The Seattle Aquarium Takes Hawaii!
Photo credit: Seattle Aquarium
The Seattle Aquarium has been researching off the northwest coast of Hawaii’s Big Island for seven years!
They’ve been monitoring the abundance of reef fish int he area. What a job, right?!
Video sampling by divers in the reef system is not invasive. In addition to the Seattle Aquarium, the project includes researchers from Washington State University, California State University, Humboldt and the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources.
Curator of Conservation Research Shawn Larson said, “We are searching for shifting baselines, which are an ecological indicator of changes in fish abundance and diversity that may correlate with local environmental changes or other factors such as changes in human use activities.”
The data shows a steady increase in the number of fish, figures that have already been used for educational and management purposes in Hawaii.
Read Dr. Larson’s journal entries from three days of this research trip:
Day 1: Tuesday, February 3
Arrived at our hosts’ beautiful house in Puako late last night. We spent the morning getting all our gear together and picking up tanks. In the early afternoon we were able to get our survey dives done at site 1. It was beautiful and we saw many fish that we hadn’t seen at this site before. Plus there were many juvenile fish of all species. It was a great dive.
Day 2: Wednesday, February 4
The waves were too big for us to access our sites from shore so no diving today. After we were shut out by the surf at Puako we headed 20 miles north to try our research sites at Mahukona. When we got there the waves were just as strong as down south—but what killed our hopes of diving here was the fact that the ladder that we relied on to get into and out of the water was gone. Two weeks ago the north side of Hawaii experienced record high tides combined with very heavy surf, and many nearshore areas were damaged, including our entry sight at Mahukona. Frustrated, we headed back to the house and spent the rest of the day preparing for our talk at the historic church in Puako at 6pm, which was attended by approximately 30 people and very well received, with lots of good questions and interest in our work.
Day 3: Thursday, February 5
Today was our day in Kona (about a 30-minute drive to the south of Puako) to dive with Captain Pete McCormick off his 25-foot Parker motorboat. We were hoping to be able to dive on Sites 3, 4 and 8. However the swells were pretty big and after we surveyed sites 3 and 4 in Kona, we tried to make it down to site 8 (another hour boat ride) but it was too rough. We’ll try to pick up site 8 again Saturday.
Read more on the Seattle Aquarium’s blog.
