Clean Lenses but Mucky Water

Yellow Tail Snapper Stays Alert!

This easterly wind has sure kicked up the sediment. We have thoroughly tested the ptz of the camera and will make it available later this summer for the general public. We finally came up with a great t-shirt design and will have them ready in two weeks. Thank you all for your generous offers to support our program. We are close to getting everything ready for our new camera in the Dry Tortugas, but have some serious fundraising to do. People have suggested a cost of the t-shirt between $10 and $15. Any comments?

Please Tell Us If You Can Help?

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We are trying to raise more funds for our camera installation in the Dry Tortugas this summer. We are close to raising the money we need. We also have to pay for our DSL at Bahia Honda and have to pay a diver to clean the lens every two weeks. Contributions can be made to Kent Denver School (attention: Trevor Mendelow, 4000 East Quincy Avenue, Englewood, CO 80113, please put “Grouper Project” in memo line) by check or money order, or you can buy one of our t-shirts or upcoming calendar. Thank you to those of you who have already contributed. We want to grow this program!

Take our poll!

We would like three volunteers to test our new pan-tilt-zoom feature!

First come, first serve. If you would like to participate, please email Trevor Mendelow (tmendelow@kentdenver.org).

screen shot of test page

Students Get “Crazy” with T-shirt design!

Would you support this project by buying these?

The latest iteration of shirt design by Ryan, a senior at Kent Denver School.

Kent Denver Students Make T-Shirts to Fundraise!

Should the students recruit professional help? They think that they could respond to peoples’ offer to donate to the project for maintenance of the Bahia Honda Cameras and the two new cameras they plan to deploy this year. They suggest a donation of $10, which would relate to a $7 profit (through negotiation with a t-shirt company).

Visibility Finaling Improving and New Mounts for Cameras!

Cool!

As the weather seems to be laying down a wee bit we can all hope for some better viewing, and an opportunity to begin cataloging the faunal occupants of the bridge. We are especially interested in collecting data on the grouper, but would be interested to here ideas about composition or abundance surveys that could be conducted. The students have begun investigating whether individual groupers can be identified by markings, and we hope to conduct this work with live video and tagged individuals. We have the necessary permitting to deploy small, banded ribbon tags, and this work will begin at the Bahia Honda experimental location soon. Over a period of times, images of the tagged fish will be collected, and we will try to establish the efficacy of using markings for future studies of individual fish. For now, a large database of images of the Goliaths (Epinephelus itajara) has begun, and once enough data has been collected, we will publish the work on the teens4oceans website. If you can identify individuals, you could do a mark-resight estimate of abundance (identifying using marking patterns). These data will allow estimates of how many Goliath Groupers there were within that bridge area and also estimate immigration and emigration rates from the study site.
If you are interested in collaborating on this project, we will establish a gallery of fish in the “Photo gallery” section of the website. Images must be of the fish’s right side, and the whole fish image must be captured. Desktop shots of fish not cataloged in the photo gallery (send to tmendelow@kentdenver.org) will be added.
We are welding new brackets for the camera, which will rectify the odd angle of the cameras. In addition, the second camera should be available for viewing soon, with pan-tilt-zoom available at certain times of day.
There were almost two thousand hits on the website in the last three days. We love the interest people have shown in our endeavors; thank you all.

Poor shot, but usable data.

Wonderful Early Morning Viewing, Despite Dirty Lens

Wonderful schooling of snapper and grunt species, along with fast-moving permit. Big schools of carangid look-down jacks can be seen, with the odd monster goliath cruising by. When the lens is not so dirty, we will snap images and post on the blog. Anyone interested in developing a species list gallery with natural history information for each fish?

look-down jacks, image courtesy of Don DeMaria, 2008

update, 10am, EST: Lenses cleaned on both cameras; happy viewers!