Part 3: In late 2003, Doug was hired by the Dept. of Marine & Wildlife Resources in the territorial government of American Samoa. Doug was a coral reef monitoring ecologist, designing the benthic portion of the American Samoa monitoring program. Doug did that monitoring for 9 years, producing reports of about 100 pages of the results each year. In addition, he took pictures of coral species and many other benthic organisms and collected samples. He has written a guide in pdf form to identification of organisms in American Samoa for coral reef monitoring. This guide includes sections on how to recognize bleaching, predation, and coral disease. The guide includes as many or more coral diseases than are currently known for the entire world. He’s also written a pdf identification to the genera of hard corals in American Samoa, and a pdf identification for 156 coral species. In the near future he hopes to expand this guide to 200 or perhaps even 250 species. He has also begun writing a taxonomic monograph on the corals of American Samoa, based on the samples of coral species which he collected. During his 10 years in American Samoa, he has also participated in rapid surveys in places such as New Caledonia, the Andaman Islands, Madagascar, Rodrigues (Mauritius), and most recently Nauru and then Tonga. In every survey, coral species that had not previously been reported at that location were found, sometimes as many as 70 species. Doug can identify as many as about 450 species of corals around the world. The data Doug gathers will be comparable to the data he has collected around the world at over 800 dive sites. Doug has also published the most extensive review of coral reef fisheries, and papers on other coral reef subjects. He is a frequent contributor to the “coral-list” discussion online, subscribed to by over 7000 people who work on coral reefs around the world. Doug hopes to survey, record, and photograph coral species and coral diseases in Chagos and will be keeping us all involved through his blog. Hopefully he will be able to find or identify some species which have not been found there before, as well as coral diseases not reported from there as well. It will be interesting and important to gather data on the diversity and prevalence of coral diseases in this archipelago that has low levels of human impacts. The low level of human impacts suggests that it may have low levels of disease. Doug will be working with Dr. Courtney Couch as a team, recording coral disease and its prevalence. It is important to both get baselines for the number of coral species and coral cover, but also for coral disease diversity and prevalence. We know far too little about what reefs are like where there has been little human disturbance. Reefs that have had little or no human impact are our best way to measure how much we have lost on most of the world’s coral reefs. In addition, coral reefs face a very threatening future, when climate change is sure to cause a great deal of coral mortality. We must gather the data to know what natural reefs are like, before they are damaged, so we know how much they change in the future.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 21:28:04 +0000