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| Alaria on station tucked behind a coral reef in Antigua |
“We need a bigger boat”
utters the marine biologist (played by Richard Dryfuss) after he sees the huge
great white shark in the movie Jaws. I’ve
heard that phrase dozens of times on this expedition once we saw the huge tasks
before us.
However, bigger boats need deeper water and we have the
perfect tool for slipping behind a coral reef, anchoring in the sand and
waiting for weather that will allow us to study our target coral reefs.
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| Alaria's locations around the eastern coral reefs of Antigua |
Getting to those perfect anchorages means waiting for good
light, no sun glare and a person poised on the bow of the boat with hand
signals that tells me where to go and when to stop.
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| Paul spotting coral heads for us to steer around |
Getting to a site to do research involves lots of
preparation. I’ve targeted coral reef
sites along eastern shores where coral reefs grow best. We use a WiFi booster to get on line so I can
go over Google Earth images of the reef and the channels that allow us to
access them.
On the foredeck is our dive staging area. There we have a small portable compressor
that fills a scuba tank in 20 minutes. We store the tanks and our dive gear
there. We have a fish tote filled with
water to wash down our regulators and buoyancy compensators.
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| Scuba tanks being filled by our compressor |
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Foredeck with fish tote for rinsing scuba gear after dives
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After we quantify the corals, algae, sea urchins and all
reef fishes on our transects, we transcribe them onto our computers and conduct
simple analyses.
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| George doing fish transects. Note GoPro video camera on his head, writing cylinder on his right arm, dive computer on his left arm |
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| Bob placing a transect line |
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| Returning to the Zodiac after the dive |
So, Alaria is functioning as a floating marine lab. However, our work is not just confined to my
group and the partners we work with on the various islands, We are also collaborating with several other
researchers on various topics.
For example, we have also been collaborating with Liz Madin
in Sydney Australia. She’s using
satellite images to find halos around reefs where no seagrass grows. We are wondering why halos occurs so she
sends me images, I check them out.
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| Halo around a patch reef (note clear area around mark) |
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| Alaria's location to examine the halo site |
Another collaboration is with Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Manuel
Rivero (from the University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia) who are using a
state of the art camera imaging system to develop three dimensional models of
the coral reefs. On reefs where we both
work, we can supply fish and coral community composition.
When I think back to the last time I was in this area of the
Caribbean in 1973 and 1974, we had a boat, a compressor and lab but no ability
to communicate or network with other scientists in the field. Our electronic revolution connects us
easily. What is hard, is actually
getting out to the field to see what’s going on. THAT is what tiny Alaria can do very well.
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| Alaria on station in Antigua |
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