I always get a huge thrill when I experience for the first time the presence a new species. Earlier this year I saw my first ever Frogfish, in Indonesia I had many encounters with unique species such as the pigmy seahorse and the ‘walking’ epaulette shark…but I wasn’t expecting that within a few hours of my arrival to The Bahamas I would have my first encounter with a Manatee. This cuddly marine mammal was not the slightest bit bothered by company in the water and really put me in a great mood for our upcoming mission to find the best dive sites around Long Island to get eye catching 360 degree images as a pilot run for the upcoming Catlin Seaview Survey scientific expedition this month.

Unfortunately our search around Long island for healthy reef was just that…long. Each day we took off on a new direction and I was consistently saddened to see widespread disrepair of poorly conditioned reef. Most of the coral was dead. Most of the dead coral was covered in algae and there was a severe lack of fish. There is clearly an imbalance here. As a scientist, I can’t tell you why exactly, this requires scientific data and anything else is just speculation but I feel that it’s not too hard to connect the dots. Scientists say over-fishing is the biggest single threat to the oceans and as Jim Abernethy explains in my video blog below, the algae cover can no longer be kept under control by algae-grazing fish (since they’re all gone). It then takes over the reef, smothering and killing corals. It also reduces the clean surface available for recruitment of new corals on rock and old dead corals, hindering the recovery of reefs.