40 
THE CORAL TRIANGLE: HEARST BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
Figure 1: The ‘Coral Clothesline’, inspired by the Coral Restoration Foundation, in aetion about 50 meters offshore. 
plastic water bottles as floats (after all, you can sadly find empty plastic water bottles on just about 
any beaeh in the world). The mock up went into our big reef tank for testing and was immediately 
dubbed ‘the coral clothesline’ by the aquarium’s docents. 
In addition to our clothesline supplies, we paeked everything else we could think that we might 
possibly need. Some highlights: six large, low style plastic tanks that could be weighted and sunk 
offshore for holding larger fish and other inverts, as well as smaller plastie tanks that eould be hung 
from the elothesline to hold small fish and other inverts. A backpaek kit for harvesting jelly gonads 
(as removing the gonads doesn’t impact the jellies long term and the gonads ship better than adult 
jellies). Fiberglass window screen to make lids for impromptu holding containers, as well as the 
mbber bands to hold those lids on. Dozens of tubes of super glue and rolls of duct tape. LCD micro- 
seope just in case we needed to look at something close up. Sharpies for note taking. Scissors for 
cutting everything. Needle nose pliers for coral fragmenting. Plastic mlers for scale in photographs. 
Deli eups for transport, collection and shipping or animals. All this stuff and more went into one 
fish shipping box and filled every empty space in our luggage. 
After flying all night to Manila, all this gear, along with some very tired biologists, hit the 
ground mnning at 5 am, finding our checked items, finding our ride and driving 3 hours to Club 
Oeellaris, a world renowned SCUBA resort, which would be the base of operations for the shallow 
water team 
Science was everywhere 
When we arrived at Club Oeellaris, we found it had already been eompletely taken over by the 
Expedition. Seienee was everywhere. Across the resort, any flat spaee had already beeome some 
sort of makeshift lab, with equipment and apparatus piled all over the place. Every electrical out¬ 
let had a eomputer, eamera, light or batteries eharging. Containers of every eoneeivable kind from 
plastie bags, to lidded jars, to 5 gallon buckets waited everywhere to be filled with hunks of sei¬ 
enee. While all of that was exciting, we really wanted to get in the water. Within an hour of arriv¬ 
ing our Diving Safety Offieer, Elliott Jessup, got us suited up and on a boat for our first dive of the 
trip — we saw sea snakes, corals and fish galore. After our afternoon dive, we assembled our off¬ 
shore holding about 50 meters offshore so we would be ready for whatever eolleeting we would do 
