One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish : Divers Take Underwater ‘Census’ Hoping to Track Populations and Raise Ecological Awareness

Where 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.

Lead 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 are 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 is 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 that the count will gain nationwide support. During this year’s two weeks of counting, which ends today, about 300 volunteer divers are expected to log fish populations in the waters off Southern California, the Monterey Bay and the Florida Keys.

“It’s a modest beginning,” Davis said. But the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, which the fish count is modeled after, also started small, beginning in 1900 with just 25 observers and now bringing together 22,000 people each year to count birds in 1,563 locations across the nation, Davis said.

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

“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.”

Fish populations have been declining for years, Davis said. Part of the problem in addressing the issue 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.

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

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 because they are likely to be part of more common and abundant species. The system, called “timed-species counts,” yields a score for each species.

Last week, Davis, Brooks and Massengil were among 20 divers aboard the Peace, a luxury dive-boat from Ventura chartered by the 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 various 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 next 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 ends, Davis will collect the data from the other California and Florida teams.

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

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 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 indeed fun. Doose, 76, first dove off Catalina Island in 1935 and became a certified diver in 1968.

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

A volunteer with the Channel Islands National Park who dives at least twice a month, he has been part of the fish count since its inception.

On Wednesday, Doose was gearing up to go out again today--and looking forward to taking part in the count next year.