Episode 11 - Making Research Tags

Описание: This reef restoration training video explains how to create research tags for use in underwater research. As always, this is but one method of tagging for research and can be adapted to your project.

#reefrestoration

Transcript

Robust, well balanced experimental designs are important to determine the outcomes of research, experiments, and restoration projects. To assist in research monitoring underwater tags are essential to track and monitor progress overtime. This short video explains a couple of tips and tricks about creating monitoring tags for underwater research so they can be easily deployed and most importantly, relocated for ongoing monitoring.

We use these cattle tags to mark our research experiments underwater, so these are going to be for individual coral colonies that we're going to out plant, but they're used in a wide variety of scientific experiments for marking locations underwater. You can't see it very well here, but we've actually burned into each tag the numbers, because once they're in the water they look nice and bright and shiny now, and they do on day one, but they get covered over in algae and sediment and they can be quite difficult to find. So we're going to nail these to the substrate next to our coral.

To make them we use a soldering iron and melt in the tag the numbers or letters that we're trying to create and then so that we can see what the numbers are without having to feel it. We also fill in the tag. The benefit of this is that over time, when it gets overgrown with algae and other organisms, you can bend it and break off any calcareous algaes and you can still see and feel what the numbers and letters are. So it's actually really useful for underwater research. We also build in redundancies marking both sides of the tag so it doesn't matter which way it goes in. I've only got to make 174 of these, so that shouldn't take me too long.