Programs Blog

November 17, 2024 

Location: Barbados 

Weather: 80℉, overcast and windy with scattered rainstorms 

Hello SEA blog readers! Long time no see, but it’s Cayla, and I’m finally back writing another blog post! With the end of our time in the Caribbean approaching so quickly, things have been very busy. I can’t believe we have less than a week left! Everyone has been writing such great blog posts about our travels and the wonderful people we have met along the way, but something I think hasn’t been discussed here enough has been all the amazing terrestrial and marine life we’ve seen. 

Back in Woods Hole at the very beginning of this program, we over in C-House started a list on a sticky-note of all the cool animals we were seeing. The rule was that you either had to get a photo of said animal, or you had to have a witness with you to confirm the sighting if you wanted to add the animal you saw to the list. We ended up amassing quite the collection: white tail deer, eastern cottontail rabbits (a.k.a. bunnies), chipmunks, swans, wild turkeys, squirrels, gray seals, shrimp, mummichogs and silversides (a.k.a. minnows), blue crabs, long-wristed hermit crabs, and a bay scallop (which have dozens of electric blue eyes and are definitely worth a google) were just some of the animals on our list.  

Admittedly, we kind of stopped adding to the list once we arrived in the Caribbean, but we’ve been keeping track in other ways! Writing in our Environmental Communications journals, taking photos, and of course, marking down species counts for our reef surveys, have all been helpful in reflecting on all the cool critters we’ve encountered both underwater and on land. For my blog post, I thought it would be fun to share our sightings and write a few “Creature Features” to showcase some of the animals that have stood out the most on each island we’ve visited.  

St. Croix 

Land hermit crabs! How could I begin to talk about our stay in St. Croix without talking about the Caribbean hermit crab! Hermit crabs are not considered to be “true crabs” because of their inability to grow their own shells.  We saw hermit crabs back in Woods Hole, but the hermit crab species we saw all over St. Croix is quite different from the long-wristed hermit crabs we saw in Cape Cod. Two major reasons why: 1) They were much bigger, and 2) They were living on land instead of in the water! At our first St. Croix accommodation, Northside Valley, there would always be a crowd of hermit crabs outside of the little villas we were staying in, and whenever we finished eating something in a jar, the owner of Northside Valley told us to put the jars outside and let the hermit crabs do the cleaning for us. This helped us save water that we would’ve used cleaning out the jars, and since the hermit crabs got a snack out of it too, it really was a win-win situation. 

Sea Turtles! We saw more sea turtles on St. Croix than on any other island. St. Croix is home to three different sea turtle species: leatherback, green, and hawksbill, all of which nest on St. Croix’s shores. We didn’t see any leatherbacks during our snorkels, but we did see a bunch of greens and even some hawksbills! Green and hawksbill sea turtles look pretty similar, but there are a few key ways to tell them apart. Hawksbill sea turtles have overlapping scoots (what the plates on their shells are called), a pointed beak, and two pairs of prefrontal scales between their eyes. Green sea turtles have neatly interlocking scoots , a more rounded head and beak, and only one pair of prefrontal scales in between their eyes. Something truly special we got to experience was the excavation of a green sea turtle’s nest with our partners at the St. Croix Sea Turtle Project. Part of their monitoring work includes doing nest surveys and nest excavations which take place three days after the majority of the eggs in the nest have hatched. Nests are excavated to count eggshells, unhatched eggs, and find any live baby sea turtles which have had trouble hatching or digging themselves out of the sand. We were lucky enough to find some baby turtles during our excavation, and they were extremely cute to say the least. Watching them scuttle across the sand and get gently pulled into the ocean by the waves was worth every single mosquito bite I got that evening. 

Anguilla 

Ballyhoos! The ballyhoo is definitely an odd-looking fish. It almost looks like a type of needlefish (family=Belonidae) because of its thin and long pointed jaw, but the ballyhoo is actually a member of a different family altogether: the half-beaks (Hemiramphidae). Even though it’s a bit odd-looking, the ballyhoo is still a very pretty fish with its silvery scales, half-yellow tail and hints of iridescent red around its beak. We saw these guys swimming in schools at the ocean surface in Anguilla, but they were very wary of us snorkelers and wouldn’t let us get too close to them. Some of the schools must’ve had at least 150 fish in them! 

Spotted Eagle Rays! Spotted eagle rays are always an exciting find; underwater they’re graceful swimmers, and they also exhibit an exciting behavior where they use their “wings” to propel themselves and leap out of the water either completely vertically, or at a 45˚ angle. We didn’t see too many spotted eagle rays during our snorkel surveys, but I was able to photograph two during our free-day snorkel in Crocus Bay. 

Dominica 

Anoles! We’ve seen so many anoles on every single island we’ve visited. While at first glance many of them looked the same, after a while you’d start to notice small differences. In Dominica there were a lot of anoles that waved their tails side-to-side, a behavior I’d never seen before. That led me to do some research, and I ended up learning that there is a lot more to anoles in the Caribbean than meets the eye.  For example, on Dominica there are two different anole species: the introduced Puerto Rican anole (Anolis cristatellus), and the endemic Dominican anole (Anolis oculatus) which is the only native anole species in Dominica and has four ecotypes that can be found on different parts of the island. These ecotypes used to be considered separate subspecies, but that claim has since been debunked by both morphological and molecular studies. Another behavior exhibited by both species found in Dominica are the “push-ups” of the male anoles as they bob their heads to try to attract a mate or ward off competitors.  

Eels! Eels (especially moray eels) tend to have a bad reputation due to their massive teeth and their habit of hiding in and looking out of crevices while opening and closing their mouths. While this may appear menacing, opening and closing their mouth is just the way these eels breathe; they have to gulp in water in order to pass it through their gills. During our snorkel surveys, we were seeing eels left and right, and the diversity of the species we were seeing was incredible! If I asked you to think of an eel on a coral reef, I bet you would probably think of the green moray (Gymnothorax funebris) with its bright green skin and violet eyes. However, the reefs we visited were home to many other eel species, like the black and yellow-patterned chain moray eel, the goldentail moray eel with its bright golden-yellow spots, and the goldspotted eel which ironically has white spots.   

Barbados

Fireflies! I was so excited when I saw fireflies flickering in the field below Paradise Point (our accommodation) the night we arrived in Barbados. I’ve always really liked fireflies and the more I learn about them, the more enthralled I become with these amazing little guys. Fireflies are also known as lightning bugs (if you google “lightning bug vs firefly map” you can see which phrase gets used more in different parts of the U.S.), but they are actually beetles and aren’t actually considered “flies” or “true bugs.” I’m not an entomologist so I don’t think I’m the right person to try to explain that difference between what is and is not a “true bug” or “fly”, but if you like correcting people, knowing this could be a fun fact to pull out at parties (“Umm aCtUaLLy lightning bugs aren’t real bugs”). Anyways…there are around 2,400 known species of firefly worldwide, but the ones I saw in the field in Barbados were probably Dixon’s striped fireflies (Aspidosoma ignitum) based on firefly sighting data from iNaturalist.  

Whistling frogs! These innocent-looking amphibians are TINY, but don’t let that fool you…these frogs are LOUD. Measuring in at less than 1.5 inches, a singular frog can have a call louder than 75 decibels (nearly as loud as a vacuum cleaner), and a chorus of frogs has been clocked being as loud as 96 decibels! We’ve heard these frogs on every island we’ve visited, but the chorus has definitely been louder on some islands than others. Between the whistling frogs and the roosters, a lot of people were having trouble sleeping in the beginning of our Caribbean travels.  

Thank you so much for checking out my Caribbean Creature Features! Keep in mind that this was by no means an exhaustive list of all the amazing animals we’ve seen throughout the Caribbean, but I hope you enjoyed reading it nonetheless. There really is a lot of cool stuff out here. 

Before I sign off, I want to say thank you so much to everyone on this program! You are all amazing, and I’m going to miss you so much after this is over. Who knows? Maybe sometime in the future, Dr. Sara Abraha, M.D. and world-renowned economist Leandro Nuckols will pay to fly all of us environmental science majors out to the Caribbean again for a reunion! I definitely hope I’ll get to SEA you guys again! 

Best Fishes, 

Cayla 🐠