ROSS: 2011 PHILIPPINE BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
47 
it. We proudly showed him the crab, and, he obligingly began to film. Of course, as you might 
guess, the octopus wouldn’t have anything to do with it and kept pusliing it away. We shmgged our 
shoulders at the diver in apology and swam on. 
Kids in a Coral Store 
Our cephalopod duties complete, our focus shifted back to corals. Philippine coral reefs have 
long been in jeopai'dy due to human activities including dynamite and cyanide food fishing, over¬ 
collection for the curio trade, collection for the aquarium trade (this may only be a small percent¬ 
age of the damage to Philippine coral reefs compared to other factors, but it is some of the most 
visible activity and thus comes under intense scrutiny) as well as a host of other impacts including 
development, sedimentation, run off, climate change and more. As a result, the Philippines has 
become very protective of their coral reef natural resources and has been working over the last sev¬ 
eral decades to make that protection more robust and more intelligent for economic and environ¬ 
mental reasons. All Philippine stony corals are protected by inclusion in CITES (the Convention 
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and there is currently no 
export of live corals from the area — unless permitted. As you can imagine those permits are not 
often approved. The Philippine government is interested in looking into what it would take to 
empower responsible and sustainable local aquaculture and mariculture efforts and granted the 
Steinliart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences CITES and Philippine pemiits for the 
export of live coral in order to help explore those efforts. On future trips to the area. The Academy 
hopes to present workshops on coral culturing techniques as well as coral sexual reproduction 
workshops as part of SECORE in order to facilitate the sustainable production of corals for 
research, restoration and perhaps one day to bring responsibly farmed corals to market. 
Bart, Matt and I are all reef geeks, so being set loose to collect corals in an area where collec¬ 
tion is prohibited was both a treat and a ten'ific responsibility. As the only public aquarium legally 
permitted to collect stony corals in the Philippines, the California Academy of Sciences wanted to 
obtain unique species for study, captive culture research, distribution to other institutions as well 
for display at the Steinhart aquarium. To support our efforts at sustainable collection building, the 
plan was to collect ‘found ft'agnients’ (fragments that were naturally broken off the mother colony) 
of hard corals whenever possible. Fragments from larger mother colonies would be carefully har¬ 
vested when there were no found fragments available. Our approach to soft corals was similar, 
focusing on found fragments, fragments taken from the growing margins of larger colonies, or, in 
the case of whip corals, taking small specimens fi*om areas with many instances of the same coral. 
We tried to focus on corals that were exceptionally colored, oddly shaped, or animals generally 
unseen in captivity. 
As we swam along the reefs we carefully collected corals that caught our eye, gently stacking 
hard corals into the easily accessible frag containers that Bart fabricated for us on site from empty 
plastic drink mix and ice cream containers. Due to the penchant for releasing toxins when dis¬ 
turbed, soft corals were collected into individual deli cups or plastic bags. There seemed to be 
corals that fit our collection criteria every few feet, so we were forced to be selective. 
As soon as each dive was over each fragments was tagged, rinsed and separated into 5 gallon 
buckets filled with fresh sea water for the boat ride back to Club Ocellaris where they were strung 
on our offshore ‘coral clothesline’ apparatus covered in part one of this series.^ 
^http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K8feG_8bRM. This video explains our bard eoral eolleeting methods 
