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Day 9, August 9, 2005 TER daily cruise report
Another beautiful day around the Tortugas unless you are a sailor or dislike the heat. Today we investigated a damaged reef within the Tortugas Ecological Reserve.
Several years ago, a container ship anchored illegally at Sherwood Forest , a reef renowned for its high biodiversity and coral cover. The reef gets its' name from the form of the coral heads which resemble mushrooms or ancient oak trees. The under-story of this forest of corals provides a labyrinth of caves and cubby holes for fishes to hide in and we have observed some truly gigantic black grouper and hog fish holding court in its' clearings. The ship apparently had an outdated version of the local charts that did not indicate the area was protected and that anchoring was prohibited. The ship's anchor and chain swung along the bottom, knocking over hundreds of corals. As part of the restoration, marine contractors and biologists from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary stabilized many of the injured corals. We first observed the area in July 2003 when we dove at the injury site to observe the restoration in progress. In September 2004, we again dove on the site to see if recent hurricanes, Charley and Ivan had caused any damage to the restoration effort. Fortunately we did not see any corals overturned from those hurricanes. During the 2004 trip we used a multi-beam sonar system to record, in a detailed geo-referenced format, the complex surface topology of the injured site, restored site, and surrounding area. Our goal today was to see if there were any impacts from Hurricane Dennis, to observe and collect data on recovery, and to investigate nearby features of interest identified in the multi-beam survey. In case you wondered the US government brought a court case against the shipping company which has been settled.
Our night operations completed our series of drift camera video records and
beam trawl samples of the shelf north of the Tortugas Banks. Our preliminary
results indicate that the density of pink shrimp is higher in the reserve
than outside where fishing is permitted and we have observed as many as 12
shrimp trawlers working.