Pacific NW Scuba - Vancouver Washington / Portland Oregon

Thirty-two feet below the surface of Rich Passage a flash of motion catches my eye. I brush aside a blade of kelp to reveal a small eel-like shape huddled against the sand. It's a saddleback gunnel, Pholis ornata, and a first for this dive. I struggle to note the name on my slate. My hand is nearly numb and shakes badly from forty-five minutes in cold water. Hopefully the jagged scrawl will remind me of the gunnel when I get home. Some people watch birds - I count fish.

I'm a volunteer diver for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF). REEF is an organization of divers committed to the preservation of the marine environment. Its volunteers conduct fish population and diversity surveys during their normal recreational dives. In addition, here in the Pacific Northwest, the surveys include forty-four invertebrate species. Data from the surveys are entered into a central database and provided to resource managers and researchers.

REEF volunteers gather information that would otherwise be too costly to collect. Why is this important? The answer is simple. The ocean is a hostile environment for man. Its inhabitants are hidden from easy observation by its waters. In addition, they move around and are often secretive in nature. Their habitat and behavior make research difficult and expensive. To date, our society has been unwilling to pay for the needed research. As a result, decisions are often based on catch data and estimates of how these data relate to total populations. Sometimes decisions are made based on little or no data at all. Unfortunately, this has led to the over-harvest and decline of many species. Hopefully, the data collected by REEF will contribute to better management decisions in the future. By volunteering their time and the costs of diving REEF members are able to supplement the budgets of our resource management agencies.

Fish surveying in the Pacific Northwest started in 1998 and is growing rapidly. Over two hundred divers are surveying Washington waters. By September 2002, these divers had completed 926 fish surveys and 360 invertebrate surveys. The surveys came from a total of 117 sites, mainly in the Puget Sound and the Hood Canal. REEF has already responded to numerous requests for both fish and invertebrate data. The use and value of the data will grow as more divers take up fish watching.

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