“Don’t touch, don’t take, don’t break” has become part of my dive briefing just like “don’t forget your buddy checks” but once in the water everyone gets excited about what they see & forget about buoyancy & good dive skills & it’s something that all levels of divers are guilty of. The majority of divers will unintentionally touch the reef or sand with fins at some point yet it is always avoidable by being aware of yourself, your equipment & your buddy & having good buoyancy control. We can all do our bit to protect the underwater environment that we enjoy so much, instructors, dive master & fun divers alike.
The information below was taken from http://www.mission-blue.org/node/56, although based in the Caribbean the information can be applied everywhere.
Matt Metcalf
By Rachel Nuwer
Most divers would agree that the beauty and intrigue of underwater communities are SCUBA’s major draw. But divers can harm the very biodiversity they seek to experience, whether through unintentional collisions or deliberate touches. New research has found that a little pre-dive education goes a long way to mitigating these impacts on delicate underwater habitats.
“It’s important to have some conservation education immediately before entering the water to really remind people,” said Emma Camp, a conservation biologist at the Central Caribbean Marine Institute in the Cayman Islands. Camp—a diver since the age of 14—suspected for years that divers might impact the corals, but that this behavior could be changed. She decided to investigate her hypothesis as part of her graduate work at Sheffield Hallam University in England.
Camp headed to the John Pennekamp State Park in Key Largo, Florida, where she investigated four dive shops. Three were standard dive operations but the fourth was committed to conservation, training staff in ecology and briefing divers on how to avoid impacting corals. As a whole, the Key Largo area is aware of conservation, Camp explained, so she wasn’t sure if she’d find differences between normal dive operations and those dedicated to environmental integrity.
During the peak summer season, she donned gear and observed 83 recreational divers and noted each time they came in physical contact with the coral. Interactions included fin kicks, equipment collisions or touching the coral. She assessed whether or not the contact seemed to be intentional or accidental, and recorded factors like the diver’s gender, whether they were wearing gloves and whether they were carrying a camera.
After the dive, she handed out questionnaires to see whether divers thought the briefings enhanced their caution regarding the reef, and most agreed the briefings helped.
Still, 97 percent of the divers physically interacted with the reef. Their interactions equated to about 18 touches per diver on each 54-minute dive. These figures quickly add up considering each boat carries between 6 and 25 divers, and diving operations run up to three trips per day throughout the year.
Most of the reef touches were accidental, like kicking the coral, stirring up sand, or dragging loose equipment across the reef bed. Divers were also more likely to touch the reef during the initial stage of the dive, when they were adjusting equipment and buoyancy, or getting their bearings in the new surroundings.
Some boats dropped divers in shallow water just a couple meters above reefs, increasing their likelihood of accidentally banging into coral. “During one entry we literally came straight down over some of the healthiest elkhorn coral I’d seen,” Camp said, who noted that several divers hit the coral with their tanks. “If we’d been two meters to either side it wouldn’t have been a problem,” she said.
Experience didn’t change a diver’s likelihood of touching corals, either. Even someone with 1,000 logged dives may have bad habits or might not be aware of how to avoid impacting live corals. “It’s not a fair explanation that just because someone has been diving a long time, they’re a good diver and conservationally aware of their surroundings,” Camp said.
Surprisingly, divers who said they had prior biology or conservation training also displayed the same tendency to touch corals. Camp thinks this is because of differences in location. A diver hailing from England, for example, may be experienced with quarry dives, while a diver flying in from California might be confined to kelp gardens. These are very different ecosystems than Key Largo’s coral reefs.
However, simply briefing divers on responsible diving practices before they get in the water seems to work. Camp’s results, published in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management, revealed a significant difference between dive operations stressing conservation and those that don’t. The conservation-minded dive shop spent more time discussing techniques for avoiding impacting corals and explained the scientific reasoning behind the warnings. As a result, their divers interacted with the reef less than those from other operations, who touched the reef more than twice as often.
Overall, about 95 percent of divers Camp spoke with declared a concern for the state of the world’s coral reefs. Half of them thought that SCUBA diving does negatively impact coral reefs, and prior scientific studies have confirmed that their assumptions are true. The cumulative effect of too many divers can leave corals more susceptible to disease and even facilitate a phase shift from a coral-dominated to an algae-dominated ecosystem.
But simple managerial changes, like making sure divers’ equipment is secure before entering the water, and carefully choosing entry sites with the least risk of damage, could improve the situation.
Most importantly, providing an immediate reminder before divers enter the water may be the most effective means of alleviating diver impacts, especially if dive masters explain why touching coral or kicking up sand is harmful. “Having a conservation briefing is beneficial for everybody, even if they have previous conservation awareness or have done a lot of diving,” Camp said. “Conservation education can only improve the situation globally.”
