Today we visited the coral garden in the Reserve Cousteau on the west side of Guadeloupe. We had to dinghy over to the Pigeon islands reserve because you can only get there by boat. When we arrived, we put on wetsuits, got snorkeling gear on and then we jumped in the water.  We snorkeled around. It was very deep in places and shallow near the islands.  We saw lots of coral. Some brain coral, tube sponges, sea fans, vase sponges, and sea plumes. I saw a whole school of blue tangs like Dory in Finding Nemo. We saw lots of queen and rainbow parrotfish. They are colorful. They spend 90% of their day eating the algae off of coral and then they poop out sand — close to 200 pounds of sand per year. The keep the beaches looking nice and sandy.

We saw some grooved and symmetrical brain corals, smooth star coral, and starlet coral, eliptical star coral, smooth flower coral.and some lobed star coral. I think I saw some cactus coral. We also saw lots of fire coral. If you touch that, it burns your skin. I’ve never touched it because my mom and dad told me not to.

We also saw two green sea turtles. They were eating seagrass and looking for worms on the sandy bottom. One of them was nervous and swam away fast, the other one was mellow. He didn’t mind us swimming with him. I had a great time. I saw some really beautiful things. It makes me want to protect the reef and all the creatures who live there.