Thought I would talk about my day today on Glovers Reef Marine Reserve. Today we did three dives, coming back to the island between each island for our surface interval. Between our first two dives, my science project partner (Brooke Liston) and I typed up the data that we collected the night before and started to plan how our project was going to come together as we collect more data. Between dives, we took a canoe to a patch reef off of the island and completed two 10-meter AGRRA Belt Transects while snorkeling. Today we accumulated 6 more surveys towards our science project. For our project, we are correlating diseases and bleaching on corals to water depth. We are also taking other factors such as pH, temperature, salinity, and species of coral into consideration. These environmental parameters are measured in triplicate at each location by 2 other ‘nauts, Jeremy and Danny.
So far, have had some “problems” coming up with a large quantity of diseased or bleached corals in our data. While this is great for the Belize coral population, it makes our project a little more difficult! We do see diseases on almost every dive when swimming around but not always on our transect. We are looking for 8 types of diseases and I hope we have collected enough at each depth to make conclusions.
-Conner Hutchisson
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