Coral Nursery and Chaetodont Assessment

This was a rather long but enjoyable day.  We started with two morning dives.  The first was to see the coral nursery where students from last year's class placed coral fragments onto racks so they could grow for a year before planting them into a dead reef.  Then on the same dive, we visited the dead reef to see how the corals that the students planted last year are doing.  We also visited the artificial reef on that dive.  After a bite to eat on the boat, we dove the first of two dives in which we are evaluating reef health by using a single family of fishes as a surrogate for all reef fish species.  In the evening, we had a few hours of classroom presentations.

This is the harbor at Phi Phi (pronounced P-P).    Many long-tail boats are available for hire, the dive boats load and unload at the pier, and the big ferries from Phuket also dock here.

On the dive deck of our boat is the white board you see here with all the student names, divemasters, and group assignments.  This acts as a checklist to make sure we have everybody back on board after a dive before we go to the next site.

The students are writing on the dive slates the names of all the chaetodont species (butterflyfish and bannerfish) that they've memorized in the fall semester.  We'll use them on the second dive today.

As we are approaching the first dive site, the dive masters are meeting with their respective groups to give them a briefing about the dive.  This is done routinely before all dives.

Down on the dive deck, the students are gearing up.  Here are Jake and Kyler.

This is Kelly ready for her giant stride into the water.  Right hand on the mask, left hand on the weight belt... perfect form!

Jake prefers to fall backwards into the drink.

Kyler prefers Jake's method.

Our first stop on this dive is to see the underwater nursery.  It consists of plastic pallets held above the ocean floor by buoys.  The pallets are tied to sand screws so they won't float away.  The top of the racks are ~ 20 feet below the surface.

Dana and Jake are looking at some racks that last year's class put on the nursery.

Hally is getting a closer look at the racks.

Here's a fun video clip of fish activity at one of the coral racks.

After looking at the nursery, we visited the artificial reef where experiments on coral growth have been conducted over the past decade.  There are many of these concrete cubes stacked on top of one another in a pyramid fashion.  Within the past year, another 100 blocks have been placed nearby.

We continued on to look at the corals that had been planted by last years class.  Here is Sara.

Alysa.

Along the way we saw another hawksbill sea turtle munching on algae and coral.

Here's one of the corals planted last year.  It's doing great with lots of fresh growing points at the axial polyps.

These clownfish that live in anemones are so photogenic.  

Even after the dive while waiting for  the boat to pick us up, the scenery is spectacular.  These islands are limestone, so there is substantial erosion.  The base of the islands goes nearly straight down 40 feet to the sand bottom.

On the second dive we got hands-on experience with a method of evaluating reef health in which we used one family of fish as a surrogate for all reef fish.  So, we only have to recognize ~30 species.  The students each took a dive slate and marked which species they saw.  This reef is heavily damaged by mismanagement.  We'll compare the results with a healthy reef on another day.  This is Maggie.

Dana.

Jake.

There was also a wreck that we swam around and explored.  During the dive, we found a total of 6 masks and 10-12 snorkels from inexperienced tourists that don't know how to snorkel and have been damaging the reef.

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