The reef continues to surprise us with great visibility and warm water. We did get a taste of Dr. Jim Leichter's cold water upwelling onto our 100-foot site this morning. Shimmering fronts of warm water meeting cold were beautiful but sent a shiver down my spine when we had to swim into it to collect samples or survey a remote data point.

My buddy and I spent seven hours in the water today venturing for several of those down to 98 feet. What a thrill it was being able to conduct work on several experiments without having to spend hours on the surface between dives. With my buddy Laura we are conducting experiments on the ability of the brown seaweed Dictyota to reproduce by fragmentation. The alga has the remarkable ability to rapidly attach to sand grains and then grow clonally: the smallest fragments survive extremely well. Both water motion and fish continuously produce these fragments. Our experiments are looking at fragment numbers on the reef and in the water column, dispersal rates, the impact of nutrients on fragment attachment (they appear to attach significantly faster in nutrient enriched waters!), and attachment of fragments to sponges and hard and soft corals.