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.
Fire up your computers and mobile devices! It's time for more of your favorite online REEF Fishinars, our special brand of free, interactive, live webinars. You can join us from your home, sitting in the car or coffeeshop, or anywhere you have an internet connection. More info about our Fishinars and how to register can be found here.
These REEF members are moving up in the world! This past month we've had a number of Experience Level advancements by folks who have been busy conducting surveys and learning how to identify fish. This month's achievements are:
Hawaii (HAW)
- Lynn Fulks - Level 2
California (PAC/CAL)
This work was presented at the OCEANS19 meeting, and was a result of research done as part of the Grouper Moon Project. More than 800 species of fish produce sound including Red Hind (Epinephelus guttatus), Nassau Grouper (E. striatus), Black Grouper (Mycteroperca bonaci), and Yellowfin Grouper (M. venenosa). Their sounds can be used to monitor these fish and may be a means to estimate abundance if parameters such as source levels, detection probabilities, and cue rates are known.
This paper summarizes research done as part of the Grouper Moon Project to understand sound made by several species of grouper. Many fishes produce calls during spawning that aid in species and mate recognition. When multiple sound-producing species inhabit an area, the detection range may decrease and limit call function. Acoustic partitioning, the separation of calls in time, space, or spectral frequency, can minimize interference among species and provide information about fish behavior and ecology, including possible response to increasing anthropogenic noise.
We are excited to share a conservation success story for the critically endangered Nassau Grouper. After nearly two decades of research and monitoring efforts, the Grouper Moon team published key results last month in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A quiz to help you practice your knowledge of South Pacific fish ID. Each time you take this quiz, you'll get a different set of questions, so take it multiple times!
The Cayman Islands Department of Environment needs to assess the effectiveness of Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus) spawning aggregation site closures by gaining a better understanding of how local grouper populations use the ag- gregation sites. During the January 2005 spawning season thirty Nassau grouper were acoustically tagged off the Little Cayman west end aggregation site and during the summer of 2005 an additional twenty Nassau groupers were tagged around Little Cayman.
Nassau Grouper (Epinephelus striatus) were historically one of the most important shallow water fisheries in the Caribbean, yet now are rarely taken. Although normally solitary, during the winter full moon Nassau grouper attend aggregations at spawning site to reproduce. Now, however, there are only a handful of known Nassau Grouper aggregations with more than 1,000 fish left in the Caribbean. Why has the species declined so precipitously, and what can be done to reverse the trend?