Expedition Log: Palau – Day 9 After surveying the reefs located off Angaur, an oceanic Island about 10 km south of Peliliu, we headed ashore to explore the island. Tucked away in a lush tropical rainforest at the northwestern end
Expedition Log: Palau – Day 8 1998 was a bad year for coral reefs. In many parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans an unprecedented coral bleaching event swept across the reefs, killing much of the coral. In some countries,
Expedition Log: Palau – Day 7 I felt like I was floating in an emerald green broth chock full of mushrooms. Thousands of mushrooms, actually more like 13 million mushrooms. I dove to the depths and looked up, rays of
Expedition Log: Palau – Day 5 Usually we find the most delicate corals in protected deeper lagoonal waters. Species such as Anacropora, a cousin of Acropora which forms bushes of long spindly branches, up to a meter tall but only
Expedition Log: Palau – Day 3 Today we surveyed reefs in the Ngeruktabel complex of the Rock Islands, which are located south of Malakal harbor. The area is known locally as the “bait grounds” because local fishermen use small nets
Expedition Log: Palau – Day 1 We’ve embarked on our next research mission of the Global reef Expedition to Palau, a Freely Associated State with strong ties to the United States. Palau is is in the western Pacific, fairly close
Our science team has embarked on our last Global Reef Expedition (GRE) mission in Oceania, and the first in the Coral Triangle. We have begun our exploration of the Solomon Islands, a Pacific Archipelago comprised of 992 mountainous islands and
While most of the reefs we have surveyed in the Great Barrier Reef have an emergent reef flat, one of the northern reefs we were studying was fully submerged and quite difficult to locate. After circling around our GPS coordinates
Several of us have encountered a free-floating colonial tunicate during our dives on leeward reefs. Known as Pyrosomes (from the Greek, pyro = fire and soma = body), these unusual tunicates consist of cylindrical- or conical-shaped colonies made up of
Tunicates, commonly called sea squirts include a diverse assemblage of invertebrates that are usually attached to the bottom, but also include 10 species that live in the water column. These invertebrates share some similarities with vertebrates by having a tail,
