Day 8 - Anini Reef, Caves, and Kilauea Lighthouse

Again - updating later...tired.

This was my kind of day - reef and tidal pool critters and birds!

Anini Reef -

One of the first things seen was an octopus.  We got him out and had a hard time keeping him in the bucket.  If you are not familiar with octopus, they are great escape artists.  They can squeeze their body through small openings.  The opening just has to be large enough to get their beak (only hard part on their body) through.

Anini Reef

(used to be Wanini Reef, but the W came off and they just changed the name instead of fixing it)

You can see how the octopus breathes/moves through jet propulsion.  This is really cool to watch!  I have never actually seen an do this.

Octopus Back in the water - hard to see, but look for the tentacles.  He is almost the entire picture.

We saw a lot of critters, but mostly the same ones over and over again.  We saw a lot of Sea Cucumbers...a lot!  There were also a lot of Rock Boring Sea Urchins.  We found a few Brittle Stars, a Cowries, and some small crabs.  My favorite thing that I found was the Saccoglossan Nudibranch.  The pictures did not come out well, but I sat there for about 10 minutes just watching them.  Once I realized I was looking at a real organism, I started to see them everywhere!  In the sandy area that I was standing in, there were probably 20-30.  They were very small (maybe 2 inches) and moved very slowly. They blended in with the background perfectly.  

Rock Boring Sea Urchins

Sea Cucumber - not much to them.  It looks like a piece of turd rolling around in the waves.  They did not even pretend to try to hold on.  We did find a few that had wedged themselves into the rocks though. 

A type of Nudibranch - Sea Hare

Once all of the specimens had been collected, the students classified them in to the correct Phyla and sorted them into buckets (my lesson :-))  It seemed to work well.


Caves - well, we visited a dry on and a wet one.  The dry one was dry and the wet one had water in it.  They were both carved out by the waves. We also stopped by the side of the road to see a Dike - this is where a volcano side cracked and the lava camp up through it and then hardened.  Interesting...maybe, but we had to cross a very windy road to get there. A little scary.


Kilauea Lighthouse - This was a neat stop.  The lighthouse was beautiful and the birds were everywhere. I loved it!  When walked outside the Visitor's Center, there was a lady there with the high powered binoculars pointed at an Albatross.  It was very far away, but you could still see him because of their incredible size.  She said that they were staying close to the trees because that is where they net.  Very cool!  She also pointed out to me a Wedge-Tail Shearwater nesting on the ground next to the walkway.  

The rain finally let up, so I went up to the Lighthouse.  

The birds circling was fantastic.  There were mostly Red-tailed Tropicbirds, but there were also some Red Footed Boobies circling too.  The cliff across from the Lighthouse was a rookery full of Red Footed Boobies and their babies.  I wish that I could have gotten a better shot, but they were too far away.

Great Frigatebird Flying Overhead

 Red-tailed Tropicbirds

Red Footed Boobie

Random Stop 112 - We stopped at an overlook to see the Taro fields.  There was an Avocado tree next to the stop, so they picked some avocados.  I believe here we were only a little ways to the rainiest spot in the world.