26 
THE CORAL TRIANGLE: HEARST BIODIVERSITY EXPEDITION 
Photo 4. Map of expedition study sites, Google Earth. 
research in terrestrial environments in the Philippines. Thus began a whirlwind of meetings, trav¬ 
el, and operational and logistical problem solving. 
We learned that our desire to do educational outreach for the local communities at each of the 
research sites, and to have a capstone symposium with all participants at the end of the expedition, 
was something unheard of in the prior experience of the various agency personnel and something 
that was greatly appreciated and desired by the officials. In fact, in several instances we were told 
that the outreach would help ensure that we would be able to secure the necessary local permits to 
conduct the research. 
We went to Mabini to check in with the owner of the resort where we hoped to base the shal¬ 
low-water portion of the expedition. This also gave us an opportunity to re-visit a couple of the key 
dive sites that we had been studying for many years. The first dive brought an unwelcome surprise. 
We had heard that coral bleaching was occurring in the region, and as soon as we entered the water, 
we could see the immediate evidence of bleaching in about a quarter of the corals we encountered. 
Elevated seawater temperatures cause living corals to expel the symbiotic algae, which give 
corals their color. When the algae are expelled, the corals are still alive but are ghostly white, look¬ 
ing as if they have been bleached, hence the name of the condition. This is not just a cosmetic 
change. Corals obtain about half of their nutrition from the photo synthetic activity of their algal 
partners. In 20 years of studying these reefs, significant bleaching like this was something we had 
never seen. This was a new threat and added even more meaning and urgency to the integrated 
research, education and conservation work we were planning to launch. 
As we were headed back to San Francisco, we were buoyed by the prospects for great collab¬ 
orations and the progress we had made at outlining the shape of the expedition. Not more than a 
