think we are hilarious little toys. The tropical fish were so beautiful; some of the most amazing were the Moorish Idol and Hieroglyphic Hawkfish. There were also creole fish, razor sturgeon fish, angelfish, blue-chinned parrotfish, yellow-tailed damelfish, ring-tailed damselfish, giant damselfish, yellow and red snapper, sergeant major, pufferfish, triggerfish, blennies, and many more. I also saw a huge blue lobster and an eagle ray. Definitely the best snorkeling I have ever done. On the last day we saw the penguins on Bartolome, and even saw them while we were snorkeling. They are not playful like the sea lions but it is still pretty cool to see them swim underwater. A couple days before seeing penguins we saw flamingos. That is how amazing the Galapagos are, flamingos and penguins on the same archipelago. On Santa Cruz we saw the famous giant tortoises. They used to be on more islands but were heavily hunted by early explores and inhabitants, including Charles Darwin. The evidence of them is still on the islands though. On each island the prickly pear cactus looks slightly different. On the islands where there were tortoises and land iguanas they are almost tree like and have large sharp spins, an adaptation so the tortoises could not eat them, and on islands where there were never tortoises or iguanas they are closer to the ground and the spins are almost hair like. The Darwin Foundation is working on a reintroduction program for the giant tortoises, but hasn’t had much success yet. Other famous things we saw were Darwin’s finches, which aren’t too spectacular to look at but you can see some of the characteristics Darwin saw in beak size. The last full day on the boat we finally saw red footed boobies and matting frigate birds. There are actually 3 kinds of boobies; blue footed just get all the attention for reasons unknown, maybe because of their courtship dance. But there are also Nazca boobies (formally called masked boobies) and red footed. The Nazca are nothing that amazing, they what I would consider a classic beauty, not anything spectacular but definitely pretty. 
The red footed are certainly my favorite. They have red feet, obviously, and pink and blue beaks. Also, they nest and live in trees which is just hilarious to see a large webbed footed duck perched in a tree. The frigate bird males have large red pouches that they fill with air to attract females. It was magnificent when a female flew over the sea of males because they all would flap their wings and honk in a wave as she passes, then she would land by the one she found fit. Leaving the boat was definitely sad but we still had another week and a half on San Cristobal, which made it a little easier to leave. All and all the Galapagos cruise may have been the most amazing week of my life. (By the way, I took almost 6 GB of pictures and videos in this week alone…)San Cristobal 3/29- 4/9
Our time on San Christobal was spent mostly in lecture and doing our mini research projects. We had host families and I was with a nice family whose house was 2 blocks from what we called the “lobo beach”.
Lobos marino is the Spanish word sea lion and the saying of San Cristobal was “lobos marino, la cara de San Cristobal” and it was true. My roommate and I got into a routine of watching the lobos almost every night. At night they all came on the beach to sleep but there were always some active ones to entertain us. They was also usually a pup that could not find its mother and went around trying to get milk from any female, and got chased away. I am very surprised one of us didn’t jump over the fence and give it a bottle and claim it as their own. I decided to do a research project on ring-tail Damselfish with Nicole, Carl, and Brenna. Damselfish have gardens that they protect and we were going to use model fish to see if they would chase juveniles of their same species or just let them come into their territory in case they were their offspring. Turns out our models were not very good and the fish were either scared of them or did not care at all. Unfortunately one of our group members was not convinced the models weren’t working and we wasted 3 days doing the model experiment before our professor told us we should change and convinced everyone it was the best option. We changed to just observing the fish in 5 minute focals look at what fish they chased. In this experiment I learned that one of my friends is not the best work partner and is actually quite stubborn and demeaning to other group members when it came to the project idea that this person came up with (which happened to be the model idea which wasn’t working). Our friendship was probably what kept us from confronting this person at the first sign of failure. But in the end we got some interesting data from our observations and all remained friends, although we will probably never choose to work with this person again. We had our Marine Biology final on the 7th. Part of the field exam was in water and was without a doubt the best exam I have even taken because in between questions I was able to play with sea lions.
The next day, our final full day in the Galaps, we took a fun snorkeling trip to kicker rock (locally know as leon dormiendo, “sleeping lion,” because it supposedly resembled one). On the way we stopped at a Lobo Island and were literally surrounded by at least 10 playful pups. Kicker rock was also great snorkeling. The wall of the rock was covered in beautiful coral, not reef building coral, but still brilliantly colored. There were also these amazing, funny little fish that swam at the surface and at first glance looked like bubbles, until you realized they we just lingering. The next day we all said our goodbyes to the sea lions and Galapagos and reluctantly headed back to Quito where we would have a couple days to write our final research paper and present a group PowerPoint on it to the class. Then we would all start our month long internship.
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