Guana Island is a small island just north of Tortola, which allegedly has the greatest terrestrial biodiversity of any island its size in the Caribbean and possibly the world. We didn’t set foot on land, but we did get a couple chances to snorkel. On our first excursion we discovered some successfully transplanted elkhorn corals near the beach. As it turns out, these were done by a team including Graham Forrester, who we had the pleasure of meeting in Saba last year. You can read more about their study in this pdf. The corals we saw were doing very well and were quite large for three or four years of growth.

The next day we explored other parts of the bay and found a wide variety of sea life, including a greedy octopus who seemed to be trying to eat several mollusks at once. Stephen spotted a large southern stingray and I found a nurse shark and a snapper that was practically the size of a shark. Madam J, unfortunately, found a lionfish. The previous evening we’d seen lots of small fish jumping out of the water, and our observations while snorkeling confirmed that there were quite a few schools of small jacks who were probably responsible, attacking the baitfish and getting them to jump.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at 8:13 am and is filed under Extreme Shallow Snorkeling, On Expedition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.