People often ask how we can possibly stay down here for 10 days, but once you're here, at least once I'm here, I certainly don't want to leave. And as always seems to happen on these missions, the time has flown buy. It didn't take long to get into a good routine with our diving and we've been able to get an enormous amount of work done. It's hard sometimes to remember how much of our success depends on the work of the topside science crew, the Aquarius staff, and the technicians in the Habitat. There's absolutely no way we could pull this project off without such a hardworking team. The topside science team keeps busy processing samples that we send up each day, and they also dive and sample on the reef in places that we don't visit from Aquarius.

While we were out on the reef today, Otter was playing host to a visiting group of Girl Scouts, winners of a writing competition that included a chance to dive at Aquarius. And yes, the Girl Scouts did leave us some of those famous cookies.

Two interesting things I noticed today were another turtle eating a large sponge, and a few long spine urchins (Diadema antillarum) under a coral head. These urchins are extremely important grazers of macroalgae on Caribbean reefs, but are presently quite rare in the Florida Keys. It will be interesting to watch if the abundance of Diadema increases at Conch Reef like it is at a number of sites in the Caribbean after a nearly complete population collapse roughly 20 years ago.

Tomorrow is our last full day of diving. We'll be starting first thing in the morning.