Thought my diving buddies might be interested in an account of our experience with Reef Check California these last two weekends.
Think of it as sort of a Marine Life ID and Science Diving Bootcamp if you will.
Actually, Reef Check [not to be confused with Reef.org] was set up in 1997 to monitor the health of coral reefs worldwide and to train volunteer divers to collect usable scientific data for coastal and marine life ocean managers and policy makers, such as those who have set up the Marine Life Protect Act and the MLPA programs off the coast of California.
It is not an advocacy group, but a science-based training organization whose goal is to train volunteer divers to collect and submit data based on scientific protocols, developed by marine biologists.
When I first heard about them 2 years ago, I wrote the head of their California training program and asked them when they might be offering their training program in San Diego. He wrote back and said they had just begun in the Bay area and would most likely be offering training in Southern California in summer of ’07 sometime; so, we let them know we were interested and to sign us up.
Barbara and I had been working with a local group called Coast Keeper here in San Diego and had been actually ‘Science-Divers-in-Training’ with their marine biologist, Colleen, for the last two years, who through sheer coincidence, ended her contract with Coast Keeper last June and signed up with Reef Check just last month.
So, we thought: great! This’ll be a ‘skate’: having trained under Colleen on band transects and quadrat surveys for two years, and then continue on with her in Reef Check, how hard could this be, right?
Brush up on our transects, review a few fish, and we’re home free, right? Wrong!
Since one of the goals of Reef Check has been to ‘refute the naysayers,’ scientists who said that volunteers ‘can’t be be trained in scientific protocols,’ they decided to make it as tough as the programs for marine biologists. That way, they’d know that whoever made it through the program would have had the same basic training as a marine biologist and could submit quality scientific data.
It started last weekend with a sort of crash course in ‘species identification,’ covering 35 basic species native to the California Kelp Forest ecosystem, following by an ‘ecosystems’ and scientific protocols intensive.
Now, bear in mind here that Barbara and I been doing marine life surveys for both Reef.org and the Coast Keeper marine biologist Colleen for over two years. It didn’t make us scientists or Ph.ds, but we had certainly covered many of the basics.
It was just as if we were starting all over.
I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t pass the 35 species fish ID test, where pictures were flashed at us from slides every 3 seconds and, among other things, we had to distinguish between over half a dozen species of California Rockfish and 5 species of Abalone, which are notoriously hard to identify, even for professional biologists.
So, despite the two years we had been doing this, the first weekend resulted in a solid ego-battering: failure on the first test, with an opportunity to retake again at the end of the course. OK, fair enough.
Then, they got us in the water.
After one day of pool practice, this last weekend, they had us out in the ocean at Pt. Loma, laying Fish Transect Lines for Fish Surveys in 40 ft of water, plus Invertebrate transects and something horrendous called UPC: Uniform Point Contact lines, where you have to identify the exact geological and biological substrate along each yard of a 30 meter line and mark it on a nearly incomprehensible data sheet.
This involves sticking your finger in the ground under say, the 2 meter mark, and identifying what lays beneath, down to a depth of 10 centimeters [oh, yeah: the whole course was in metric, really great for us Americans who never learn the difference between a millimeter and a centimeter].
After burrowing down through various layer of seaweed and algae, you had to identify the substrate as: cobble, boulder, bedrock or shell.
Plus, we had to measure the angle and depth of the terrain: did it drop 10 centimeters away from the line or 30?
This had to be done accurately for each meter along a 30 meter transect. With an instructor hovering directly above you to see if you were doing it right.
Then: on the Algae line, we had to identify accurately 9 separate species of algae: Giant Kelp, Bull Kelp, Sea Palm, and a species we grew to hate: known rather ominously as Pterygophora, which sounds like some prehistoric flightless bird, and was always wrapping itself around our faces and masks in the surge and current during the surveys, giving the claustrophobic feeling of being wrapped in seaweed, unable to see an inch in front of your face.
Macrocystis had to be counted by the number of stipes, which sometimes numbered in the dozens per plant. And some species of algae were so numerous on the bottom, it was literally impossible to estimate how many of them there were and where one alga began and another ended. The instructors laid down transect lines through vast forests of Giant Kelp and Laminaria and each plant had to be counted. Down to the individual species. And, Giant Kelp, Macrocystis, had to be counted by the number of stipes per plant, which sometimes numbered over 50 per plant.
And, none of this, of course, included the Fish ID transect, which had to be laid out according to a compass heading given by the instructor and the fish counted as you ran the line out, with your buddy by your side.
Probably the most humiliating part of the whole thing was the ‘after action reviews’ we had from the instructors after we has surfaced: the ‘critiques’ we received on our performance.
I’m sure all of you know, as divers, how, underwater, the simplest task can turn into a nightmare, when combined with low visibility, surge and current and laying out scientifically precise transect lines and gathering scientifically accurate data, for non-scientists, is no exception.
OK: so suffice it to say, almost nothing went as planned: divers got tangled in their transect lines, our faces got wrapped in Pterygophora, almost all of us got kicked in the face by a diver ahead of us on a transect line, stirring up debris and ruining the data.
Actually, it was a miracle we didn’t have any accidents, as all the divers in the class were advanced: this is NOT a class for basic, Open Water students: you have to have you buoyancy and SCUBA skills honed to a fine edge to avoid panicking in some of the situations we found ourselves in.
And, the hardest part was the fact that, we were competing with people who where already marine biologists in the class: we had two guys from NOAA, one of whom was a [get this] Abalone Expert, who counted and identified abalone for a living for NOAA.
Plus, the fact that, a scientist would swim along the transect lines both right after it was laid, to count the species themselves, and them swim along with us, to see how many we missed.
How can non-scientists compete with professionals like that?
It was a massacre, let me tell you. An ego-crushing nightmare.
Saturday, we did 4 dives: two ‘practice’ transects followed by two Test Transects, where our counts were evaluated against those of the scientists and graded.
We ended the day physically and mentally exhausted, knowing from the critiques we had received that we had not done well.
Sunday, we two final opportunities to redeem ourselves and I completely wiped out.
We were tested on our Fish Transects, Algae Transects and the dreaded UPC lines for accuracy and species count compared to what the scientists had.
During the UPC Transect Survey, I had a scientist swoop in on me [I had forgotten she had been hovering directly above me the whole time, as she wasn't part of our group] and stab a finger at my slate and then another at my transect line, to point out that I had fallen behind by 2 meters in my count of the substrate underneath the algae forest, so I committed the most unpardonable sin in science: I ‘made up’ or ‘inserted’ data for the missing two meters, which I neglected to verify myself: in other words, I filled in the box with, say, ‘cobble or sand,’ without sticking my finger in to check verify first, so I could catch up on my sheet. What laymen call ‘guessing,’ scientists call ‘making data up’–the ultimate NO-NO in science.
This all came out during my post-dive ‘critique’ where I later saw the notes the scientists had written to each other about me, on their slates, about my various methodological ‘faux pas’ underwater.
They asked me: “So, you when you found yourself falling behind, you ‘made data up [guessed at it]‘?
I hung my head and confessed and they all clucked their tongues and told me there was no greater sin to be committed in science OR science diving. And, one of the scientists reviewing me was the marine biologist we had been training under for the past two years: Colleen. My embarrassment was complete.
My whole sheet of data had to be discarded. And, this was our Final Exam.
Needless to say, at that point, I knew I was pretty much doomed.
Barbara fared slightly better, having been good, but ‘borderline’ on many of her surveys, they decided to let her pass, but not without letting her know that she ‘squeaked’ by [barely].
There was one finally humiliation in store for many of us: the 35 Species Fish ID Test, where the slides of each species are flashed for 3 seconds each: several of us had failed it at the very beginning of the course, and even by the end of the class, after countless hours spent with flash cards late into the night, we still couldn’t pass it on the final try and get the require 85%.
Part of the problem was: you had 3 seconds to both identify the species AND find in on the sheet and write in the answer and it was here that many of us fell hopelessly behind: 3 seconds was just not enough time to do both. There was no mercy.
The NOAA guy failed the course–not the professional abalone counter, of course, but his colleague.
I failed the course, along with 3 others out of a class of 10. That’s a ‘wash-out’ rate of 40%.
It was quite a blow to the ego of many of us, especially those of us who had been doing volunteer science diving for a number of years under the supervision of professional marine biologists.
We were told that we can keep practicing and the biologist we have been working with for the past 2 years said she’ll be happy to work with us on practice transect lines as much as we want, but many of us have the feeling that certification with Reef Check is still quite a long ways off for many of us.
Especially on those dreaded UPC lines, where you have to accurately identify the substrate along each meter of a 30 meter line, and have it exactly match that of the scientist grading you.
I take some of the blame here for letting my ego tell me that because I was an experienced diver and had been doing science diving with a marine biologist, that this would somehow allow us to ‘skate’ through the program.
We forgot that we were up against and being graded by science professionals who do this for a living.
Plus the fact that Reef Check is determined to show the scientific community that volunteer divers can be trained to submit the same quality scientific data as professional marine biologists.
And, those who can’t, are unceremoniously washed out.
In a way, I don’t blame them, because for many years, the scientific community has been saying that volunteer divers can’t be successfully trained to submit rigorous scientific data and this program is designed to prove them wrong.
But, I think we should have been told, look: you’re going to be up against scientists who do this for a living and you may not make it through the class.
Instead, it was presented as something ‘almost anyone can do,’ and it’s not.
We don’t know what the ‘washout’ rate is for their other programs in California, we suspect it comparably high and that they are ending up with rather small ‘pools’ of trained volunteer divers to work with.
But, I don’t want to sound bitter here: I certainly underestimated the amount of work involved in a course like that and, despite 2 years of science diving with a marine biologist, I was woefully unprepared for the rigors of ‘true’ science diving.
You know: just because you have good diving skills, doesn’t mean you can do everything associated with diving well, including science diving.
We may just have to leave that to the professionals for now.
That’s my tale.
Moral of the story?
How about: “Know your limits and stay within them” [and leave science to the professionals] LOL!
