REEF members are the heart of our grassroots marine conservation programs. A diverse community of divers, snorkelers, and ocean enthusiasts support our mission to conserve marine environments worldwide.

This month we highlight Alison Stocker, a REEF member who lives aboard her sailboat, currently in the Mediterranean. She has conducted more than 175 REEF surveys while sailing around the world, in regions including the South Pacific (SOP), Central Indo-Pacific (CIP), Indian Ocean & Red Sea (IORS), and Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean (EAM). We're thankful to call Alison a REEF member, and we can't wait to see where she surveys next!

When and how did you first volunteer with REEF or become a REEF member?
I first heard about REEF through a friend of a friend whom I met at a cruiser potluck gathering in Tonga one evening in September 2017. Up until then, I had been keeping a record of species of fish that were new to me as I saw them. REEF surveys seemed a perfect way of combining my passion for snorkeling and fish-finding while generating some useful citizen science data. I bought a small Olympus underwater point-and-shoot camera which helped me to identify unfamiliar fish and made the survey work much more effective. I recorded my first REEF survey in Fiji in July 2018.

My husband and I are “cruisers” who have been living aboard our 42-feet long sailboat for the last 18 years while very slowly making our way around the globe. We left Florida in 2008 and are now in the Mediterranean, having spent four years, including the pandemic, in Australia. Both of us were divers before moving aboard our boat "Tregoning” but we had no room for diving equipment, so we have snorkeled along our route through the tropics.

What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned doing a REEF fish survey?
As a retired plant ecology research scientist, I am an enthusiastic supporter of well-managed citizen science, and I am especially keen to contribute to global databases of organisms. While we have been moving around the world, it has been fascinating to document how the distributions of fish species show their evolutionary spread across oceans and seas. For example, crossing the Pacific from east to west, it was noticeable that the diversity of fish species was gradually increasing. On a smaller, more recent scale, it has been interesting to track the distribution of species from the Red Sea, including migrants such as the Dusky Rabbitfish, which have moved through the Suez Canal and are gradually dispersing north and east through the Mediterranean.

Do you dive or snorkel close to where you live?
My husband and I typically snorkel close to our boat, so yes, we almost always snorkel close to where we live, but that location keeps changing. We often choose where we are going to anchor based on the site’s snorkeling potential. In many places we can snorkel directly off Tregoning, in other places we take the inflatable dinghy to the best-looking spot. One aspect of this is that we rarely snorkel in places that are popular dive-sites. Many of my survey sites are new to the REEF database. The challenge for me is learning new groups of fish species as we move.

As might be expected, the best surveying has been on the coral reefs of the South Pacific, the Great Barrier Reef, Indonesia, the Maldives, and Red Sea. Sadly we were in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, such as Mexico, Hawai’i, French Polynesia, and the Cook Islands, before I started conducting REEF surveys. Such surveys typically included more than 50 species and often exceeded 100 species. Spending most of the pandemic aboard a boat in Queensland, Australia, was spectacularly lucky for us as we were still able to visit the reefs during the winters. The Mediterranean has been somewhat less exciting. Although most of the water is pleasingly gin-clear, it is a low-productivity system with virtually no coral and limited diversity - more than 20 species has been a good survey.

What is your favorite fish or marine invertebrate?
I have only once seen a tasselled wobbegong which may be my favorite fish based on its name – it is so distinctly Australian. It was at one of our favorite atoll-anchorages, Lady Musgrave Reef, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Instead of being camouflaged against the coral, it stood out boldly against the white sand as it gently swam from one coral head to another. My husband points out that if I really wanted to pick the coolest name, it would surely be Hawaii's state fish, the humu humu nuku nuku apua'a (aka the Wedgetail Triggerfish), which we saw all through the Pacific, from Hawaii to Australia.