One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Were it not for the fact that she was covered head to toe in neoprene, drifting through kelp forests 40 feet under water, Rhonda Brooks would have looked like a classroom student.

Pencil in hand, she swam through the deep blue water off Anacapa Island. On a white plastic slate, she wrote the names and tallied the number of fish she saw--100 senoritas, a dozen garibaldis, a handful of California sheepheads.

When she could not match a fish to a photograph on her laminated chart, she consulted with her dive partner, veteran marine biologist Ron Massengil.

“It was a living biology class,” Brooks said. “He would help me identify the juvenile fish because they look different from the adults in the chart. He would point to something and write its name on the slate.”

The two Channel Islands National Park employees were part of the Great American Fish Count, a diver-led, grass-roots effort. Spawned four years ago by Ventura-based marine biologist and diver Gary Davis, the fish count was designed to increase public awareness of the state of underwater ecosystems.

Davis, who is a researcher with the Department of the Interior’s National Biological Service, hopes the count will gain nationwide support in the future. During this year’s two weeks of counting, about 300 volunteer divers are expected to log fish populations in the waters off Southern California, the Monterey Bay and areas of the Florida Keys.

“It’s a modest beginning,” Davis said. But the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, which the fish count is modeled after, began in 1900 with just 25 observers and now brings together 22,000 people each year who count birds in 1,563 locations nationwide, Davis added.

The fish count should help dispel misconceptions about the underwater world.

“There is a general feeling that the ocean is a boundless resource,” Davis said. “But people who have been diving for a long time realize things are not as they used to be.”

According to Davis, fish populations have been declining but the fishing industry has been in denial. Part of the problem is that fishery managers have little, if any, direct information on the volume of fish populations. Conservation efforts are guided only by estimates of the weight or numbers of fish caught by recreational and commercial fishermen, not by what is left behind in the ocean, he said.

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So Davis devised a system to count the fish that remain in the water. Because the actual number of fish is virtually impossible to measure, Davis’ system estimates the abundance of individual species and gives a score to each one allowing for comparisons from one year to the next.

Each diver logs not only how many fish of a given species they see but also how soon they see them during a dive. The ones seen sooner receive a higher score since they are likely to be part of more common and abundant species. The system, called “timed-species counts,” yields a score for each species.

This week, Davis, Brooks and Massengil, where among 20 divers aboard the Peace, a luxury dive-boat from Ventura chartered by Channel Islands National Park for the fish count. With the boat anchored off Cat Rock, a basalt pinnacle on the south coast of West Anacapa, the divers scouted the underwater world.

In pairs, they explored the reefs at different depths, looking along sandy sea bottoms and rocky coves, bubbles rising above them in the dark turquoise water.

Back on the boat, Davis removed his fins and mask, unstrapped his weight belt and took the scuba tank off his back. The precious white slate hung from a wrist strap attached to his wetsuit.

In the first five minutes of his dive, he spotted more than 100 senoritas, blacksmiths and opaleyes, a couple dozen garibaldis, rockwrasses, kelp bass and sheepheads. In the following five minutes he logged more than 100 blackeye gobys. He also saw a bat ray.

“Nothing unusual here,” Davis said.

Warming up in the boat’s hot tub, Brooks and Massengil checked their slates against an identification chart while other divers dutifully filled the forms and turned them in to Davis.

After the fish count is over Sunday, Davis will collect the data from the other diver teams in California and Florida.

And what do the numbers mean?

“Not much at this point,” Davis said. “That’s not what it’s about.”

Davis cautioned against drawing conclusions from year-to-year variations. There are normal weather, environmental and other natural variations in populations, and the data are only useful in the long term, Davis said.

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What is useful, Davis said, is educating people about the underwater environment.

“What concerns me is that people don’t know what is going on,” he said. Davis believes that if more people are aware of the need to protect the ocean, they will call on politicians to do so. “That is a political decision not a scientific decision,” Davis said.

Davis is keenly aware of the need to keep the fish count simple so recreational divers will choose to get involved.

“If this isn’t fun, people will stop doing it,” he said.

For Paul Doose, a veteran diver who lives in Oxnard, Wednesday’s outing was fun. Doose first dove off Catalina Island in 1935 and became a certified diver in 1968.

“All species seem to have declined, mainly among game species like lobster, abalone, sheephead and halibut,” Doose said.

Now 76, Doose is a volunteer with Channel Islands National Park and dives at least twice a month. He has been part of the fish count since its inception.

“I’m going back out on Sunday [on the fish count],” Doose said. “And again, next year.”