April 15, 2026

Our group trained all week in a biodiversity blitz, where we surveyed reef life across 12 coral reefs around La Parguera, Puerto Rico. We were trained and tested by experts Leah Harper and Jared Oviatt from the Smithsonian Institution's MarineGEO network, on Reef Life Survey training methods. This is a widely used and standardize approach that allows researchers around the world to assess abundance, biomass, and, importantly, the biodiversity of life on reefs. Because its quality controlled and standardized, we can compare our data in PR to reefs all around the world.

To do this training, we identified, counted, and measured all the fish swimming around us while swimming 50 meter transects, then we got close and personal with the reef and found all the cryptic fish and invertebrates hiding in these highly structured habitats, i.e. the blennies and the gobies and the crabs. We then took photos of the seafloor to calculate coral cover and other sessile life. We clocked about 15 hours of time underwater last week ;) 

Together, this gives us a snapshot in time of how diverse our reefs really are. We are celebrating the hard work of learning many, many organisms now, and at the same time excited to get back in the water and do it again to see how these underwater worlds are changing through time.