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Journal 18-James
Lindholm: Mission Day 8: Monday, August 26, 2002 Today we are wrapping up what has been a very successful mission. All told, we surgically implanted 50 acoustic tags in fish here at Conch Reef, with an additional 30 tags placed by our surface crew at Grecian Rocks to the north. We began the mission with 80 tags, and to finish a week and a half later with all tags placed is an unmitigated success. Further, we were able to distribute the tags nicely across three functional groups of coral reef fishes--pelagic omnivores, benthivores/benthic piscivores, and grazers. The official total for Conch Reef includes: Pelagic: Benthivore/Benthic Piscivore: Algal Grazer: Tagging operations such as this can easily degrade into a tag-what-you-catch fest, with tags distributed across the numerous species that are collected. The problem with this approach comes with the statistical analysis when you try to compare, for instance, a single tagged blue striped grunt to 14 schoolmaster or the 30 bermuda chub to the 17 french angelfish you caught. By largely avoiding this pitfall, we should be able to make multiple robust comparisions of fish movement at both Conch and Grecian Rocks respectively, and between the two sites. We are also walking away with multiple video records of fish site utilization and movement behavior following tagging. The videos follow tagged fish we located using the diver-held reciever, and will ultimately be analyzed back in the lab to compare tagged fish to untagged fish of each species (which we also filmed). While the mission must come to an end, the data collection is only beginning.
Based on work we conducted down here last November, we can likely expect
to be collecting data on the fish we have tagged this Cheers and thanks for reading. |
Mission
Date: August, 2002 Mission Summary Aquanaut Profiles Expedition Journals Mission Pictures |
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