ROSS: 2011 PHILIPPINE BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
43 
Figure 6: Even when bad weather kept us from diving, instead of relaxing, we were still scienee geeky. This is a time 
lapse shot of lightning and Matt Wandell writing CAS (California Aeademy of Seienees) in the air with a dive light. 
We would finally climb out of the water at 6 pm for dinner . . . unless we were doing a night 
dive. On night dive days, dinner and dry-off was often as late as 10 pm. 
After dinner, there was more sciencing to be done. The spreadsheet detailing what we had col¬ 
lected needed to be brought up to date, the Coral ID software needed to be consulted to identify 
each SPS coral to species. Paperwork for permits for export, and shipment/arrival details needed 
to be initiated and updated. When that was done, we were often drafted to help the researchers on 
other teams process specimens they had collected, take pictures, be all around helpful, and tend to 
whatever animals we were keeping onshore. Sometimes we even had a moment to geek out with 
Philippine scientists, or have a drink of the local rum (which I still think also contained Formalin). 
We were lucky if we fell into bed by 11:30. 
The SECOND night 
Our first night dive was something special. The moon was full and the dive site was called 
Dead Palm. We hit the water just after the sun set to swim over stands of Acropora of all different 
kinds and Turbinaria colonies as large as a car. It was an SPS lover’s dream dive. About halfway 
through the dive the particulate in the water started to gradually become noticeably thicker, and vir¬ 
tually at the same time the three of us looked at each other and yelled SPAWN through our regu¬ 
lators. 
Many corals reproduce in coordinated mass orgies where they release millions of gametes into 
the water. None of us had ever seen a coral spawn in the wild, and it really is as cool as it looks in 
the documentaries. We traced the spawn to a huge thicket of Acropora nobilis, and watched in 
amazement as each egg/sperm bundle emerged from the branches and floated towards the surface 
where fertilization takes place. Within a few days the fertilized eggs change into a coral planula, 
coral larvae, which swim around (yes, swim!), until they find a suitable place to settle and devel¬ 
op into a mature coral. 
