Blogging about beautiful Belize

Eight students are spending their spring break in Belize, Central America, together with their professor, Dr. Amy Berger. This week-long trip is the primary component for their class, “Caribbean Biogeography”. While there, the students are exploring reef, shore and jungle environments. The students are blogging about their experiences, including this entry from senior political science major Brandon Creakman of Cleveland.

"Waking up after a long day of travel yesterday was far easier than expected. It helps that I was promised breakfast right at 8 o’clock. After a great breakfast that did not involve Hoernemann, we finished getting ready and started making our way down to the beach. Amy mentioned that there has only been a single class that has not gotten sunburnt after their first day. We quickly realize that a goal of ours as a class was to be that second class. We all loaded up on sunscreen.

We arrived at our first dive site after an eventful 10-minute boat ride. This included spotting a yellow stingray in the water as well as an eagle ray leaping out of the water. Seeing this only made everyone want to get into the water more. Everyone was antsy to get in the water once we stopped and set anchor. We then swam to the Pillar Coral and began observing. Siete, our guide began handing around a brittle star and pointing us under corals to see a nurse shark. He was spotting things that took me minutes to find even after he pointed them out to me. The man is a legend.

Coming back to the water after our first dive, I didn’t expect things to be that different. Minutes into swimming, the guru Siete, points out the highly poisonous lionfish. No spear in hand (they’re invasive and not good for the reef) we kept moving. Eventually, we saw multiple rays and some turtles. All in all a great first day. The consensus of other groups at TREC is that every day is better and better. I am definitely looking forward to that."