Ngerchelngael

I planned this trip down to the hour. 

If you look in my scientific notebook as far back as September, you can find the charts. To-do lists for each day in the country, estimates of how long it would take us to collect each set of samples, routes for minimizing travel between sites. I had us on a tight schedule. 

If there's one thing I've learned over the last 10 years of doing field work, it's that nothing goes as planned. Ever. Surprisingly, despite everything, this trip stuck relatively closely to the schedule I had set (with some minor exceptions). I had booked the boat for an extra day just in case, so I was delighted when we got to use it for bonus samples. 

I had all the Porites lobata I needed to set us up for next spring. I had outplanted tiles, collected plankton, and looked at rubble. We had even sampled four additional species at most of our sites. We used the first couple dives on our bonus day to fill in the gap and collect the fourth species at two sites where we had missed it before, but after that, it was only 11 am. We still had the rest of the day. 

I turned to our boat driver, Nelson. A few days before, he had made a suggestion. He knew a site, he said, where the water got really hot and there were the types of corals I was looking for. We had driven past it but not really investigated. But on our bonus day, we had nothing but time. 

"Nelson, take us to Ngerchelngael," I said. 

Nelson clapped enthusiastically and clambered over to the boat's steering wheel. "Here we go!"

The seafloor in Nelson's little bay was littered with Favites pentagona - code name O.G. Kharis and I swam around for about a half hour, collecting tissue chips from the colonies. We had added a whole new site to the analysis. 

Kharis and Cassiopea.

It was lovely to have extra time on our last sampling day. I should also mention that during a dive at another site, Risong, Kharis found an upside-down jelly. There's a genus of jellyfish called Cassiopea that swim upside-down. The jellies have symbiotic algae in their tentacles, so they have to swim upside-down to expose the symbionts to the light. They're a seriously fascinating species. 

I am so relieved to have our sampling finished, to have met all our goals and more. It's been a very successful trip in Palau!