TWARS (This Week at Reef Seekers) - March 30 - April 6, 2025

[Ken Kurtis]

Trip report & pix, Citizen Science, & more
(please scroll down for details)​

I see light at the end of the (trip report) tunnel . . .

WORKING ON IT - These trip reports and pix always take me longer to get completed than I usually anticipate. (You'd think I'd learn by now.) But I'm pretty sure I'll have everything written, tweaked, and posted by tomorrow afternoon. You will get a separate e-mail Monday afternoon. And, of course, I'm talking abut our trip to Easter Island. Hard to believe that we've been back a week already. And it was very ice being gone the two weeks. For me personally, that was pretty much a perfect amount of time to be away. On top of that, I really enjoy spending time on Easter Island. I find the diving interesting, the moai are simply out of this world, and it' simply a very unique experience.

CITIZEN SCIENCE WHILE THERE - You may have heard the term "citizen science" before. In marine science terms, it's when we take non-degreed non-professional people and have time make observations or measurements out in the field. These are usually well-trained &/or well-educated people who simply lack a PhD or MS in the particular field of study. Reef Check is a good example of this as they use many trained volunteer divers to gather data that's then analyzed by scientists. The advantage of citizen science is that you can generate a lot of data but it may not be as rigorously and specifically accurate as if taken by a trained scientist. On the other hand, doing this just with trained scientists means you increase the accuracy of the data being collected but you significantly reduce the amount of data you're getting, so it takes a lot longer to collect enough to draw any conclusions. That's why you might hear about some 10-year study that comes to a conclusion and you say, "Well, everyone knows that" because you've been observing it for years. This is all prologue to . .

THE UNDERWATER MOAI - As you may have heard me mention before, there's an underwater moai at Easter Island (just outside the harbor) but it's not real. It's a leftover prop from a movie that was shot in 1996. But that also means it's been underwater for 29 years. The other time we've gone in the past (2011 and 2019), I always make sure we dive that spot and take photos of our divers with the moai. So I was very curious - this is the "citizen science" part - to see what the coral growth has been over the years. And I was able to take my shots from previous years and compare them to the ones I got this year. Here's what I got:

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THE CONCLUSION - You can definitely see a difference in the three pix. In 2011, the moai had already been down there for 15 years but was showing very little, if any, coral growth. I would have expected after all of that time, and 15 years certainly seems like enough, that corals would have settled on the surface and started growing. So when we came back eight years later, in 2019, I was very pleased to see significant coral growth all over the head. And if you look closely at the 2025 pictures, where another six years have passed, you can see that many of the 2019 corals are still in place and have simply grown larger, especially around the chin. In fact, you might expect, if we continued to measure the rate of coral growth on a regular basis, that at some point, the moai was be totally obscured by the corals and will barely be visible. This is a similar fate that has befallen old-time anchors that have spent hundreds of years underwater. The coral growth obscures what they really are. Anyhow, just something I found interesting and hopefully you will too.

PIX ALMOST DONE - As I mentioned, I still need to sort through and post pix to my SmugMug page. I will have both underwater and topside images since both are interesting. But here's two more underwater shots just to give you a taste. While 25% of the fish at Easter Island are endemic, there are many that are not. These are two examples of familiar fish. On the left is a Teardrop Butterfly which is listed by Randall (acknowledged as the Easter Island fish expert) as rare but we saw them often. not every dive, but many dives. And on the right is a Spiny Cowfish, quite common and prolific and would frequently swim right up to you to check you out. As I said, you'll get a separate e-mail tomorrow afternoon with links to the trip report and the slideshow.

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REEF SEEKERS CH-EVE TABLE SOLD OUT - As I mentioned last week, there are still plenty of seats available for Chamber Eve (Wednesday, May 7), just not at our table. But we've still got plenty of room for you either at Virtual Chamber Eve ($95 and you get a t-shirt, raffle tix, and a link to the live-stream) or out on the Flying Dutchman (Reef Seekers is usually the #1 recruiter but we're getting a run for our money this year). And don't forget that there's always the Chamber Challenge which is a direct donation to our Chamber. Everything helps. The website is www.chamberday.org, the date is May 7, and we hope we'll be adding your name to our lists of donors.

GOOD DEED OF THE WEEK - It's not every day you can say you helped make an animal's life better. It's certainly not every day you can say that the animal in question is a shark. And it's certainly not every day you can say you did it free-diving. But here's a video where divers spotted what appears to be a full-grown grey reef shark with a line wrapped tightly around it. The diver was able to dive down, catch up with the shark, and cut the line. It obviously left a scar on the shark, which you can clearly see, but maybe that will heal over time. But it's nice to see a good deed done. Here's the link. (There's audio too.) Not sure if you need FaceBook to view it or not: MAKING A SHARK'S LIFE BETTER.

APRIL IS ALMOST HERE - For many reasons, it's among my favorite and most challenging months. But where has the March gone? They're calling for overnight showers on the last day of March. Shouldn't that be an April thing? What else will april bring?

And that'll do it for now. Have a great week and let's go diving soon!!!

- Ken