44 
THE CORAL TRIANGLE: HEARST BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
Coral spawning is one of the new frontiers in captive coral reproduction, because collecting 
spawn instead of coral fragments can yield many more corals in captivity in an incredibly sustain¬ 
able collection method. A group of public aquarists and coral scientists formed SECORE (SExual- 
COralREproduction — http:/Avwm\secore.org/) and they have been holding workshops m the 
Caribbean for the last several years to perfect spawning, fertilization and settling procedures. 
Building on the success of the Caribbean workshops the Ste inhart Aquarium hopes to hold a SEC- 
ORE workshop in the Philippines in the next few years. The most important part of such a work¬ 
shop is of course timing it with the coral spawn. There is not much infomiation on the timing of 
Philippine coral spawns, and none of the previous tidps to the area had ever come across one, so 
actually observing coral spawning in the Philippines is a good and necessary start to bringing SEC- 
ORE to the area. 
We, along with some of the other California Academy of Sciences researchers and a Philippine 
television crew, returned to Dead Pahn the next night where the coral spawn was in full swing yet 
again. We were able to find a colony ofAcropora willisae when it was beginning to release gametes 
and set up around the coral to both collect some of the spawn and to document the event. I’ll never 
forget filming Matt collecting gametes in a plastic bag while the television crew was filming me 
film him. We were able to collect several hundred sperm and egg bundles, and though completely 
unprepared for the labor intensive process of fertilization and settlement, we gave it a go. 
A SURREAL NIGHT 
After years of having the privilege of diving around the world practicing no impact diving, 
after collecting for the trade practicing and teaching having as little impact as possible, and after 
planning to take ‘found frags’ when possible, watching a scientific survey on the move takes a bit 
of getting used to. The researchers were collecting everything — worms, urchins, fish, nudibranchs 
— and just about every dive on the Expedition yielded at least one animal that seemed to be unde¬ 
scribed by science. The animals were being collected and preserved for scientific description, 
genetic analysis and as a way to be comprehensive in the survey, and being in the midst of a full 
on scientific survey lead to the Steinhart biologists to try to take advantage of the situation, and 
alter our plan regarding what we would try to bring back to San Francisco for our living collection. 
On the third evening of our diving. Dr. Healy Hamilton showed us some ghost pipefish, 
Solenostomus cyanopterus, and some pygmy seahorses. Hippocampus bargibanti, that had been 
collected that day. These animals were going to be sacrificed for their genetic material. 1 know 
some people have a visceral reaction to that idea, but as Dr. Gerald Allen once said during a 
MAGNA talk “It’s a necessary part of science”. Of course when we saw the ghost pipefish, a 
species that we had always wanted to work with but hadn’t because of their dismal record of sur¬ 
viving collection and shipping through the trade, we immediately suggested that we try to keep 
them alive and that we tiy to ship them home and put them on display — if they didn’t make it, we 
would still have their genetic material available for science. Though we weren’t prepared for hold¬ 
ing these kinds of animals, Bart, Matt and I had been trained in the ultimate McGyver proving 
ground — the reefkeeping hobby. We got to work setting up buckets aerated by scuba tanks, faux 
gargonian hitching posts for the seahorses made from zip ties, and prepared ourselves to do water 
changes as often as needed by slogging 5 gallon buckets up and down 2 flights of stairs. 
Of course, the third night of diving was also the night we collected coral spawn, so while we 
were preparing to try to keep these amazing fish alive, we were also preparing to attempt to keep 
the coral spawn healthy and fertilized wliich included ‘stirring’ the gametes every hour or two. This 
led to the most surreal night of the trip. We had coral out on the clothesline, ghost pipefish in the 
offshore holding tanks, trays of coral eggs and sperm, and a bucket with two pygmy seahorses next 
