Lionfish Sampling Day 9: End of the road

Today was a pretty epic day on the water. It is Saturday and the weather was perfect, so there were a ton of boats on the water today. Fortunately, none of them wanted to dive or fish in the same spots we were diving. We only had 2 sites to finish. It wasn't too difficult, but we did spend over three hours at each location. Each pair of divers spent almost an hour an a half on the bottom doing our surveys. We had a tough time finding graysby, so that was part of what took us so long. 

We saw a whole lot of cool things from the surface. We saw a sailfish jump out of the water super close to the boat. That was AWESOME! The water was also so calm and clear that we could see the other pair of divers on the bottom while we were sitting in the boat. It was a pretty incredible day on the water. 

This trip has been quite memorable overall. The general attitude has been extremely positive. Everyone was very organized and kept everything running smoothly. We worked together extremely well, staying on top of data, and working together like a well-oiled machine. This has been an extremely positive experience & I have learned a great deal. I have continued to hone my skills as a research diver, gotten to drive a boat, and generally had a god time working closely with a group of higly inteligent, highly motived marine scientists. Yay field reasearch!!!

Lionfish Sampling Day 8: Weather

The field sampling for this project occurs  four times per year for two years for a total of eight visits to each of the twenty sites. Each sampling period has its own unique challenges. The project began in January when both the air and the water were in the 60s. This sounds like a nice, warm temperature. However, it is quite cool to be wet for twelve or more hours per day, During the May sampling period, it was very windy, and the samplers were only able to visit fourteen of the 20 sites. 

Our routine during this sampling trip has been for two divers to go down and do their surveys while the other two divers remain on the boat and watch their bubbles. The divers on the bottom do not bring a surface marker with them. The two people on the boat have to constantly watch their bubbles in order to not drift away from the spot where the divers are working. During that time, we also prepare all of our gear for the next dive. 

The weather in July has been really nice overall. There is relatively light wind in July, leading to seas less than two feet. Most days have been sunny, and we make sure to wear pleanty of sunscreen when on the boat.  However, summer also means squalls, rain, and thunderstorms. The squalls aren't too bad but they are a pain. They bring wind that whips the water into a froth, significantly reducing our ability to see our divers when we are on the boat, and changing the direction of the wind, making the boat quickly float away from the divers. Rain adds a level of difficulty. It reduces visibility even further, and makes the divers even more difficult to see. 

Thunderstorms are the worst. One lightning strike can fry all of the electronics on a boat and even severely shock a person who is holding onto metal on the boat. Being at sea on an open center-consoled boat in a thundstorm is no bueno. Yesterday Chris and Joe came up just before a rainstorm started moving toward us and building energy to become a thunderstorm. We turned on the radar, took a look at the direction it was moving, and started heading south as fast as possible.  We ran south around the edge of the storm, spending several tense minutes unsure if we would make it away from the thunder and lightning. When we got past the south edge of the storm, we were able to wait out the weather and get back to pick up a few graysby. The radar was a great help to us since we could watch where the thunderstorms were moving, and how far away they were. 

Today the weather seemed to be acting aproximately the same. However, when we watched the rain showers, there was no lightning, so we were relatively safe. The showers stayed close to land, and never made it out to where we were sampling. Once we finished our sites, we did have to run back to the park through pelting rain that seemed very cold after our day of sunny, humid conditions offshore, and our week of diving four hours every day. 

As long as all goes well, we will finish our last two sites tomorrow and be done with this project for the month of July. It has been a really fun experience. I have learned a lot, and had a good time. I'm excited to get to participate in some research this summer. 

Lionfish sampling day 6-7: Graysby hunting

One of the four divers on this trip is a master' student at USF. His project is dealing with the diet of the predators on the reef and how they are impacted by the presence of lionfish. There are a few different ways to possibly answer this question. One way to analyze this data is the use of isotope analyses. The isotopes of nitrogen and carbon differ based on where their food is coming from.  If lionfish are having a significant impact on the native predators' ability to find food, the natives would shift their diet from their normal diet to different food. This shift would be present when the data is analyzed.

Graysby looking angry at the world

One of the resident preditors on the reef is a small grouper species called the graysby. For the master's project, we are spearing 1-2 graysby on each site. On each site, once Kara and I finish with our surveys for lionfish and other prediators, we spend the remainder of our time searching for a few graysby to shoot for the project. We swim around the reef & try to sneak up on them and spear them with a pole spear.

The student, Joe, will analyze their tissues for the nitrogen and carbon. Currently, each of the reefs we are visiting have at least a few lionfish living on them, and they have been there for the past few years.  In another few months the National Park will begin regularly visiting each site to remove the lionfish they find. On future trips, the divers will collect 1-2 more graysby. These will be after the lionfish have been removed from the area. If the lionfish were having an effect on the diet of the native predators, Joe's analyses should find a change in the isotopes. If lionfish are not affecting the diets of native predators, the isotope signatures will be the same both now and in a year.  Of course, we will not know the answer to this question for at least another year or more. It will be very interesting to find out what type of effect the lionfish have on the native predators. 

Lionfish Sampling Day 5: Hunting for lionfish

Searching for lionfish while diving seems like the easist job on the planet. Lionfish are large. They have red and white stripes and long trailers all over all of their fins. It seems like they should be the most obvious fish on the reef. However, there are a few things that actually make them a little tough to spot. 

First, they really like to hang out inside of holes, under ledges, and generally anywhere kind of dark and dank. They group up in the best holes, sitting next to each other. They love to hang out upside-down inside of these holes. In order to spot them, you often have to hang upside-down, stick your head into a hole and then look really hard. No one ever expects to see a fish sitting on the ceiling, even under water. 

The second thing that makes lionfish hard to spot is those long, frilly fins. Although the fins look extremely obvious on their own, when looking for them among sea fans, sponges, algae and other organisms flowing in the current, it's really quite difficult to distinugish the fish fins from any of these other living things.  

The third thing that makes lionfish difficult to spot fact that those stripes are actually a form of disguise called "disruptive coloration." Many species of reef fish employ this tactic much like zebras in the grasslands. By disguising thier eyes, having irrregular vertical bars, and frilly fins, they blend right in with the background. Potential prey and predators never even notice that the lionfish is there until it's too late. 

These facts conspire to make a large and conspicuous-looking fish somewhat difficult to spot while trying to cover every inch of 3000 square meters of dense reef habitat. 

Lionfish Sampling Day 4: Working in Space

Each site we visit is marked with 8 floats attached to the bottom in precice locations. The floats also have livestock tags attached to to bottom in case the floats break off. Since the sites are only visited once every 3 months, there is a fairly high chance that at least one of the floats will  go missing. If this happens, we have to do our best to find the tag, clean it off, and replace the float. Today we visited two sites that hast lost several of their buoys. We were able to find the locations of the tags. We then replaced each of the missing floats with a new one.

Anytime I am doing this sort of work under water I feel like I am working in space, possibly doing critical maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope or the International Space Station. Since we don't know what the state of the site will be I bring several extra floats and zip-ties along with me on each dive. While I am perusing the site for lionfish, I also keep an eye on each of the markers. If I arrive at a marker and the float is intact, I will clean it off, removing any of the plants or animals that have started to grow on the line or the float. If I arrive at the approximate location where the float should be and I don't see it, I will spend a few minutes searching for the livestock tag. I can often find it on the bottom. I then clean it off & thread a new float line through the spot where the tag is. This entire procedure makes me feel like I am in space. I can't see any of the gear that I'm carrying with me, but I know exactly where each piece of gear is. Each of the floats is buoyant, of course, and will float aways if you let go of it. Other gear is negatively buoyant, but I have to make sure to place it where I can see it to pick it up and not let it slide away. I also have a propensity to hold things in my mouth since I only have two hands. Of course, with a regulator in my mouth I can't use it for holding onto gear when I run out of hands. Much like space, I have to think hard about each move I am going to make before I make it. I have to hang on to all of my gear, and I have to make sure that I finished everthing completely and have picked up all gear before I move on to the next task. 

Lionfish Sampling Day 3: The ups and downs of small boat sampling

All of our sites are located 10-15 miles offshore in somewhere between 50 and 80 feet of water. To get there, we are using a 26 foot catamaran with two 115 horsepower outboard motors. It is a great work boat for four divers. There is lots of space to store gear and get ourselves ready. The boat is wide, and there is a lot of deck space. The T-top provides a fairly large amount of shade, and the boat is very easy to maneuver. Each day we bring out pleanty of food to eat between dives, and we take turns at the helm. 

However, working on a small boat requires quite a bit of pre-planning and organization. We have a total of 24 Nitrox tanks. We can only bring 12 out on the boat with us at one time because of the amount of space on the boat and the number of hours in a day. The two divers who are about to go on the boat get their gear ready on the back corners of the boat, while the other two people bring their gear to the bow when they get out of the water. Since the sites we are working at are 300 feet long and the current is relatively strong, the pair of divers who stay on the boat don't anchor. They "hold station" by watching the divers' bubbles & driving the boat so that it stays close enough to the divers to pick them up when the dive is over.  This can be extremely easy if the wind is calm and the waves are small. It gets much more challenging when the wind is blowing the tops off of the waves, and the current is running several knots. Anything above about 15 knots of wind makes this an impossible task and requires that you cancel diving for the day. Fortunately we have yet to have a day like that. 

By managing our air consumption pretty religiously, we can make the tanks that we have last about 2.5 days. Today was our "tank day." We sampled for two twelve-hour days, and today we were only on the boat from 7:30 am until 1 pm. Then we ran the tanks up to the dive shop to get all of our tanks filled. This is still work, but it's a bit easier since we just bring the tanks to the shop and then let the shop workers fill them. However, we do have to lift those 38 lb steel tanks into the back of the truck, and then unload them at the dive shop, load them back up to take them back, and then unolad them back at the National Park. 

Since conditions were a bit marginal and we were trying to complete a deep site, we were only able ot finish half of the surveys we needed to. Tomorrow will be another full 12-hour day. We will again attempt to complete three sites. I always say "attempt" because you never know what will happen on the water on any given day. It's always an adventure. 

Lionfish Sampling: Day 2

The study we are working on is a  BACI (Before and After Control Impact) study. In short, the goal of the study is to determine how frequently lionfish will need to be removed in order to return the area to a "natural" state, or that before the lionfish were introduced.

There are a total of 20 sites within the study. Each is approximately 100 meters long & situated along the edge of the reef in 50-80 feet of water. Each site is sampled four times per year. During the first year of the project everything is left as is. All lionfish are left in place, despite their invasive nature. During these sampling trips we are merely observed  During the second year, each site will receive one of three different treatments. Three of the sites will have lionfish removed from them on a monthly basis. Three will have lionfish removed every four months, and the remainder will not have lionfish removed. Researchers will continue to return to the sites four times per year to count numbers of lionfish remaining and numbers of other types of fish species present. If the lionfish are having a substantial impact on the populations of other fishes, the researchers would expect to see an increase in all types of native fishes on the sits with the most frequent lionfish culls. However, if the impact is somewhat lower, the researchers would not expect to see much difference in fish populations between sites with monthly lionfish removals and those with removals 3 times per year. This study will determine how frequentlly the National Park should be culling lionfish in order to maintain the populations of native fishes in a natural state. It will be a couple of years before we have an answer to this question.

Counting Lionfish

Both yesterday and today, we completed three surveys of lionfish, other predator fish, and prey species.  Of course, completing the dives is only a small part of the entire process of working in the field. These are at least twelve hour work days. We get up around 6 am, leave the house by seven, arrive at the park around 7:30, load the boat, and drive out to the first site of the day. Each pair of divers spends approximately 1 to 1.5 hours on the site, searching for their fish (lionfish/predators or prey species), then we move on. We arrive back at the park around 7 pm, and head back to our rental house. This is a great group of people, so we work together to make dinner, and then clean all of our gear, and ready for the next day. It's an exhausting schedule, but it is also a great deal of fun. You get to know people extraordinarily well working so closely with them. 

My office for a couple of weeks

Tomorrow will be a shorter day of sampling. We plan to only sample one site and then come back in to get our tanks refilled at a local dive shop. This will also give us a chance to rest up a little bit, watch the World Cup final, and generally recouperate for another couple of twelve hour days. 

Lionfish Sampling Day 1

Yesterday we drove from St. Petersburg to Homestead, Florida for our sampling trip. It rained most of the way across Alligator Alley, which is always an impressive sight. You can see the rain coming for miles, but once you are inside, you can't see ANYTHING!

Once we arrived at Biscayne Bay National Park, we stowed our tanks and put the boat in the water, and went grocery shopping. We went over all of our procedures for the next day, and relaxed for a little while.

Today we began our sampling. Back in January, other divers had set up semi-permanent transects. The total length is 100 meters. There are two sets of divers working at each site. First, Kara and I descend to the bottom & cover the entire site which is 100 m long by 10 m wide.

We would criss-cross back and forth across the site. Kara would be searching for lionfish and I would search for all native predators such as groupers, snappers, hogfish, and the like. This procedure took us approximately 45 minutes.

Once we came up, the other two divers would descend and do an extremely detailed count of ALL fish found on a 25 meter long by 4 meter wide section. That procedure takes anywhere from 45-80 minutes depending on the number of gobies, blennies, and other tiny fish that are living in the area.

Today we completed surveys at 3 sites out of 20 that we have to complete total. That was a pretty good day. We left the house at 7 this morning, and got off the water at 7 pm. After a long day on the water, we went to a great taqueria to eat dinner,  getting us back to the house aroud 10 pm. There's a lot more to this project, but I will continue my descriptions another day. I need to go to bed, so that we can get back up and do it all over again tomorrow! Good times!!!

Summer 2014: Biscayne Bay!

Since I left the world of professional research 2 years ago and started teaching, I have made a conscious effort to participate in research projects as often as possible, especially if they involve scuba diving. Last summer I participated in two different projects, one investigating corals and the other investigating fisheries. Throughout the past year I have volunteered for a variety of short-term projects.

This summer I will be participating in a project which is investigating an invasive species which has been getting a lot of attention in Florida, the Southeastern US, and the Caribbean. That species is the lionfish, Pterois volitans. This species is native to the south Pacific & Indian Oceans. They are a species of scorpionfish which pack a powerful sting when an animal is punctured by any of the spines on their dorsal or pectoral fins. They are incredibly sedentary, they don't really move very far when they are on a reef. They have an incredible appetite, eating anything that will fit into their mouths.

Researchers have also discovered in the Southeast Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico that they are not particularly picky about their habitat. They will live anywhere there is coral or limestone reef on the continental shelf. They are now ubiquitous to reefs on reefs throughout the Caribbean, all the way up the east coast of the U.S. (though they probably can't survive the winter north of the gulf stream), and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. 

Their ubiquity and seemly insatiable appetite has made P. volitans a concern throughout the region. There is signficant uncertainty about what these new invaders will do to populations of reef fishes, especially native fishes such as snappers and groupers which are caught for sport and sale. Because of this concern there are a great deal of projects to study the problem of lionfish invasion throughout the range. 

During the project in which I'll participate over the next two weeks, we will be mapping the location of P. volitans living within Biscayne Bay, near Miami. 

During this phase of the project will be mapping the locations of individual lionfish along a series of transects set up within the bay. We will also be quantifying and sizing all of their potential competitors, the predatory fish such as snappers, groupers, grunts, etc. that are living nearby. This will not strictly be a reserach "cruise" as Biscayne bay is close enough to civilization for us to stay on land. We will be going out to the bay each day, diving, counting fish, and then coming back to our rented house to sleep each night. 

I'm very excited about this project because it uses a lot of the skills I have developed over the years, but is not identical to any projects I've worked on in the past. I will continue to update this page with pictures, stories and information I learn throughout the trip. Please stay tuned. 

8/1/2013: The final analysis

So, we made it back to Mayport Naval Base & were tied to the dock at around 7 am today. The entire ship's company worked to get all of the science gear unloaded & then the science staff loaded it all into the trucks to get back to Beaufort, NC.
This was one of the most harmonious research cruises I have been a part of. Everyone onboard the vessel was highly professional and engaged. Everyone knew their job and got it done like clockwork. We may not have captured as many red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) as people were hoping in our traps. However, the videos were another story. Most of the sites the last several days had red snapper observed on the cameras, and these will be counted along with a variety of other species when the videos are analyzed in the next several months (For the 2012 season I analyized 75 videos, and expect to do about the same for 2013).
All of these data will be combined together for the red snapper stock assessment meeting which will take place next August (2014). Based on the data that has been collected over the past 4 years, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council will decide on the catch limits for commercial and recreational fishers for the following several years. If the data that we collected shows that the population of L. campechanus is healthier than previously thought, the council may open the fishery for longer periods of time or allow larger numbers of fish to be harvested. Our one cruise will not give us this answer. It will be combined with similar data from many cruises over the past few years to make these decisions, and this will be a very short-term dataset. The folks making decisions would like to have at least 10 years of data to go on. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

I would like to close this blog with a note from my friend Zeb, our chief scientist for the trip. I think he says it better that I could.
 "The second leg of the 2013 SEFIS cruise on the Pisces completed operations today, and we are now steaming back towards Mayport for a sunrise arrival.  It was another successful sampling trip aboard the Pisces, splitting our time between the mid-shelf waters near the Georgia/South Carolina border and those off north-central Florida between St. Augustine and Cape Canaveral.  We mapped 148 square kilometers across 21 different areas, resulting in 213 new video/trap stations being sampled.

A big thank you goes out to the night shift (Warren Mitchell, Matt Wilson, David Berrane, Dawn Glasgow, and Neah Baechler), whose long efforts at night consistently resulted in solid multibeam maps every morning from which to choose stations for the day.  The quality of maps continues to improve as Warren and Matt whittle down the remaining issues that stand between us and charting-level products.  While a few outstanding issues persist, they have worked to document all the effort that has been put towards correcting them and identified some potential next steps.  

Video and trap sampling during the day met a series of challenges, from high seas and strong current in the north to very cold bottom temperatures in the south.  Overall we caught 35 red snapper, almost all in Georgia, as well as a handful of groupers (red grouper, scamp, coney).  Early in the trip we also had a lot of catch of the typical inshore characters (black seabass, triggerfish, tomtates, etc.), but as we moved to Florida and the cold temperatures set in catches were restricted to small catches of almost exclusively black seabass--most other fish appeared to either not be present on the reefs or not interested in the bait.  Despite the small catches, however, the video samples revealed lots of new habitat that can be added to our sampling frame as well as many snapper in areas where we caught none.  Deck efforts were expertly led by Patrick Raley from the NMFS Panama City lab and Julie Vecchio, a science teacher from St. Petersburg, FL, who is also a longtime colleague of ours in the video sampling world.  Many thanks to them as well as the rest of the deck crew, Doug DeVries, Jenny Ragland, and Zach Gillum.

We also had the pleasure of sailing with a NOAA Teacher At Sea, Paul Ritter from Illinois.  He was extremely enthusiastic and anxious to help, and, in a first in my experience in sailing with participants in this program, was actively looking for ways to get his students to engage with the actual data we collected on board.  By the time we disembark in the morning, he (along with Julie) will have finished designing a science lab for high school students that incorporates some of the videos we collected to teach them how NOAA uses video to monitor fish populations--an impressive feat considering he also worked long days on deck.

Finally, a big thank you to the officers and crew of the Pisces.  It's always a pleasure to sail on this ship, as accommodating and professional a team as exists in the fleet.  I'm looking forward to being back here again in 2014!"

For me, I met some great people, got to interact with some long-time colleagues, saw some amazing things & had a lot of laughs. I always learn something going to sea & this trip was no exception. I hope you learned something from reading my musings.

I had totally neglected to link to the official teacher at sea blog for this trip, so here it is (sorry Paul). If you are interested in a slightly more zany & entertaining analysis, here it is. Paul Ritter's blog

7/31/2013: Headed to Jacksonville

A research vessel is a little like a rental house. Of course, the ship’s crew has all of their spaces where they keep their gear & the ship’s gear. However, the science labs are largely empty & the science crew brings all of their own research materials. Before the cruise, the science crew must think ahead and plan for the most samples they think they will collect. The must bring all of the tags, bags, markers, memory cards, preservatives, etc. that they think they might need during the entire trip. When leaving the ship, all of this gear must be packed away into containers, prepared to be taken off of the ship, trucked back to home base, and stored for the next cruise. 

 

We completed three trap sets today. In those traps we caught a whole bunch of black seabass, and a fair number of jellyfish. Red snapper continue to be seen on camera, but not enter the traps. In between trap sets, we washed all of the buckets, containers and most of the other gear. Once we finished with the last fish, we packed away all of the sample containers, and other equipment. We also scrubbed the wetlab clean. It is always amazing to see how far the slime can fly when fish are flopping around being measured. It’s also amazing to witness the extreme transformation of a space from dirty to clean with the effort of just a few people.  Cleaning and packing took us until dinner time.

The evening was a low-key one. Folks were cleaning their cabins, and the mates made cookies, so everyone had cookies and ice cream. There are only a minimal number of people who need to work right now, so the ship is pretty laid back. The science night crew is hanging around a little bit, trying to get back on schedule. The ship’s crew is preparing the boat & themselves to get back into port. We will be arriving back at our same dock space in the Mayport Navy base by around 0730 tomorrow morning.

7/30/2013: Winding Down

I have found that there is a trajectory to each research cruise. It doesn’t seem to matter much how long the cruise is. It tends to follow the same path. The first few days, people are getting into the groove, figuring things out, finding their jobs. The middle of the cruise, everyone is pretty well coordinated. There are often some mistakes at this time because people start to get complacent. They are pretty sure they know what their job is & it seems like they could do it in their sleep. Of course, this isn’t exactly true and mistakes are made. Toward the end of the cruise, the entire ship’s company is looking forward to home, even if they will be headed back out to sea again in a few days. 

Toward the end of the cruise, people start talking about their families. They make plans for what they will do after they get home. If the ship is close enough to land, people start trying to find cell signal & call home. The metal preparation seems to take between 24 and 48 hours.

We will be setting traps three more times tomorrow, but the preparations for home have already begun.  Plans are being made for when gear can get washed, when it can be stored. There will be one final push to get as many samples as possible tomorrow, but after that everyone will start to think about the things that need to get done back on land. 

 

Despite the fact that NOAA’s vessels are connected to the outside world in a variety of ways, there is a feeling at sea that the world is no bigger than the vessel you are working on. Inside these bulkheads and on these decks is the only thing that really matters. Work is work and nothing can change what needs to get done. No matter how mad you may be at someone, you still have to work next to them tomorrow. Once a voyage is almost over, dynamics start to shift. People let their feelings show a little more. They focus a little less on the task at hand and spend a little more time thinking about the end. If the cruise has been an upbeat one (as this one has), this often involves a little extra joking around, a little extra frivolity. No matter what, the last 24 hours of a research cruise involves a lot more smiling than the few days leading up to this point.  The end is near! The end is in sight!

7/29/2013: Fishery-independent surveys

Today we caught our first red snapper in a trap for a week. We have seen several on the videos, and I have blogged about some of the reasons we may not have been catching them. However, the question came up today, “Why send scientists out here at all? Can’t we just get the data from commercial and recreational fishermen?” This question always comes up because sometimes it feels to the science party that we are maybe spinning our wheels when commercial fishermen make their living doing this stuff.

 

The short answer is “not really,” and I’ve explained some of the reasons in my first post from this cruise. The fishermen are impacted by factors other than the numbers of fish in the water when they are bringing fish to market. The price they will get (for commercial fishers), regulations, the price of fuel, etc. NOAA’s goal is to set the limits for numbers of fish that can be harvested from the populations while still maintaining a healthy ecosystem.  In order for NOAA to collect information on the overall population, the surveys must be able to capture as many sizes of each species as possible. They must be able to track the size of the population over time. Many fish species experience boom-and-bust cycles in their populations. This is a natural phenomenon which can be influenced by everything from water temperature to food availability to amount of rainfall. Therefore, it’s important to get an accurate count of fish numbers without the confounding factors of price or weather getting in the way.

Another advantage of fishery-independent surveys is that these surveys can give the scientific community information about species that are not currently commercially valuable. There are many species for which we collect data that are not currently fished. Videos are especially handy tools for quantifying species which would never be attracted to a baited trap. All of these species are important to the ecosystem. They may be food for a fished species. They may be a species which is not currently fished, but a future fishery may develop. They may be the predators of a currently fished species. The more we understand about the ecosystem and all of the different species which inhabit it, the better we will be at predicting trends & preventing crashes in the stocks of individual species. Despite the fact that the people involved in a single survey cruise may be frustrated by their idle hands, the endeavor is creating valuable data for the future of fish populations.