Follow along as Career Belize students explore the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef through snorkeling, expert lessons, and hands-on experiences that reveal the importance of protecting these incredible ecosystems.
This post features student writing.Â
We started our day at 7:00 with a lovely breakfast, followed by a lecture on the coral reefs and how important it is to preserve them. After that, we took a quick hike to the lookout tower, where along the way we saw so many cute hermit crabs and even got to cross a rope bridge! The view from the lookout tower was so cool. From one vantage point, you could see the three different types of mangroves: red mangroves, white mangroves and black mangroves! Then, after quickly running back to put on our swimsuits. We boarded our charter boat to head to the 2nd largest barrier reef in the world, the Mesoamerica Barrier Reef. We spent a long time snorkeling there and got to see so many amazing things like Caribbean squids and a super duper cute green sea turtle. Even though none of us wanted to stop snorkeling, we got back on the boat and headed back for lunch.
Then, fortunately for us, our amazing leaders and experts planned another snorkeling trip for us, and we hopped onto the boat again and headed to another site. At this site we got to see more squid and so many different varieties of fish! We even got to catch a couple of lionfish, as they’re a harmful, invasive species. Sydney was the best at spotting them! Anyways, after snorkeling we headed back for some downtime to work on our independent projects and get a delicious snack of cinnamon rolls! Then after that, our expert Brian gave us an informational talk about mangroves and their importance in our ecosystems. Finally, we had dinner and did our crocodile night walk where we only barely spotted two small crocodiles off the dock ☹. However, luckily for us it was also the perfect time to go spot all the nocturnal blue crabs, and wow. There were dozens of them all surrounding the compost! It was truly an astonishing site to see! We finished our night with our usual rose, bud, thorn and hit the hay. Today was so much fun!
– Issy and Lizzie
