Biological Monitoring

As of 4 August, the corals in St. Croix looked great with no bleaching (not even the fire corals (Millepora spp.) or Palythoa were pale).  A few Montastraea faveolata were still a little pale, but Dave Ward told us that these still haven't recovered fully from last years bleaching event.

Ruben van Hooidonk and I did four 20 meter video transects directly under the stick site (transect lines were tied from opposite eye bolt to eye bolt across the base plate).  Everything looked great here.  Interestingly, there were a lot of coral recruits (small colonies that were < 2 yrs old or so).  Ruben and I also did three transects each at the east and west wall of the Salt River Canyon at 90 feet, 55 feet and 30 feet (six total).  These will act as reference sites to the coral under the stick and will provide great data in the event of bleaching.  Ruben is very interested in the effect that hurricanes may have across this depth distribution.

On the last day, Ruben and I tagged 68 colonies and took small cores for zooxanthellae studies.  One of Andrew Baker's students across the street, Adrienne Romanski, is going to analyze the DNA of the zooxs from these samples.  The idea is to sample the same corals over the next three years annually to see if the types of zooxanthellae change with time.  Some zooxs are more temperature tolerant than others, and researchers have found that corals can swap out for the hardier types during bleaching.  These questions are vital to understanding if corals have any chance of acclimating to warmer sea temperatures.

In short, it was a successful trip.  Ironically, the two days Tropical Storm Chris was 80-90 miles North of us were the calmest and didn't stop us from working.

Derek