Well, I am off to Bali, Indonesia, in a few days to co-teach a course with Nancy Knowlton and Jon Geller, and led by Chris Meyer. The course is on Marine Biodiversity Inventory Methods and takes place with our Indonesian collaborators as part of the Indonesia Biodiversity Research Center and is part of a summer-long program led by Paul Barber of UCLA. This is a field course that involves capturing marine biodiversity in a number of different ways to get a complete picture as possible of this complex environment. Then we can better understand changes in biodiversity across space and time.
Some of organisms we are interested in live within the reef, but swim up out of the reef at night. These are what we call demersal. So, my wife, Jennifer Collins, and I made some demersal plankton traps together and decided to capture the process on this short video.
Oh, and please NOTE: I mistakenly said that "most animals" on the reef are fish and other big critters, but what I meant was that most animals we are familiar with are big and macroscopic. in fact, most animals on the reef (and in other environments as well) are tiny, less than 2 mm in size.
This is created as part of a pilot study, organized by my friend and colleague Bud Gillan, called "Tiny Things Lead to Big Ideas" funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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