Diving on the pier

Fredricksted has a pier that can accommodate the big cruise ships. There was a cruise ship here last Sunday, but this week one didn't come -- maybe they don't come on a weekly schedule. There's great snorkeling and the supports of the pier are covered with tubeworms and sponges. It turned out that someone needed to stay back and hold the car keys (because they have these electronic things on them now), so I volunteered to do that. I found a cute place called Polly's at the Pier where I could see the pier and had a cold drink in a nice breeze.

We put out a trail camera with a pile of chicken feet and have gotten some good videos of mongooses. Two mongooses visited the camera yesterday morning between 8 and 9. They were mongooses we had marked and we noticed some interesting things. We noticed that the first one was very suspicious of the chicken feet. She would grab one and jerk back, as if she was expecting something to try to trap her -- where would she get an idea like that? We also noticed that they don't really like to eat the chicken feet. They're attracted by the odor, but they don't seem to be able to find much in the way of anything edible on them. We also noticed that the hermit crabs are invisible to them. They completely ignore hermit crabs -- that suggests that they don't eat hermit crabs, unless maybe they're starving. I replaced the card in the trail camera and we'll see if we get anything new today.