Mona Island, Cueva del Lirio, AEB trip circa 1982

A land's view from an area near Cueva del Lirio, you can see in the top left corner the ship Alborada that had ran aground on the reef in from of Pajaros Beach

A part of the Asociacion de Estudiantes de Biologia of the Mayaguez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.  You can see Nelly with a ton of hair, Javier alarmingly young, Jorge without big muscles and Isabel with a goat skull.

In one of the ledges of the cave we found a small nesting colony of  Sooty Terns

There were Sooty terns all around the Island but these were nesting in one  an opening of the cave that faced toward the sea

The inside of the cave is filled with a breathtaking variety of speleothems ranging from cave pearls to massive stalagmites that resemble fantastic animals.

A seaward view from Cueva del Lirio

I visited Cueva del Lirio many times during the 1980's.  My only regret is that I didn't take more photos of the inside of the caves.  Mona Island caves are laberinthic and this makes them unsettling and disorienting for those that are not accostumed to visit caves.  There are many strange and wonderful speleothems inside this cave.  Hopefully one day I will be able to go back to take photos of them.

Mona Island, the amazing sight of waterfalls on a dry deserted island, AEB field trip 1980.

Water falling from the 200 feet tall cliffs in the area of Pajaros beach

We tried to fend off the water with anything that we could find

We had to take refuge in the area of Cueva del Caballo since the rain swamped the camping area.

Mona Island is a deserted island usually most remebered by hikers for its dryness and its endless vistas of dry fearsomely thorny scrub.  Althought the island can have periods of rainlessness that lasts months, from time to time it does gets hit with the great weather systems that make their way from Africa to the Caribbean.  In this case the Association of Biology Students was camping in Sardinera beach and decided to go to the other side of the island, to Pajaros Beach, about six miles away as the crow flies.  During the night we were camping in Pajaros beach a tropical wave or depression unexpectedly dumped an enormous amount of water over us (I know this is almost beyond belief but at the time we didn't have cellphones or even (gasp) Tweeter).  When we woke up the next day there was water everywhere and the astonishing sight of waterfalls falling from the central plateau of the island.  The previous day the island had been bone dry and now it everything was soaking wet.  We took refuge in a small cave nest to the Cueva del Caballo and made jokes as we shivered and tried to make the best of it.  I have gone back to Mona Island many times over the years but I have never again witnessed this spectacle again.

Mona Island, cave pearls, circa 1984, AEB field trip.

These are cave pearls from a cave in the Island of Mona, a small island about fifty miles to the west of the Island of Puerto Rico.  Mona Island is composed of a huge slab of limestone that rose from the sea about a million years ago.  There are two types of limestone in Mona Island, caliza lirio, the top layer, is relatively easily dissolved by rain water, the bottom layer is dolomite which is harder and resists dissolucion by rain much better.  In the boundary between the two layers of limestone you get enormous caves which can have hundred of thousands of square meters of interior space.  The easiest caves to access are all around the coast of the island. Almost all were severely altered by man early last century to extract huge quantities of guano that were deposited in the caves in the past.  The caves in Mona Island are laberinthic with many side passages and cavities going in all directions and interconnecting in all sort of ways.  They are full of a large variety of stalagmites and other speleothems, some of which seem to defy gravity.  Cave pealrs can be found in large numbers in some of the caves but they are rarely as white and pristine as these ones.  As you can see they are not necessarily round, they can be square, triangular and irregularly polyhedral.  From the empty niches you can tell that some have been taken away from the cave.  These pearls have no commercial value and are best enjoyed in their natural setting.  Hopefully these ones are still in the cave where I saw them.

The goats on Mona Island back in 1979, ABE field trip

A startled goat running at full tilt through the scrubby vegetation in alocation a few hundred feet south of the Mona lighthouse

Part of herd of about thirty that crossed the road from Pajaros beach to the lighthouse

Two goats grazing on the median strip of the road from Pajaros beach to the lighthouse.

My first trip to Mona Island was back in 1979.  It was with the Asociation of Biology Students of the Mayaguez campus of the University of Puerto Rico.  This trip was an important event in my life as I made new friends and decided to go to study to the Mayaguez campus.  I took many photos in that trip, sadly they have become a bit deteriorated.  But they still provide a window to a time where Mona Island was not a popular destination and few people visited it.  In this trip I saw a large number of goats.  About seventy goats crossed the road ahead of me during a half hour hike between Pajaros beach and the lighthouse, undoubtably there were many times this number lurking in the vegetation to the sides of the road.  The goats seemed untroubled by our presence  and some even spent some time grazing on the median strip of the road even as we approached them.   The goats were also plentiful around the lighthouse and I even managed to get fairly close to a few before they took flight.  In the decades that have passed since my trip hunting became much more popular and large numbers of hunters would visit the island to hunt for goats and pigs.  The goat population plummeted and it became harder and harder to see them.  The last time I was in Mona, about ten years ago, you had to hike for hours away from human haunted areas to be able to glimpse even one.

Mona Island Sardinera Beach coral reef, circa 1982

Acropora palmata coral was abundant all over the Sardinera reef and  it would grow almost up to the water surface near the reef crest.

Many of the Acropora palmata colonies were composed of many thin flat branches

Every crevice in the reef was inhabited by some critter, in this area there were a lot of black urchins

There were, many, many fish around the corals.  Here you can see part of a school of surgeon fish with a few parrot fish tagging along.  These were not tiny fish most were in the 1-2 feet long range.

Here I am hanging for dear life in the strong currents of the reef crest.  You can see that the water is full of small fish.

Among Acropora palmata colonies in water about seven feet deep

Colonies of the finger coral Porites porites extended as far as the eye could see

School of fishes of all sizes filled the reef, here is a group of yellow grunts

In the Sardinera Beach reef there were fish in good numbers all over the place.

1980 Mona Island, a happy smile in an awful spot, a memory from my AEB times

This is a photo of one of my dearest friends.  It was taken during a trip to Mona Island 1980.  I can hardly believe that thirty one years have passed since we did that trip.  Mona Island is an uninhabited island between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.  It boasts some of the most dangerous and inhospitable terrain in the Caribbean, its central plateau is dominated by fearsomely thorny, horribly poisonous xerophytic flora.  As hard core biology students we decided to visit one of the eastern Caribbean largest breeding colony of red-footed boobies.   The colony is located in the most remote and inaccessible part of the island.  To reach it we traveled for hours through very difficult terrain and did so enduring air temperatures that in the sun reached up to 120 F.  It is a wonder nobody died.  This photo was taken near Punta del Norte, we had found a cave to take refuge from the tremendous heat and had rested for a time inside it.  The cave was filled by a several feet thick blanket of dried goat droppings.  But we were so overjoyed to be out of the sun that we didn’t mind in the least.  As we rested our tired bones on the cave floor we were thankful for a cool place to rest.  This photo reminds me of the times when life was simpler, when we were alarmingly skinny and when a cave full of dried droppings was another amazing thing to be experienced and not a horrific ordeal to be endured.  So many years have passed and we are still good friends and he is still a very nice person, always with a smile on his face.  My friend went back later to the colony and took with him his future wife.  Now he has two beautiful children and a wonderful marriage.  I suspect that if a girlfriend has the fortitude to endure the heat, the thorns and spines, the endless walking and the awful cave, there is little that can put a dent on this relationship.

One one trip to the red footed booby colony I found a an orchid in full bloom with flowers that I have never seen before.  It looked so delicate and out of place in the arid landscape.  I took a flower back with me and Hector Colon who was quite familiar with the flora of Mona Island identified it as something new for Mona Island.  Later it was identified as Broughtonia dominguensis, this was the first time this orchid had ever been found in the Puerto Rico area.  I was fascinated by the fact that this small orchid could thrive in such a hostile enviroment.  This was the start of my interest for orchids, which continues to this day.