Thursday, August 30, 2007

coral disease at Salt River

Hey team,

After consulting an expert (Marilyn Brandt at RSMAS) I am pretty confident that the disease I saw on a bunch of Montastraea faveolata colonies at Salt River is "Yellow Band Disease". Tyler Smith reported seeing a bunch of this around the rest of the USVI and Marilyn told me it was quite prevalent in the Dominican Republic. I think it may be worth doing some more intensive monitoring of the progress of disease on tagged colonies when we go to Jamaica.

Take care,
Derek

Coral Observations

Here are some observations from diving August 28th:

-Overall: only mild, partial bleaching and paling on very few colonies. Likely nothing more than normal summer paling as only Agaricids seemed affected and they are notorious partial, annual bleachers.

-Most colonies of Montastraea faveolata appeared to show signs of disease. I am not totally convinced that it is "disease," nor am I confident regarding which disease it is (Yellow Band?), but I will investigate further.

Derek Manzello

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Station Maintenance by AOML Crew

Yesterday (Aug 28) the "brain" and Vaisala weather package were removed from the station and taken back to the hotel for reprogramming, etc. We saw NO major signs of bleaching in the area, just very few scattered minor incidences--"nothing to write home about" (Derek).

Today, the logger was re-inserted into the stick, the new Vaisala was installed, and the CT was removed. However, problems arose with the deep CTD, and we decided to watch it through the day and see how it would look by the end of the day. Tonight it appears the CTD has "cleared its throat" and is once again transmitting correctly.

Crew: Dave Ward, Derek Manzello, Mike Jankulak, Jim Hendee

Cheers,
Jim

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Maintenance Update

Dave just called me. He said he did a cleaning at 1130 yesterday. Station looks OK. Slight bleaching occurring near the station.

Jules