Lindsay's Reef

Lindsay’s Reef

I am holding a Point Intercept Frame (PI Frame) We used it Monday at Lindsay’s Reef. This reef is at the south east end of the island and is one that John has been studying for many years.  My partner and I swam out over the reef and dropped this frame over the coral.  We then counted all the coral under the PI frame.  We only counted what was under the orange markers. We made a note of what we saw on a white board with a pencil while we were swimming!  That took a little getting used to! We classified what we saw as hard coral, soft coral, sand, rock, algae, other sponge. We ended up seeing quite a lot of algae, some soft coral and very little hard coral.  I did see a spotted eel that was about six feet long!

John has been coming to San Salvador Island for over ten years to study the coral reefs.  He has found that the amount of hard coral living in these areas has declined. We found with our survey that the hard coral accounted for about 7% of the total reef cover which is down from the amount when the survey first started in 1992 when the hard coral made up about 14% of the reef surface.