[Coral-List] coral spawning 2004

Mark Vermeij Mark.Vermeij at noaa.gov
Fri Aug 15 16:18:35 EDT 2003


Dear all,

Awaiting this years spawning activities, we thought it would be a good 
idea to call for a collective effort to quantify this event on a broad 
geographical scale. A search for a recent overview on spawning 
activities in the Caribbean resulted in surprisingly few results and an 
update seems in place. We thought of the coral list as an excellent 
medium to make such an inventory. In cooperation with Jim Hendee we'll 
additionally link the spawning observations to a wide variety of 
environmental factors that are currently monitored by the CREWS 
knowledge base. For a slightly outdated but still very useful guide on 
CREWS please visit: http://www.coral.noaa.gov/crw/crews_layman.pdf.
Linking our observations with variable combinations of environmental 
conditions will potentially allow us to gain more knowledge on timing 
and environmental cues that trigger coral spawning. We will also 
compare this years observations with the existing old archived spawning 
records on the CHAMP Page. This seems extremely interesting given the 
fact that the few corals that we have observed spawning untill now 
behave completely different than expected. E.g. last month we observed 
A. palmata spawn four days later than expected in the Fl. Keys, 
behaving differently than the six preceeding years (see mail Baums on 
this list). Linking such observations might reveal new processes that 
influence the timing of coral spawning. This plan will however not 
succeed without your help.
We would like to ask everyone who observes spawning activity to share 
these observations. We'll compile them, link them to the CREWS data-set 
and produce an overview that will be made available to everyone through 
a medium yet to be determined. We regard this undertaking as a large, 
but interesting collective effort. 
The following details would be very useful in addition to the spawning 
itself and we would like to ask everyone interested in participating to 
provide us with as much detail as possible. Such information involves:
- Locality (geographic coordinates if possible)
- Date
- Species
- Depth
- Time spawning begin
- Time spawning ends
- Gamete bundles (hemaphrodites)
- Cloud of gametes (gonochoric)
- Estimated percentage of population spawning
- Comparisons (if possible) to previous years
- Tide level, water temp, sea state, currents
- State of local reefs
- Other observations
Observations can be sent to:
Ernesto Weil at eweil at caribe.net
Mark Vermeij at mark.vermeij at noaa.gov
Depending on what will happen we'll update everybody on a regular basis.
If you know of persons not linked to the coral list we would appreciate 
it it you would forward this message in order to expand our future data-
base.
For further questions, please contact me or Ernesto Weil personally.


Looking forward to your responses,

With excited regards,


Ernesto Weil (University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico)
Jim Hendee (NOAA/ AOML, Miami)
Iliana Baums (RSMAS University of Miami, Miami)
Mark Vermeij (CIMAS/ NOAA Fisheries, Miami)


____________________________________________________________________


Dr. M. Vermeij
Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS)
Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS)at the 
University of Miami/
NOAA Southeast Science Fisheries Center 
75 Virginia Beach Dr
Miami, FL 33149 U.S.A.

mark.vermeij at noaa.gov
tel +1 305 3614230
tel +1 305 3614609
fax +1 305 3614499




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