GOSLINER & BURKE: FROM PARACHUTES TO PARTNERSHIPS 
29 
Detailed planning and coordination between the Academy and local experts, effective project man¬ 
agement, and exquisitely organized ground transportation made it all work almost seamlessly. 
Shallow-water Marine Component 
At Club Ocellaris Dive Resort, the shallow-water team’s home base, a typical morning began 
at 6:00 or 6:30 a.m. and included two dives to photograph and collect specimens. Following the 
second dive, we would return to Club Ocellaris, have a quick lunch, and then process the speci¬ 
mens from the morning dives. In the afternoon, those individuals who were done documenting and 
processing specimens were ready for a third dive. Often there would be a night dive, since a com¬ 
pletely different set of animals is active at night. The night dives usually started around 6:30 p.m. 
and lasted several hours. 
We would usually make it back to Club Ocellaris around 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., have a very late 
dinner, and then document and process the specimens from the night dive. Bedtime was usually 
some time after midnight. For safety reasons, every seventh day was a mandatory “dry day” in 
which each individual could rest or catch up on specimen documentation. Over the 30 days of shal¬ 
low-water work, 119 dives were made, representing about 1,000 person-dive-hours, exploring coral 
reef, sandy and muddy debris substrates ranging in depth from less than a meter to over 35 meters. 
The aquatic biologists joined the shallow-water team for 12 days to collect living specimens 
of fishes, corals, and other invertebrates and transport them to Manila to ship back to the Acade¬ 
my’s Steinhart Aquarium. Part of their intent was to develop new animal husbandry techniques to 
share with Filipino partners to ensure more sustainable use of marine resources, especially for the 
aquarium trade. 
To store animals such as living coral fragments under water until the team headed back to 
Manila, the aquatic biologists invented a new method they called a “coral clothesline.” They sus¬ 
pended a nylon line off the surface of the reef with empty plastic water bottles as floats and tied 
the coral fragments to the line. 
On two successive night dives, the entire shallow-water team witnessed mass spawning of 
corals. Little information is currently available on the timing or frequency of coral spawning in 
most parts of the Philippines, and the aquatic biologists are now planning a return trip at spawning 
time to do animal husbandry research to eventually be able to successfully rear coral in captivity 
through their whole life cycle, thus decreasing collecting pressure on wild populations. 
The shallow-water component was highly successful. At least 100 new (to science) species of 
marine animals were collected in the 30 days of diving. The team was also able to make observa¬ 
tions of the same corals that had shown signs of bleaching during the October 2010 planning trip. 
By January, corals had begun to acquire new zooxanthellae algae, and by May, almost all corals 
appeared to have virtually nomial levels of pigmentation. This was a very encouraging sign as it 
indicated that this region of the Verde Island Passage, owing to its deep waters and strong currents, 
shows greater resilience to the effects of climate change on corals than do other parts of the Philip¬ 
pines or Southeast Asia.3 
The shallow-water team also compared bio-diversity levels in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) 
and nearby unprotected areas to determine the impact of the protected status. The existing MPAs 
were the only places where we observed schools of large fish or the largest of the seven species of 
giant clam. We made specific recommendations for reducing damage to MPAs and other reefs by 
creating permanent moorings rather than having boats drop their anchors on live coral; for better 
enforcement of MPAs; for expansion of existing MPAs; and for proposed designation of six new 
MPAs in areas that had particularly unique biodiversity. These recommendations were presented in 
