GVI.2015.1

GVI Volunteers in Action to Monitor Coral Bleaching

Objectives

- Making long term, sustainable contributions towards key global and local issues - Environmental sustainability

Summary CoralWatch is an Australian research project that monitors coral health. By collecting CoralWatch data, Pez Maya is contributing to the scientific community and helping them better understand the threats that coral reef ecosystems face today. These threats such as pollution, coastal activities and elevated seawater temperatures are a problem not only on the Mesoamerican barrier reef, but are found all over the world. Report CoralWatch is an Australian re-search project which led to the development of a cheap, simple, non-invasive method for the monitoring of assessment of coral health, based on observations on coral bleaching in stony corals. Coral bleaching is the expulsion of symbiotic algae by corals, inhibit-ing their capability of photosyn-thesis and in many cases actually renders the coral tissue pale or completely white. This process is detrimental to coral health by cutting of their main supply of carbon, thereby killing the affect-

ed corals in a few days to a few weeks. This process is thus a key indicator of coral reef degradation and usually occurs after periods of elevated temperature stress, nutrification and pollution of seawater and by indirect causes such as tourism and fishing. The CoralWatch method can be used by anyone with the Coral Health Chart, which is designed spe-cifically for the purpose of performing a CoralWatch. It works like a paint color matching chart and is thus easy to use for everyone. Very little is known about trends of coral bleaching on a global scale. Currently coral health monitor-ing mainly occurs around a few reefs that are regularly visited by scientists. There are many ques-tions that will have to be answered in order to try and save the reefs. This is why we at Pez Maya are working hard to get as many CoralWatch data from our reefs. We send the data to the CoralWatch project where it is analyzed and made available on the project’s website. This will make it possible to compare the condition of many different reefs at any one point in time, as well as the condition of a single reef over time.

Figure 1 Volunteer monitoring corals

GVI.2015.1

At Pez Maya we train our volun-teers in performing the CoralWatch by first teaching them about the biology and ecology of corals and the different species of coral that occur around our base. There are over 50 species of stony coral in 12 families found on our dive sites, of which the majority is used for CoralWatch dives. These corals come in many different shapes and sizes, from boulders to branches and from golf ball sized to the size of a small car. Our divers go down in buddy pairs with the necessary equipment, consisting of the Coral Watch Chart, a dive torch, slate and pen-

cil. When they find a candidate for the CoralWatch, they look for the

darkest and the lightest part of the coral and find the corresponding colors in color brightness on the chart, as an indication of the amount of bleaching of the coral tissue. Finally, the divers write all their findings down on the slate. Volunteers collect data from 20 different corals they encounter during each CoralWatch dive. During the first trimester of 2015, 21 CoralWatch dives were done. Almost all of these dives were done in March, when the majority of our coral volunteers were trained to the level of CoralWatchers. In total, 420 corals were monitored in 14 hours of diving. At Pez Maya, we are passionate about this project and believe efforts such as these are important for the understanding of coral reefs, not only the beautiful reef in front of our base, but reefs all over the world! It is one of the many ways we contribute to marine conservation on a daily basis in our Mexican GVI hub. Do you want to know more about the marine conservation program at Pez Maya? visit our website.

Figure 2 Using the CoralWatch card