It’s finally a wrap! I’ve finished collecting the data for my study on degraded reefs. It’s been a rather rough couple of weeks. We’ve had very choppy waves, uncooperative tide tables, and difficulties trying to get a boat but we’ve eventually collected all the data we needed from Coral Garden. A huge thank you to Charlie, Danielle and Ali for helping me with the data collection and to Tholal as well for being too kind and offering to drive us out on the dinghy early in the morning!
Among the three of us, we observed some 10,385 fish from 191 species over 60 transects. We recorded 6000 points for our benthic surveys in total and found live corals from 23 genera.
The project that we’re working on is to compare post-disturbance states of reefs affected by coral bleaching and crown of thorns predation. Collecting the data was no doubt physically exhausting, but now on to the mentally exhausting part…actually analysing the data, running the statistics and then writing up the paper!
Couldn’t be more glad to have all the help and support from my amazing co-authors Danielle Robinson, Charlie Everitt and Dr Steve Newman!
the cerulean sea 
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