Coral Rubble Transport!

 MFT: Collecting Tagged Coral Rubble
LFP: Less than yummy food

Today I got to work on a completely different project! There are a couple of scientists working in the Marshalls from New Zealand, and last night we managed to overlap with one of them, Murray Ford. He is looking at sediment transport rates of coral rubble across a reef flat of the islands on the atoll. It’s a really clever project, he takes coral rubble, drills a small hole into it and inserts an RFD tag. Then he releases several pieces of rubble from a known location and comes back several months later to find them again and chart where they’ve moved. All you need is a wand to read the RFD tags and then you get to shift through the sand/other pieces of rubble till you find the one you want. Then you can weigh them and see if mass has changed significantly over time (i.e. eroded or new growth on the rubble). It’s a really clever system.

I went out with him in the morning during low tide and used the WHOI RTK system to pinpoint the location of each of the coral rubble pieces we found. It was fun work and a great way to see a new environment. We haven’t done too much on the reef flat except take a few pieces of C14 sampling. The morning was a huge success. We collected lots of pieces of rubble and released a bunch more. We also got to talk science and academia in New Zealand. The afternoon, I joined back up with Steph and Richard and we went and finished RTKing near the hotel. It was a tiring day, especially for Richard and Steph. Chris spent the afternoon organizing all of the equipment and starting to pack up those 15 boxes we had.
Finding coral rubble on the island

The hoa and reef flat


Found piece of rubble -- all encrusted with new growth

Panorama of reef flat looking oceanwards
New rubble for release

The waves on the reef flat


crazy creepy eel on the reef-flat

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