welcome back this is part 2 of our saga we're trying to understand our nemesis
spider snails these are these vermetid snails that essentially sneeze on corals and cause a
lot of harm sometimes kill them we're trying to understand if these snails are linked to
human population development this is the second expedition for this study and this
time we're going to a really close Island we're going to Tahiti which is in the backyard of our
home island of Moorea. quite a beautiful place to go and it's quick and easy to get
there so we're pretty pumped after the first part of this study where we went to Maiao we
learned a lot of lessons one of them was always bring enough fuel to get home also the classic
saying never take gift nail to the mouth has a whole new meaning but our spirits are high we
know this area better we've been here before the weather conditions are awesome so it was
time for us to just get out there and collect as much data as we can quickly so we hit it hard
this is very different from part one so this time we're making great time we're collecting tons of
data quickly everything's cooperating until we realize that we need to dive on the southeast
corner of Tahiti this is a really beautiful place it's called Tahiti Itti which is basically small
Tahiti what happens to be home to a monster we weren't just dealing with spider snail today we
were dealing with CHEO poo loosely translated as skull Smasher place of skulls head sever this is
one of the biggest surf waves in the world and one that sadly claims a lot of lives of people
that try to ride it we of course are not going to be surfing this wave but instead we're gonna
be counting snails underneath it we had no idea how this was gonna go we wanted to get a really
thorough dataset from around the island so we knew we needed to sample from this area
but we didn't know if we'd be able to we were making good time we figured we would just go
ahead and and give it a shot it was certainly more challenging than I think we'd anticipated
it's hard trying to count up snails that are the size of pinheads in some cases when you're
being thrown around like you're in a washing machine
this is where the expedition kind of hit
a roadblock because it took us a lot more time to get these dives done than our previous dives but
in the end we were able to get them finished the experience did cost us a few dives at the end but
we had enough data to characterize the island so it was a huge success and the weather didn't hold
up perfectly well for us on the way home got a little bit of rain but our boat driver Jacques
is a master of finding tuna he saw some birds on the horizon when we were leaving and knew
that they were possibly fished there and he caught us a nice fresh dinner for the evening all right
baby two islands down one to go and this last expedition is going to be at our home island
of Moorea we know this place like the back of our hand what's the worst that could happen