Jesse, Dore, and Kayla set out to monitor their coral sites at Trunk Bay on September 6. Jesse is prepared to take digital photographs of each coral site with the digital camera in an underwater casing in his hand. Dore is ready to take data on the health of each coral site on the clipboard. Kayla needs to dive down to the identification tags at each site and use the scrubby in her hand to clean them.

Group 3 heads out the deepest. Janet Simonsen, their chaperone, captured these images of them at work.
 

Kayla is ready for her next dive!	Jesse points out a coral site to his group.	Dore leads her group to the next site.

This is a picture of an Elkhorn coral site at Trunk Bay. Students have to free-dive down to observe the coral and enter their data when they return to the surface. They also have to scrub algae and scum off of the red tag so they can read the site identification number.

Groups 2 and 3 monitor transplanted sites closer to the shoreline, but all groups work equally hard locating their transplanted sites, collecting data, and taking photographs of them.
 

Gregory poses for the camera, as his group mates look for their transplanted sites.	Students from Group 2 prepare to get to work as coral monitors. Matty (left) holds his scrubby to clean off identification tags, James (center) shows his clipboard for collecting data on the table shown, and Joey (right) gets the camera ready.

The following sequence of photographs show what the students do at each transplanted site.
 

Jesse dives down to show his group mates the location of a transplanted site. Sites are flagged with orange tape to make them more noticeable.	Matty free-dives to clean off the identification tags for each transplanted site his group monitors. See the cloudy puff next to his hand? That's the algae he's scrubbing off the tag!

Kayla is hard at work documenting the data her and her group mates collect about their transplanted sites in the table on the clipboard. The paper used for the table is waterproof to allow us to bring it into the water with us for more accurate data collection.

The final step at each transplanted site is to photograph the coral with a digital camera in an underwater casing. Dore is taking care of that!

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