Visit a Sanctury

Join Shannon Lyday and Jon Martinez on a tour of Honolua Bay in Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary! We've been working with XL Catlin Seaview Survey to take 360 images of coral reefs across the sanctuary system so that we can track the health of these amazing habitats. ‪#‎EarthIsBlue‬

Transcript

Aloha! My name is Shannon Lyday. And I'm Jon Martinez. And we work for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. We're here today at Honolua Bay, which is the marine life conservation district for the state of Hawaii. It's also part of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. It's a popular spot for swimming, snorkeling, diving. There's a lot turtles here, a lot of coral. It's going to be a great day. We're expecting to get some great photos. We're about to go on a dive here to take imagery—360-degree photos. It's part of the XL Catlin Seaview Survey. We just finished our dive here at Honolua Bay in West Maui. The depths were pretty shallow, as you can see; the reefs, from about five to twenty feet. So we had a lot of bottom time, about an hour and a half, and were able to take thirty 360-degree images as part of the XL Catlin Seaview Survey. We saw lots of good things on the dive. Yeah, thanks Shannon. So we saw a lot of coral, a lot of fish, good species diversity for coral and fish, and a wide range of age class for both coral and fish. We did see some impacts from sediment, and we did see some coral bleaching. But overall, the water temperature here in the bay was fairly cool. So this will be an interesting site to monitor over time. If you'd like to monitor our project, check out the images at sanctuaries.noaa.gov.