6/8/09 Saint Catherine's Island, GA, USA
Free day today and I went canoing out of King's New Ground Dock, taking the falling tide out to McQueen's Inlet and then catching the newly rising tide back in. This in worth mentioning because I made a series of cool finds on this trip. First was a polychaete found on the north side of McQueen's inlet, on the upper beach, inside some pig fecal matter. Roughle 2cm long, I'm curious whether this worm was a parasite inside the pig (parasitical polychaetes are fairly rare) or simply wondered along and found the feces after it was excreted by the pig. What was really amazing, however, was that on the way back Jia Pan, by canoe partner, and I spotted a couple of dolphins entering a small side tidal creek and decided to follow. We canoed with the dolphins for a couple hundred meter, and it was awesome. They were breaching within 2m of our gunnels, and we got to watch them working in pairs herding fish. It would have been awesome to see them all get together and shoal some fish, but no such luck. Honestly I was redicullously awed and excited. This is were I've been hoping I'd end up: canoeing up a marsh with dolphins in the course of my profesion. OK, honest the original plan was to be in a marsh with manatees and swimming with dolphins in the open ocean, but I can compromise. Katie Qualls also brought back a colony of obelia from south beach which I just got to look at under the disection microscope, along with some barnicles that I was actually able to see filter feeding. I believe that I'm in love with the disection microscope, and am going to run away with it. Though I'll need to move to a country where bigamy is allowed so I can be married to the Sewanee boat, too, because I'm also in love with it.