Benthos and Coral

The organization I am interning for has a science program with three study focuses, fish, invertebrates and benthics.
Each volunteer or intern gets a study focus and trains to perform surveys on their subject *(see biosurvey).
We share our data with the FLMMA Network (Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area Network) among others.
The reefs we survey are free of fishing and pollution. Our long term monitoring data is used to compare our pristine reefs with over-fished and polluted ones to determine the severity and long term impacts to the environment.

Benthic:
Wikipedia defines the benthic zone as “The ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers.”

Our Benthic study started off by learning hard corals. There are two main types of hard corals: Acropora, such as Staghorn Coral and Non Acropora, like Brain Coral. All other hard coral branches off from these. The main difference between the two is acropra has a single polyp at the top of each branch while non acropra has multiple.
There are more types of Acropora than non acropra. Coral comes in tons of different shapes and sizes, the majority have different variations of where the polyps are located and how many on each surface or tip.

Acropora:
There are 150 known types of acropora coral however the organization I work with only targets a few:
Acopora Tabular | Acropora Branching | Acopora Digitate

• 

• 

• 

Non- Acropora:
Massive, Foliose, Branching, Milepora, Encrusting, Sub massive & Tubepora

Soft coral: for the surveys we put all soft coral in the same category, as soft coral does not do a lot to maintain or build the reef. They are not as at risk so it is not monitored as much as the hard coral.

Benthos:
After learning coral we moved on to the rest of the benthics.
For the benthic surveys we looks at:
Bivalves (clams)
Tunicates (sea squirts)
Zooanthids
Mushrooms
Byzoans
Anemones
Sea fans
Hydroids
Feather stars
Corallimophs
Crustose Coraline Algae
Turf Algae
Macro Algae
Cyanobacteria
Sea whips

In order to become survey ready you must pass a test for corals and one for the other benthics. Lastly, you must pass an in water validation. This is an underwater identification test where the instructor points out various organisms and you write the answers on a slate. Then you do survey practice where you follow the transect line and document the benthics observed as you travel along the survey line. After you pass that you are survey ready.

There are four surveyors per survey, one for each study focus (fish, inverts, benthics) and a physical surveyor who lays out the line and leads the dive.
The survey starts with the physical surveyor unraveling the survey reel, then follows the fish surveyor, then comes benthics and after inverts. The survey is 50m long. After 20m the physical surveyor stops the fish serveyor to wait for benthics and inverts to catch up as well as check their air. After everyone has regrouped the survey goes on for 30 more meters.

After the survey we fill in a survey sheet for each topic and then the data is entered by the science team. All the survey data is combined each year.