Shark Fin Soup and a Quiz on the Beach

So, most of my week was spent working on various projects for our Marine Life class.  I presented one yesterday about the marine diversity of the Outer Banks.  I'm also working on a project about sharks.  Apparently, we kill over 73 million sharks each year, mostly for the shark fin soup market in Asia.  The good thing is that people are finally realizing how important sharks are to our oceans.  Without them, midlevel consumers (like the Cownose Rays causing problems in NC) experience population explosions and mow down all the species that serve as their food sources.  Without their top predators, ecosystems are thrown into chaos.  Anyway, that's been my life for the last week. 
We also had a quiz Friday about some of the stuff we've been learning in class.  However, I'm classifying this as the Best Quiz Ever because 1. it took place on the beach, 2. consisted of playing Fish-ionary, and 3. our professor bought us beer for it.  Plus, 4. everyone got a 100. 
We were going to go diving yesterday, but conditions have been iffy for the past few days so we decided to wait for a more favorable weekend.  Considering how much work I still have to do, this was probably a good thing. 
Friday night, Tristan played his guitar and sang popular music from the U.S. at Casa Blanca.  It was a lot of fun.  There were a lot of gringos (not all of them us).
I swear my host mom can read minds.  I spent most of yesterday thinking about how much I wanted yogurt with granola and fruit in it.  Guess what we had for breakfast this morning?  :)  It was delicious.  Last night, I went on a walk with her.  We were supposed to go to some concert; however, they were charging $5 to get in and you could hear the music from three streets away anyway.  So, we walked down to the Malecon and got ice cream. 

Our class, being amazed at everything we saw on Puerto Grande

Lots of Black-striped Salema

Another curious sea lion (apparently too curious, one of the groups had a sea lion mess up their transect)

SHARK!!!!  This was at Leon Dormido

Pelican enjoying the view (this was also at Puerto Grande)

Sole, our professor, writing on the board on the beach

Quiz?!?!

This would be how I get home

My only other bit of news is that I almost got attacked by a sea lion, again.  I was walking home through one of their little resting beaches.  It was later, so they were all laid out all over the place.  I thought I was being quite careful and maintaining my distance; however, one of the bulls disagreed.  He sprang up (faster than I thought they could on land) and started barking at me and flopping towards me.  Needless to say, I backed up and went another way.