Underwater reefcam to document daily reef life
By Google Adsense - Posted Jun 13, 2011 10:00 AM
Researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have recently installed a permanent underwater camera on Daves Reef in Townsville, Queensland where they plan to document the day-to-day activity of the marine life in the surrounding vicinity.
Daves Reef snapshot from 06-13-2011 at 0930 AM.
It is hoped that the photo-documentation being collected will help scientists learn more about coral bleaching as well as species variability and behavior within the area.
AIMS spokesman Dr Ray Berkelmans says it is a technological first.
"It's trained on a coral bommie (pictured above) with some lovely plate corals and really the idea for this camera is to give us real time feedback as to what the conditions of the corals are," he said.
"We've been very good at and very sophisticated at predicting coral bleaching but what we don't have is real time feedback of what the corals are actually doing so this is kind of closing the loop for us."
"It's trained on a coral bommie (pictured above) with some lovely plate corals and really the idea for this camera is to give us real time feedback as to what the conditions of the corals are," he said.
"We've been very good at and very sophisticated at predicting coral bleaching but what we don't have is real time feedback of what the corals are actually doing so this is kind of closing the loop for us."
The researchers have also made the entire photo collection freely available online. Photos are taken every 15 minutes and then placed online for everyone to see.
