We are getting into the routine of living and working on the sea floor a little more now, but also feeling the effects of working mainly at night - one of the drawbacks of working on night-feeding animals. Since we also have to take daytime samples it gets pretty tiring.

For me, the main action is between 9 pm and 1 am when I am setting up the close-up video cameras to film coral feeding, and taking water flow measurements over the corals. To do this I am using the "hookah," a long hose that supplies air to the facemask. I have a microphone and headphones to talk to the person inside the habitat who controls the camera focus and recording equipment, and logs the current meter data to computer. We use the hookah alone, out on the reef. It's pretty eerie at night lying in the dark adjusting equipment. We keep the lights turned off so as not to attract zooplankton, which would give our experimental corals more food than they would normally have available. Looking back to the habitat, you can see the porthole lights, and the whole habitat outlined in a greenish glow. It could become a spiritual experience, but then the headphones cackle on, "shift camera 2 to the left," and it's back to work.

Most things are working well. We still have one camera we can't get to work, and of course we make mistakes. Brad Agius just spent 20 minutes out on the hookah waiting for a carefully-timed run of the zooplankton collection pumps. I gave him our pre-arranged signal over the underwater "hailer" (an underwater speaker is connected to a microphone inside Aquarius). "Two minutes to pump number one," then he went to collect the sample, only to find that the collection bags were not previously attached. He then had to wait another 20 minutes (after he loads the bags) to collect the samples. That probably won't happen again.

The important thing is that we now have a good deal of video footage documenting feeding by the corals. We have two cameras on each coral, one with a 10 cm field of view and the other focussed in on 4-5 polyps (about 2 cm field of view). We can measure flow over the coral and we can quantify food capture events with the larger field of view - documenting successful prey capture and what they have caught. By the end of the mission we should have a good idea of what a healthy coral should be eating for breakfast!