Where in the World is Natalie Suderman?

By the end of my six weeks, I was not only doing fish transects, but I was also able to help collect coral data too. Most of the data was collected to assist one of the volunteers, Amie, who was doing her dissertation as a part of being on the project.  Out to collect some data To start, I helped by collecting measurements and health profiles of randomly sampled coral along the reef.  Sometimes Amie would have us scribe or measure the samples she took. And sometimes I performed the sampling myself. It's much harder to write underwater than it looks Whoo. So exciting. A few of us would also take transect videos for Amie to review later. This meant we could cover more sites more quickly, since she could review the videos later and note the coral present for her dataset. The camera being crucial for success Looks just like a fish transect Ok, I'll stop with the corals. You get the idea. We sampled both forereef and backreef s...

Caye Caulker is not a large place, and after spending 5 weeks in same piece of land, I started to tire of the sights. The island began feeling a bit claustrophobic, so to combat this I took a day off to go to the zoo! Of course, this was the day it decides to rain. But no matter, here we are. First stop were the coatimundi. They were very active, but these three in particular were a sight to behold. Albino coatis! This little cat was a new one for me. It's called a jaguarundi, but it looks like a polecat, a river otter and a cat had a baby. But still cool Belize would not be complete without Howler Monkeys And we have to include Belize's national animal. The tapir. I can't deny they were quite cool, if not smelly. But my favorite part were the jaguars. I mean, what beats a big cat? He's so beautiful! One more for good measure. The animals were so cool, and it gave me a lot of inspiration for characters in books I could see ...

Lion fish hunts were quite exciting and always turned into a competitive searching game. There were a couple of sites you could rely on finding one or two, it was just a matter of who could find them first. And while finding them wasn't too difficult, catching them proved to be a different story.  Going on a lionfish hunt There be lionfish in these parts We know they're out there Can't hide forever Not with Sophie and I on patrol What's that I spy? All of the hunts I went on with Frontier ended without success. Sometimes David or Sophie could snag them in the prongs of the sling, but never managed a deadly strike before the lionfish would slip out of our grasp.  David goes in for the killing blow But it masterfully escapes! The lionfish will live to see another day. Here's another one we didn't manage to kill Maybe being a conservationist runs too deep in our blood, or maybe the lion fish in Be...

As we live on a reserve, there are actually trails that lead through the mangroves that people can visit and stroll along. Although given the prevalence of crocodiles, mosquitoes and sand-flies, there's not a whole lot of strolling. Nonetheless as caretakers of the reserve, part of our responsibilities include maintaining the trail and keeping it nice and stroll-able (to the best we're able). So, on this particular morning the task was left to me, Sophie, Sam and Amie. Now, knowing how bad the mosquitoes can be, we made sure we were prepared. We take our job very seriously (from left: Amie, Sophie, me, Sam) With every inch of our skin covered, sprayed and sprayed again for good measure it was time to enter the mangroves. Thankfully, with the strong breeze the mosquitoes were actually no where to be found, and the trail clean actually became kind of fun, albeit sweaty. Take that We managed to clean quite a lot of the trail, and for only having our h...

After I conquered my nosebleeds it was finally time to get in the water and start diving. After I completed my Advanced Open Water certification (without incident, hooray!) and mastered all the fish species I needed to learn I could finally start performing...wait for it...fish surveys! What is a fish survey you ask. It's a way of sampling the reef for fish abundance, size distribution and diversity and used as an indicator of reef health. So first we roll out a transect line in one direction and then swimming along the tape measure we mark down how many of each type of fish we see, and mark the appropriate size range each fish fits into. Like this We continue to swim in one direction to minimize the possibility of counting the same fish twice, until we reach the end of the 30m tape, at which point we turn around and start counting juveniles. The purpose of this is that juveniles are much smaller and generally more abundant, and can look quite different than mature adult...