Courtesy Ocean Frontiers
As dusk settles on the reef, it seems as if all the fish are in a hurry to either end the day or start the evening. On Grand Cayman, Ocean Frontiers has installed a webcam on a shallow reef near the East End dock to monitor the action. “The busiest time is dusk,” says Steve Broadbelt, owner of Ocean Frontiers. “There is a lot of fish activity, and this is just by day — we don’t know what they’re doing at night.”
Two thousand miles away in Denver, Colorado, 16-year-old Parker Lindsay is also watching. “I tend to watch around 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and during these times I have been noticing certain types of fish congregating on the coral head.”
Broadbelt and Lindsay are watching live video being streamed on the Internet from the webcam, which is part of a reef-monitoring system set up by the nonprofit Teens4Oceans. Broadbelt is planning to install lights for nighttime viewing of the reef, and he’s hopeful the webcam will capture coral-spawning events.
“I’m excited about what we’re going to learn during the coral spawning in a few months,” Broadbelt says. “We have coral heads that will spawn in September, but we want to find out if they spawn at any other time of year.” teens4oceans.org; oceanfrontiers.com/webcam
