WCS Glovers Reef

AGRRA Team.....Just DO it!!

Clockwise Faegon (boat captain), Ben Wainwright (WCS), Debbie Wang (Peace Corps) and Nadia Bood (Consultant, WWF)

The team members of Glovers Reef AGRRA team were : Ben Wainwright (WCS), Annick Cros (WCS) , Nadia Bood (Consultant, WWF) and Debbie Wang (Peace Corps). 15 sites or over 40 transects later, the team had become extremely efficient in their task. So what did they do to celebrate? Go diving of course....

Presentation of AGRRA by:

Nadia Bood: Consultant, WWF

Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) Participants
Glover's Reef Atoll Assessment Zone

After an intensive week (May 15th to 19th, 2006) of training in the Atlantic and the Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) technique in Belize City, we journeyed out to Glover's Reef Atoll to join the WCS team in a regional rapid reef assessment for the Mesoamerica Reef region.

This region-wide rapid reef assessment is being executed to identify bleaching resilient (corals bleach and may die but the community bounces back) and resistant (corals do not bleach) reefs in the MAR region by examining factors such as live coral cover, coral colony size and age, abundance of bleaching resistant species, reefs that survived previous bleaching events, areas with strong recruitment, and fish diversity and abundance.

The World Wildlife Fund and Nature Conservancy are funding this very ambitious project, with the actual execution carried out by a number of national-based organizations. For the Belize reef region, a total of 145 sites will be assessed between May and July 2006. These sites have been divided into eight regions to facilitate ease of monitoring. Glovers Reef Atoll is one such region. From May 21st-30th, 2006 we (Annick, Ben, Debbie and myself) completed the assessment of 15 requested sites for this zone.

The time spent at Glover's Reef, although intensive, has been quite invigorating. The establishment and services provided were above and beyond expectation. I especially enjoyed the great cooking of Martha and Bernice, who I believe are responsible for the extra few pounds I've gained in my waistline ;).

Nadia Bood on a pause after completing an AGRRA site.

Methods

Ben and Debbie were the "fish" team. They counted fish along a 30m transect, estimating size. They completed 10 transects (5 transects each) per site.

Ben and Debbie getting ready for an AGRRA fish survey

Nadia and Annick were the "benthic girls'. They measured all live corals under a 10m transect, measuring size and % live cover. They also measured algae canopy size and the type of benthos on the transect. Any indication of bleaching or disease was written down. They completed 6 transects (3 each) per site.

Annick and Nadia, the benthic girls, ready to jump in.

Glovers Reef was divided by randomly drawn hexagones. In each hexagone a primary and secondary site was randomly chosen in 3 reef classes: reef flat, fore reef and patch reef. Glovers Reef has a total of 15 site with 5 reef flats, 5 coral patch and 5 fore reef. The classes or reef categories used were defined for the Millenium Coral Maps which map out all the reef of the world at a 30m resolution. To learn more about these maps please visit the website: http://imars.usf.edu/corals/index.html.

Map of Glovers Reef AGRRA primary (pink) and secondary (blue) sites. If primary sites could not be used (lack of coral cover for example), secondary sites were surveyed.

For more explanation on method used please visit the official website: www.agrra.org

Preliminary results for Glovers Reef

It is too early to give results for any sites in Belize. This set of measurements were carried out in a period where water temperatures are still low. They will be be used as baseline information for future bleaching events.

However here are a few observations made at Glover's Reef:

There are still areas with surprisingly high coral cover.

The windward and leeward side of the atoll have completely different reef structures with different dominant coral colonies.

There tends to be more fish on the fore reef than patch reefs or the reef flat.

You see more sharks while staying still and counting little juvenile strip parrotfish than when you actually look for them!

Diademas are hiding in shallow water, on reef flats with very low coral cover or relief.

Some random facts of AGRRA by:

Debbie Wang - Peace Corps Volunteer

I could be all intelligent and brainy-like and tell you about what I've learned on my surveys about fish abundance, diversity, and distribution for the 15 AGRRA sites we have finished here at Glover's Reef, but I'm sure everyone else has already dscienceat scienc-y stuff!

...so I figure I'd share a few of the many weird and random things I learned during my time here at Glover's:

-Composting toilets can be a cool thing! Especially when you go to the bathroom 3 times more than you normally would.
-Peeing in a shorty wetsuit several times while diving is fine, but apparently peeing in a long wetsuit several times while diving can get a little gross, even if you are doing it to get warm.
-It doesn't matter if you're a hot shot diver who has a gazillion dives under your belt and can name all the scientific coral names, when you jump in the water and you've forgotten to turn the tank air on, you're still a big dumbass.
-If you stay in the dorms that Nadia and I stayed in, there is a mythical morning gecko who will come to your door and wake you with his highly disturbing croaking.
-Both Annick and Ben are very well traveled. Put them 2 together and you have the United Nations.
-Annick sure joked a lot about purposefully ignoring coral she was supposed to be counting, or placing her transect on strategically coral-less areas....hmmm! but was she really joking?!
-If you go to enter your fish/coral data on Nadia's computer, bring a book to read while you wait for the Excel program to load up, a thick one.
-Don't ever sing the "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie worl" song while doing AGRRA surveys, you'll never get that song out of your head, and I'm pretty positive that singing that song completely negates our validity as scientific data collectors
-Singing the A-team theme song while on the boat does this as well, actually it's worse.